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F1's Mercedes Power Unit Customers Anni Graf - Formula 1 - Getty Images
The 2026 Australian Grand Prix was a voyage of discovery for all the Formula 1 teams, with everyone still learning about their new cars and power units—and in particular, how the latter have to be operated. And of the most intriguing outcomes of the weekend was the obvious frustration of Mercedes customers McLaren and Williams, with both teams wrestling with the possible fact they may be on the back foot due to a lack of information flow from their common power unit partner.
The circumstances brought to mind a similar situation in the first year of the V-6 hybrid rules back in 2014. McLaren ran a single season with the new Mercedes power unit that year, before switching to a Honda engine the following season. The works Mercedes team dominated 2014, and customer team Williams also benefited with some strong showings. McLaren, however, had a dire season by its standards.
At Suzuka, then-team boss Ron Dennis, frustrated by his cars' performance, made his feelings known. “One thing that jumps [at] you if you look at all of the qualifications of all of this year is the time difference between the Mercedes-Benz works team and the other teams,” he said in 2014. “What that means is that in my opinion, an opinion held by many people in our organization, is that you have no chance of winning a world championship if you are not receiving the best engines from whoever is manufacturing your engines.”
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Former McLaren team boss Ron Dennis.Mark Thompson - Getty Images
“A modern Grand Prix engine in this moment in time is not just about transparent power,” Dennis continued. “It’s about how you harvest the energy, it’s about how you store the energy, and effectively if you don’t have control of that process—meaning access to source code—then you are not going to be able to stabilize your car in the entry to corners, etc, and you lose lots of lap time. So even though you have the same brand of engine that does not mean you have the ability to optimize the engine.” (Mercedes boss Toto Wolff later denied customers didn’t get fair treatment.)
In more recent seasons, the FIA has very closely regulated the power unit supply situation, so that manufacturers are obliged to give the customers the same hardware and software and modes and so on. Over the last few years, there was never any suggestion that customers of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains were at a disadvantage; the fact that McLaren comprehensively beat the works team in 2024 and 2025 is proof of that.
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That may have changed with the 2026 power units, though, and the incredibly complex energy management associated with them. Inevitably, Mercedes (and Ferrari) have been a step ahead of their customers over the last few years as they've developed the power units. It’s natural that the works teams would be totally embedded in that process, and thus come into this year with more knowledge. Customer teams knew that would be the case. However, as everyone has run their new cars on track, the customers have discovered the knowledge gap is apparently bigger than they had anticipated—and they feel Mercedes hasn’t been giving them the full story on how to fully optimize the power units.
Winter testing, and even practice in Australia, only revealed so much. The real story came during qualifying in Melbourne, where Mercedes was eight-tenths of a second ahead of the field, including McLaren—which dug into the data after the race to see where the missing time was. "I can say that we spent a lot of time looking at several overlays—not only obviously with HPP teams, in particular Mercedes, but also to other competitors,” said McLaren boss Andrea Stella. “The result of this analysis seems to direct to the fact that we have work to do as a team, in collaboration with our HPP engineers. We have work to do to exploit the potential of the power unit.”
Stella admitted McLaren has some catching up to do. “Now, it's not obvious how you do that,” he said. “We are in a journey of knowledge, probably—or maybe I should say certainly a journey that is earlier than the works team. The works team and HPP will have worked together for a long time, so they will have collaborated, talked about how to use the power unit. That's fair enough. But we'll definitely intensify the collaboration with HPP, because our understanding is that there is some low-hanging fruit that we should be able to cash in.”
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McLaren’s Andrea Stella and Zak Brown.Mark Sutton - Formula 1 - Getty Images
"Let me 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 the ability to predict how the car will behave, and the ability to anticipate how we can improve the car,” he added.
A cynic might suggest McLaren is simply frustrated it has lost the advantage it had over the past couple of years. But the view of Williams boss James Vowles is another story. His team has other problems at the moment with an overweight, under-performing car; however, when a guy who was part of the works organization for many years comes close to being critical, take note. "What Mercedes are doing on the power unit is something that caught us off-guard,” said Vowles. “It took a qualifying for us to really see just how off the pace we are, in that regard. That's probably three-tenths, something in that ballpark.”
“I'm confident Mercedes have provided us—because they're very good at this—with the ability to do what they're doing. I don't know how to do that right now, as I talk to you today," he said. "And that's what we're working through in the background right now. What have we missed, and how do we get there faster?”
Like Stella, he suggested the information flow isn’t what he’d like it to be. “It is not an open door, as you would imagine,” he said. “Because that's where the performance is found. So it is down to us to try and work around it. But I would say we have to acknowledge we, as Williams, do not have the sophistication that they have—the level of technologies. And definitely, that's on us."
"I would say the converse is that there's some inherent knowledge they have, which we don't. That's down to us to figure out.”
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As for Wolff, he downplayed the situation when asked about it. "I think it's clear when you roll out new regulations, there's so much to learn,” he said. “Whether you have a customer that's on your gearbox or suspension, and in the same way, on the power units, the development slope is very steep. And you can never deploy things to make everybody happy. But I think most important is, we are trying to provide a good service.”
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