McLaren arrived at Suzuka with two things to explain: why both of its cars had failed to finish in Shanghai, and whether it still believed in the Mercedes High Performance Powertrains partnership that had been, until China, its greatest competitive advantage. Andrea Stella used the Japanese Grand Prix paddock to answer both.
The McLaren team principal began by acknowledging how unusual the Chinese GP weekend had been. "China was definitely a challenging and frustrating event for us," Stella said. "Two cars not being able to take part in a Grand Prix is pretty exceptional as a situation. We understand the source of the problem. In both cases it was related to the electrical side of the power unit. We had faults on the battery, but different faults pretty much at the same time of the week, and in this sense is quite exceptional."
It was the phrase 'different faults pretty much at the same time' that had unsettled McLaren's engineers the most. The team had modelled the risk of a single battery-side failure; it had not modelled two distinct faults on the same weekend. The initial internal conversation at Woking, according to paddock sources, was whether the HPP partnership could continue to be treated as a guaranteed advantage.
Stella's public answer to that question was unambiguous. "We trust 100% that HPP put in place remedials," he said. "I think we are exposed as a team likewise all other teams may be exposed. There's no team dependency in the kind of problem that we had on the electrical side of the power unit."
He went further when asked whether the relationship with Brixworth had been damaged. "They are learning together with us. It's not like information is held back. There's maximum sharing. We work very well with HPP and with our engineers. We've been world champions together three times in the last two years. So the relationship is great."
The technical honesty did not stop at the power unit. Stella also gave one of the more complete public assessments of the MCL40's current strengths and weaknesses against Ferrari and Mercedes. "The MCL40 is a very high potential platform," he said. "At the moment our car when we compare to Ferrari and Mercedes suffers a bit of a deficit in grip. So Ferrari and Mercedes are faster than us in the corners. I think compared to Mercedes GP, we see that we are probably under-exploiting the power unit a little bit."
That last admission is significant. Stella is effectively conceding that the works Mercedes team has a better handle on the deployment envelope of its own power unit than McLaren does as a customer — a familiar dynamic in the turbo hybrid era that was supposed to be narrower in 2026.
"The main limitation as a customer team has been the timeline," Stella explained. "It's been a push program — it's been pushed from all teams, all competitors. For us certainly it's been a program — the delivery of the MCL40 was pushed up to the last minute, the same has happened for the power unit manufacturers. So it's relatively normal that in this condition as a customer you tend to be a little bit on the back foot."
None of this, he insisted, changes McLaren's ambitions for the year. "We should see a positive trajectory and we are confident that McLaren will be in condition to compete for podiums and victories on merit within this season."
The Suzuka weekend gave that claim a sharper edge. With P3 and P5 for Piastri and Norris in qualifying — and a race that saw Norris overtake Lewis Hamilton for fourth — Stella could point to evidence that his message was more than reassurance. "The important thing is not about if or what," he said of the gap to Mercedes. "It's about the fact that the progress we saw yesterday in qualifying has been confirmed in the race. So this is a good position to now go into this break, in which we will work hard to improve the car."
For McLaren, the message is clear: no divorce is coming from Brixworth, no panic is coming from the top, and the podiums-and-wins target Stella has set himself for 2026 remains on the table. For the rest of the grid, it means the most complicated alliance in modern F1 — a works Mercedes team and its most dangerous customer — just survived the test that was supposed to break it.
Source: youtube.com