Stella admits being a Mercedes' customer team is now a disadvantage for McLaren

A reliability crisis brought into sharp focus

McLaren's 2026 season has taken a troubling turn. After securing a double podium in Miami and suggesting that the team's first major upgrade of the year had begun to bear fruit, back-to-back weekends in Canada and Monaco have unravelled the narrative.

For team principal Andrea Stella, the pattern is impossible to ignore. While he is careful to note that each retirement has had a different root cause, his conclusion is unambiguous: McLaren's reliability is not yet at the level required to compete for a championship.

The customer team disadvantage

"Never before we felt that being a customer team has put us on the back foot," Stella said in Monaco, speaking to Motorsport.com. "And when I say this, and I want to be clear here, to avoid any misunderstanding: it's not because you are a lower priority for HPP."

Instead, Stella points to structural limitations: fewer opportunities for deep integration between chassis and power unit, reduced scope to align timelines when addressing reliability concerns, and the inability to combine efforts across facilities in the same way a works outfit can.

"There are many reasons why reliability associated to the power unit plays a role, or taking advantage of being a works team from a power unit point of view," he explained. "I think these reliability issues have come into focus in 2026, when we had such a major technical regulation change."

McLaren CEO Zak Brown has already indicated the team would, in principle, be open to developing its own power unit in the longer term — as Red Bull has done — provided the financial case stacks up. But that is a prospect measured in years, not months.

McLaren wants to be "completely fair" to Mercedes HPP

With immediate solutions needed, Stella says a comprehensive review of the collaboration between McLaren and Mercedes HPP is already underway — one that goes beyond fixing individual failures and examines the entire framework of how the two organisations work together.

"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 explained.

"In 2026, there's so much novelty, there's so many new things, and we kind of have to operate at a new level of collaboration compared to what we were doing before. These conversations have already started for some months now, but like everything in F1, there's always a lead time."

Stella is equally at pains to distribute responsibility fairly. The gearbox failure that ended Norris's race in Canada, for example, was entirely of McLaren's own making. "There's some, like the gearbox problem on Lando's car in Canada, which are purely on the McLaren side," he said. "So 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."

The honesty is notable — but so is the urgency. With Norris now trailing heavily in the championship standings, McLaren cannot afford for the reliability conversation to drag on much longer.