- McLaren’s power unit troubles have left Lando Norris 98 points adrift in the championship.
- Andrea Stella links the team’s customer status with Mercedes HPP to deeper structural gaps.
- Monaco exposed pace and reliability problems that go well beyond a single race weekend.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has admitted that the team’s customer relationship with Mercedes HPP is costing them ground in the 2026 Formula 1 world championship.
Speaking to Motorsport.com after Lando Norris retired from the Monaco Grand Prix with a power unit failure, Stella said it was the first time in recent memory that not being a works outfit had placed McLaren at a real disadvantage.
“Never before we felt that being a customer team has put us on the back foot,” he said. “And when I say this, I want to be very clear to avoid any misunderstanding: it’s not because we have a lower priority for (Mercedes) HPP.”
Norris now sits 98 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, who claimed his fifth consecutive victory of the season in Monaco.
The Monaco weekend that brought things to a head
McLaren arrived in Monaco for its 1,000th race as a constructor. It was not the weekend the team had hoped for.
Norris had already suffered power unit trouble during Friday practice, forcing his crew to work through the night to ready the car for Saturday. He started Sunday’s race from eighth on the grid. Problems returned almost immediately.
His power unit showed unusual behaviour in the opening laps. The team attempted a fix mid-race, but it made things worse. McLaren reverted the change and asked Norris to manage the issue as best he could.
On lap 45, while fighting Pierre Gasly’s Alpine and George Russell’s Mercedes, the unit gave out completely.
“At the end, it pretty much went immediately,” Norris said. “There were some issues at the beginning, and then more in the middle, and I don’t know if they’re related or not.”
It was the third time this season that Norris had been unable to finish a race due to a mechanical problem. A gearbox failure ended his race in Canada on lap 40. An electrical issue stopped him from even starting in China. Oscar Piastri scored the team’s only points in Monaco.
The pace deficit added to the concern. Norris said McLaren were “six tenths of a second off over a single lap” in Monaco.
The contrast with Miami, just weeks earlier, made the decline harder to ignore. Norris put it plainly: “You just look back to a couple of weeks ago in Miami, we fought for a win. Probably should have won the race. The fact we can go from almost winning a race against the Mercedes to being so far off is pretty crazy.”
Why being a customer team is suddenly a problem in 2026
For several seasons, McLaren’s arrangement with Mercedes HPP worked well enough to sustain two constructors’ championships and a drivers’ title.
The two organisations built up shared knowledge over the years of working under stable regulations. The gap between a works outfit and a funded customer narrowed to the point where it barely mattered.
The 2026 technical regulations reset everything. Entirely new power units arrived, and every team is still working out how to run them reliably. That learning process is where the gap between a works team and a customer becomes most visible.
Stella was clear that the problem is structural, not a matter of how Mercedes HPP treats McLaren. Works teams have more access to facilities. They can run chassis experiments alongside extended power unit tests. They can move faster when reliability problems appear.
“It is because you have less opportunities to integrate, to stay on the same timeline when it comes to addressing reliability problems or exploitation of the power unit from a performance point of view,” Stella explained, citing facility access and shared development timelines as specific areas where the gap shows.
He was also careful to separate the power unit issues from problems McLaren created themselves. The Canada gearbox failure, he stressed, was entirely the team’s own doing.
“There’s some, like the gearbox problem on Lando’s car in Canada, which are purely on the McLaren side,” Stella said. “I just want to be totally fair to our power unit supplier, with whom we’ve had a fantastic relationship, very successful. And still, the relationship is great.”
A “wide-ranging” review and a performance concern
Stella confirmed that McLaren and Mercedes HPP have been discussing how to change the way they work together, and that those talks have been running for several months.
His description of what needs to change was detailed. It goes well beyond solving individual failures. The two sides are looking at how often they meet, how thoroughly they share information, and how quickly findings travel between the factory and trackside.
“You ultimately need to review the depth, the intensity and the effectiveness of the various meetings, engagement, sharing of information, processes, from factory to factory, track to track, track to factory, and so on,” Stella said.
He acknowledged the limitations of a fault-by-fault approach when the source of the problems is not yet fully understood.
“When you don’t know what’s coming, it’s not sufficient to simply address item by item,” he said, while adding that structural changes in Formula 1 always take time to show results. “There’s always a lead time.“
On the car itself, McLaren are also dealing with problems that belong entirely to them. The MCL40 is short on mechanical grip and aerodynamic load.
The team is struggling to get its tyres working in the range where they perform best. A new front wing concept introduced at Monaco needs further development.
Stella’s words from Monaco amount to a frank acknowledgement that the 2026 season has exposed something years of success had kept hidden.
How McLaren responds to it, both in its own design office and in the depth of its working relationship with Mercedes HPP, will determine not just whether this championship is recoverable, but what kind of team McLaren F1 becomes on the other side of it.
