McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has admitted that his team currently feels it is at a disadvantage compared to the Mercedes works squad when it comes to understanding the behaviour of the power unit.

Following the opening round of the 2026 Formula 1 season in Australia, Stella explained that McLaren is still trying to fully interpret the data and integrate the characteristics of the Mercedes power unit into its simulations. According to the Italian, discussions with Mercedes High Performance Powertrains have been ongoing for several weeks as the team tries to improve its understanding of the system.

Even during pre-season testing, McLaren often found itself reacting to what it saw on track rather than predicting the behaviour in advance.

“The discussion with HPP about having more information has been going on for weeks because even in testing, we were pretty much going on track, running the car, looking at the data, and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s what we have. Good, now we react to what we have.’ That’s not how you work in Formula One,” Stella said, as quoted by GPBlog.

He explained that normally teams simulate the behaviour of the car before running it on track and already know what they expect to see from the power unit and other systems.

“In Formula One, what happens on track, you simulate. You know what is happening. You know what you’re programming. You know how the car is going to behave,” Stella added.

However, the early phase of the new regulations has made this process more complicated for McLaren. The team currently relies more on analysing track data after each run to better understand the behaviour of the car.

Stella admitted that as a Mercedes customer team, this is the first time McLaren feels slightly behind the works squad in this area.

“I have to say, since we are a customer team, this is the first time that we feel we are on the back foot, even when it comes to our ability to predict how the car will behave and anticipate how we can improve it,” Stella concluded.

Despite the current challenge, McLaren expects that continued cooperation with Mercedes and further analysis of the data will allow the team to close the gap in understanding and improve its performance in the upcoming races of the 2026 season.