Understanding the growing power unit
After the three world titles won in recent years – one for Drivers and two for Constructors – the McLaren he started the 2026 season and the new regulatory cycle on defense. The papaya team is the third force on the track at the momentbut the gap that separates it from Ferrari and especially from Mercedes seems difficult to bridge at the moment. In an interesting press conference held in Shanghai in the presence of journalists who flew to China, the team principal of the Woking team, Andrea Stellatried to take stock of the current situation of the reigning world champions.
In summary, they seem to be There are two areas in which McLaren aims to improve in the coming weeks/months to get closer to the top of the grid: the exploitation of the Mercedes power unit and the developments on the MCL40. An area – that of updates to the ongoing championship – in which the team directed by Stella has shown itself to be particularly skilled in recent seasons.
“In each session of each event we learned more about how the power unit works – explained the McLaren team principal – it’s a very complicated system. The complexity lies mainly in the sensitivity to small variationswhich lead to significant results in terms of lap times and speed. This is also why, as you may have noticed by analyzing GPS overlays, the same rider, or two riders from the same team, can have very different speed profiles lap after lap. We must therefore understand where these sensitivities come from and, to do so, it is also necessary to understand which tools to use. Little by little we have learned something new and we are in a better position than in Australia. I would like to thank our technical partners at HPP, because they supported us exceptionally in this journey of discovery and optimization”.
The motorsport potential made available by Mercedes, however, is, according to Stella, still superior to what McLaren currently manages to exploit: “After analyzing these qualifications it seems to me that we still have potential to exploit. This is positive, because we can further improve the lap times. This is for qualifications, where everything is more or less predetermined in terms of reference conditions. We also learned a lot in Australia and in the Sprint about how to use the engine in the race: you can see how many overtakings we can do and this depends a lot on how the power unit is exploited”.
Targeted updates
Regarding the updates to bring to the single-seater, Stella – also indirectly responding to the joke made to journalists by Oscar Piastri – highlighted the differences that exist with the situation the team found itself in in 2023: “Obviously we are very determined to create a development path similar to the one we had in 2023 and which then gave us the momentum to go on to win two consecutive titles. One key difference compared to 2023 and is that this car we have at the moment is a solid platform, at best it is slightly underdeveloped. There is nothing about the car that isn’t conceptually sound – it just needs to be further developed. In 2023, however, we had to correct some projects. In that case it was necessary to go back to the drawing board, redesign the aerodynamic flow field in a more conceptual way and review the geometries quite thoroughly. Instead, the path for this car will be more focused on accelerating development according to principles that we already believe to be valid. At the moment we are still a little behind the level of development that Ferrari and Mercedes seem to have reached“.
