Excuses wear thin fast in Formula 1, especially for the team defending two world championships. That’s the uncomfortable position McLaren find themselves in this week, after former Haas boss Guenther Steiner used a podcast appearance to say exactly where he thinks the papaya squad’s 2026 problems lie.
Speaking on The Red Flags podcast, quotes carried by Motorsport Week, Steiner said McLaren’s habit of pointing at engine supplier Mercedes whenever performance dips has gone on long enough. “They are a car manufacturer; they should make their own engine,” he said. “That would take away [the excuse], because they always, when something goes wrong, say ‘oh, the engine, now we don’t get the same engine as Mercedes.’ It’s always something. At some stage, you need to be a grown-up, and they’ve got enough money.” For a fan base that entered the season defending both the drivers’ and constructors’ titles, the sight of their team still hunting for a first win nine races in makes the criticism sting all the more, and it echoes Lando Norris’s own upgrade plea after the Silverstone fallout.
Yet, looking deeper at what’s actually holding McLaren back, Steiner’s engine jibe is only part of a much messier picture.
Andrea Stella Admits The Power Unit Gap Is Real
Team principal Andrea Stella has not exactly dismissed the idea that Mercedes power is part of the problem. Speaking at Silverstone, in comments also carried by Motorsport Week, he admitted McLaren is still leaving performance on the table with its Mercedes High Performance Powertrains unit. “Power unit exploitation and power unit performance are particularly important,” Stella said. “I have to say, and I’ve said that other times, that we still seem to have a little bit of a deficit in extracting the most from the HPP power unit. If you look at the GPS overlays, it becomes apparent that somehow we need to keep our conversation open with HPP, because there’s some performance we seem to be leaving behind.”
McLaren are one of several Mercedes customers, alongside the works team, which leads both championships with seven wins from nine races. According to Autosport, McLaren have also been unable to run the very latest specification of the power unit at Silverstone, with team boss Zak Brown pointing to mileage already accrued compared with rivals such as Williams and Alpine. It is a technical detail, but a costly one for a team that spent the past two seasons setting the pace, and one that stands in sharp contrast to the reality check McLaren already faced against Ferrari earlier this season.
Oscar Piastri Points To A Deeper Chassis Problem
The engine debate is only half the story. Oscar Piastri, who finished 11th at Silverstone after a difficult weekend, believes the MCL40’s problems go beyond the power unit entirely. Speaking to media including Motorsport Week, he said: “I think the conditions have definitely exposed where we are weak,” Piastri said. “When the grip is good, when things are consistent, we can be in or close to the fight, so we look okay and mask some of our issues. But the conditions were very tough, and there is nowhere to hide, so it’s not a huge surprise we struggled and were so far off.”
Piastri pointed to a pattern stretching back beyond Silverstone. “We saw in Canada and Monaco when the tyre temperatures are difficult and tricky to get in, we struggled when the wind is high, and we’ve struggled when everything is just a little bit outside of our comfort zone.” High-speed, low-grip corners like Silverstone’s Maggots, Becketts and Chapel complex exposed the same front-end instability, suggesting McLaren’s issues are systemic rather than a single fix away from resolution.
Between Steiner’s blunt advice, Stella’s admission on power unit exploitation, and Piastri’s read on a chassis with a narrowing operating window, the picture forming around McLaren is not one problem but three overlapping ones. Whether that adds up to a genuine crisis or a mid-season wobble will become clearer at Spa-Francorchamps, but the noise from outside the team now matches what’s coming from inside the garage — arriving just as speculation over Piastri’s long-term McLaren future swirls in the background. Until McLaren close the power unit gap and widen that operating window, defending two world titles will keep looking like a distant memory.
