Understanding the growing power unit
After the three world titles won in recent years – one Drivers’ and two Constructors’ – McLaren started the 2026 season and the new regulatory cycle on the defensive. The papaya team is the third force on track at the moment, but the gap separating it from Ferrari and especially from Mercedes seems difficult to close at the moment. In an interesting press conference held in Shanghai in the presence of journalists who flew to China, the team principal of the Woking team, Andrea Stella, tried to take stock of the current situation of the reigning world champions.
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In summary, there seem to be two areas in which McLaren aims to improve in the coming weeks/months to get back closer to the top of the grid: the exploitation of the Mercedes power unit and the developments to the MCL40. An area – that of updates during the championship – in which the team led by Stella has shown itself to be particularly skilled in recent seasons.
“In every session of every event we have learned something more about how the power unit works – explained the McLaren team principal – it is a very complicated system. The complexity lies mainly in the sensitivity to small variations, which lead to significant results in terms of lap times and speed. This is also why, as you may have noticed by analyzing GPS overlays, the same driver, or two drivers from the same team, can have very different speed profiles lap after lap. We therefore need to understand where these sensitivities come from and, to do so, it is also necessary to understand which tools to use. Gradually we have learned something new and we find ourselves in a better position than in Australia. I would like to thank our technical partners at HPP, because they have supported us exceptionally in this journey of discovery and optimization”.
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The engine potential made available by Mercedes, however, is, according to Stella, still higher than what McLaren is currently able to exploit: “After analyzing these qualifying sessions, it seems to me that we still have potential to exploit. This is positive, because we can further improve lap times. This is for qualifying, where everything is more or less predetermined in terms of reference conditions. Furthermore, we learned a lot in Australia and in the Sprint about how to use the engine in the race: you can see how many overtakes we manage to make and this depends a lot on how the power unit is exploited”.
Targeted updates
Regarding the updates to be brought to the car, Stella – indirectly responding also to the joke made to journalists by Oscar Piastri – highlighted the differences with the situation the team was in in 2023: “Obviously we are very determined to create a development path similar to the one we had in 2023, which then gave us the momentum to go on and win two consecutive titles. A fundamental difference compared to 2023 is that this car we have at the moment is a solid platform, at most it is slightly underdeveloped. There is nothing in the car that is not conceptually valid: it just needs to be further developed. In 2023, however, we had to correct some projects. In that case, it was necessary to go back to the drawing board, redesign the aerodynamic flow field more conceptually, and review the geometries quite thoroughly. Instead, the path for this car will be more focused on accelerating development according to principles that we already consider valid. At the moment we are still a bit behind the level of development that Ferrari and Mercedes seem to have reached“.
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