'That's not how you work in F1' - McLaren fume at Mercedes

Piastri and Antonelli battle at T1 in Miami — Photo: © IMAGO

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'That's not how you work in F1' - McLaren fume at Mercedes

The Mercedes engine has raised eyebrows

Sheona Mountford F1 Journalist

Motorsport journalist working in F1 since 2024.

Tuesday 10 March 2026 10:55

McLaren F1 chief Andrea Stella has delivered an exasperated breakdown of what it's like to be a Mercedes customer team in 2026.

Sunday's Australian Grand Prix confirmed Mercedes are the team to beat this season, with a harmonious combination of power unit and car design lifting George Russell to his sixth career victory.

Much has been written about Mercedes engine advantage and their geometric compression ratio - which you can read all about here - but their trick should also benefit their customer teams.

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McLaren, Williams and Alpine are all Mercedes powered in 2026, but the three teams only managed a best finish of fifth, 12th and 10th respectively on Sunday.

Reigning champion Lando Norris finished 51 seconds behind Russell on the road, and McLaren team principal Stella has since spoken out on their rival's advantage.

Stella: Not how you work in F1

Stella said: "The discussion with HPP (Mercedes High Performance Powertrains) about having more information has been going on for weeks because, even in testing, we were pretty much going on track, run the car, look at the data, 'oh, that's what we have. Good, now we react to what we have'.

"That's not how you work in Formula 1. In Formula 1, what happens on track, you simulate. You know what is happening, you know what you are programming, you know how the car is going to behave.

"So, you also have your plans as to how you evolve it that you have figured out before because you know what you are expecting from the car.

"So, I have to say, since we are a customer team [of Mercedes], this is the first time that we feel we are on the back foot even when it comes to the ability to predict how the car will behave and the ability to anticipate how we can improve the car."

What about Mercedes' other customer teams?

Stella was also asked about fellow customer team Williams, with James Vowles admitting they were 'caught off guard' by Mercedes' efficiency.

The Italian responded: "I don't know about Williams. Honestly, I can say that we spent a lot of time looking at several overlays, not only with HPP teams, in particular Mercedes, but also to other competitors.

"And definitely, the result of this analysis seemed to direct to the fact that we have work to do as a team in collaboration with our HPP engineers. We have work to do to exploit the potential of the power unit, which, once I see the potential that HPP is extracting, looks like there's more that is available.

"Now, it's not obvious how you do that. For us, we are in a journey of knowledge, certainly, a journey that is earlier than the works team.

"The works team and HPP will have worked together for a long time. So, they will have collaborated, talked about how to use the power unit. That's fair enough, but we'll definitely intensify the collaboration with HPP because our understanding is that there is some low hanging fruit that we should be able to cash in.

"When it comes to, is this all that is available and that we are underexploiting? I am not sure. I think we will need some more analysis to understand whether this is only about parameters that we can control, or drivers' input that we can control, or there are some other factors, more systemic, that not necessarily a customer team can control."

Mercedes McLaren Toto Wolff 2026 regulations Andrea Stella