McLaren are leading the constructors' championship, yet their team principal has gone public with a frustration that would have been unthinkable a year ago: being a Mercedes customer is starting to cost them.
Andrea Stella did not hide it after Monaco. "Never before we felt that being a customer team has put us on the back foot," he said — a striking line from a team that won back-to-back titles on Mercedes power. Stella tied the deficit to the structural realities of not building your own engine: fewer chances to integrate the unit, and a slower route to fixing reliability or unlocking performance than a works operation enjoys.
He was careful not to turn it into a grievance. "I just want to be totally fair to our power unit supplier, with whom we've had a fantastic relationship, very successful," Stella added.
The comments reopened a long-running question: should McLaren, like Red Bull, eventually build its own engine? CEO Zak Brown poured cold water on any imminent move, noting McLaren isn't even in the room where engine rules are written. "Well, we're not a manufacturer. So, we actually don't have a seat at that table as far as the power unit group is concerned," Brown said.
He framed it as a question McLaren will keep revisiting rather than act on. "Anytime a new regulation comes out, we'll take a look and see if it's something technically that's interesting. Is it something fiscally that makes sense?" Brown said. For now his answer is to stay put: "I'm very happy with HPP. They've been a great partner. We've won a couple of championships with them... I think priority one is to stay with Mercedes."
Mercedes, for its part, has heard the complaint before and pushed back. Responding to Stella earlier this season, Toto Wolff argued the steep learning curve of new regulations makes it impossible to keep every customer happy. "You can never deploy things to make everybody happy," Wolff said. "But I think most important is we're trying to provide a good service."
The gap between Stella's warning and Brown's caution is the real story. One half of McLaren's leadership is flagging a structural handicap; the other is stressing loyalty to a supplier that has delivered titles. Both can be true at once — and that is precisely the bind independent customers face under the 2026 rules.
Analysts see a narrow path rather than an open door. The post-2030 formula is being shaped to lower barriers for independent engine suppliers, which could one day make a McLaren-built unit viable. Set against that is the brutal cost and risk: a full power-unit programme runs into hundreds of millions with no guarantee of competitiveness. History offers a warning, too — McLaren's 1960s attempt to run its own engine produced plenty of noise and few trophies.
The nearer-term friction is smaller but real. Tension over knowledge-sharing, and Mercedes' wider commercial manoeuvring elsewhere on the grid, have nudged McLaren to at least think about independence. Brown's message is that thinking is as far as it goes — the door is one McLaren will look through every time the rules change, but priority one remains the badge on the back of their title-winning car.
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*Originally published on [Formula One News](https://newsformula.one/article/mclaren-eyes-own-engine-as-mercedes-customer-status-bites). Visit for full coverage.*
