F1 News: McLaren launch new power unit team to unlock Mercedes potential in 'significant shift'

An edited photo of Andrea Stella looking serious and Toto Wolff grinning on a background of a McLaren in the pits — Photo: © IMAGO

McLaren F1

McLaren launch new team to unlock Mercedes potential in 'significant shift'

McLaren are looking to pile on the power

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Thursday 6 August 2026 09:45

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McLaren have launched a new division focused on overcoming the challenges posed by their Mercedes F1 engines.

The Woking-based outfit are a customer of Mercedes, one of four teams on the current grid who are supplied by the Silver Arrows powertrain department.

McLaren have suffered a plethora of reliability concerns already this season, with many of them being attributed to their Mercedes power unit. Mercedes themselves have also struggled with reliability.

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Performance-wise, McLaren have also struggled to match the output of the main factory team, who benefit from a much larger pool of data linked with their own power unit.

They did though bounce back to top form at the Hungarian Grand Prix last month, claiming their first grand prix win of the season with 2025 world champion Lando Norris storming to a pole position-race victory double.

Norris claimed a brilliant victory in Hungary.

Having brought multiple upgrades to their chassis over the course of the season so far, McLaren also believe that there is untapped potential in their power unit, prompting the creation of this additional in-house department.

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McLaren creates new power unit team

According to technical director of performance at McLaren, Mark Temple, the goal of the new unit within the team is to extract every ounce of performance from their Mercedes power unit.

"There are new roles," Temple confirmed on the official website. "We have a power unit performance team now, which we didn't have before.

"They’re focused on understanding how we get the most out of the power unit. They’ll study track data, and work with race engineering, but also use our simulator and offline tools to maximise our performance.

"It’s definitely a new set of skills, and a new way of working - because these are things we didn’t really need to worry about before."

'Collaborative process' with HPP

Temple then revealed that these people also work closely with Mercedes' powertrain department.

"It’s a group of people at McLaren who work very closely with HPP (High Performance Powertrains)," he said. "As a normal activity, HPP will do simulations, and come up with a configuration for a particular event and a given session, and present a multitude of different options of how best to use energy around the lap.

"We want to then check that against our tools, and the specific requirements of the MCL40, plus variables like the wind direction, the grip level, the amount of fuel in the tank, and so on.

"So, we explore all of those things and compare them against what we think is optimal, and then make recommendations to our race engineers alongside the HPP engineers. It’s a very collaborative process - but we use some of our tools differently - and indeed have slightly different tools - to HPP, so it’s a combination of the two approaches."

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