Andrea Stella admits McLaren has ‘quite a lot to improve’ after reliability-hit 2026 start

McLaren’s 2026 reset remains a reliability battle

Andrea Stella has delivered a blunt assessment of McLaren’s 2026 Formula 1 campaign, admitting the reigning champions still have “quite a lot to improve” after a difficult start under the new technical regulations.

McLaren’s MCL40 has not carried the team’s title-winning authority into the new era. The car has been particularly exposed in high-speed corners, but Stella’s concerns extend beyond pure chassis performance. Electrical problems and power unit-related gremlins have also disrupted the team’s rhythm, turning reliability into one of the defining themes of its early season.

Lando Norris has felt that pain most sharply. The reigning world champion suffered two consecutive failures in Canada, with gearbox and battery issues ending any chance of a clean weekend. In a season where McLaren is already trying to recover performance, those losses have compounded the pressure.

Barcelona offers relief, not a solution

Barcelona at least provided a calmer reference point. Both McLaren cars finished inside the points, and Stella acknowledged that the weekend represented a step forward in terms of operational stability.

“Finally, a relatively calm and clean weekend from a reliability point of view,” Stella told media, including Motorsport Week. “Of course, we don’t have to forget that in some of the previous weekends we didn’t only have problems on Sunday but we also had problems affecting practice. So there’s been improvement from this point of view.”

That improvement matters, but Stella was careful not to oversell one clean event as proof of a turnaround. In his view, McLaren cannot judge reliability by a single race. It has to be measured across the season, and the early evidence has not met the team’s standards.

“Reliability, you know, I don’t want to judge it in a single race,” he said. “I would like to judge it in a season and say we had a couple of exceptions. But we have to rebuild from where we were, so we take one race at a time, one event at a time.”

Ferrari pressure sharpens McLaren’s dilemma

The problem for McLaren is that reliability is not its only concern. Ferrari now appears to have moved ahead in the development race, with its Barcelona progress underlining the scale of the challenge. For more on that shift, read our analysis of Ferrari’s Barcelona upgrade and Hamilton’s breakthrough.

Stella made clear that McLaren, its suppliers and its collaboration with HPP must all maintain higher standards. But while performance remains the ultimate target, reliability has become the foundation McLaren must restore before it can properly chase Ferrari and Mercedes again.

“The mission is very clear,” Stella said. “We only want to think about performance, an area of performance in which we also have quite a lot to improve.”