McLaren boss clarifies stance on Mercedes PU knowledge advantage

Andrea Stella has clarified his thoughts McLaren’s efforts to match Mercedes by saying his Formula 1 team is “not complaining” about any advantage the works outfit has.

He insists that his team is simply focussed on working even more closely with High Performance Powertrains (HPP) division in order to gain a deeper understanding of how to operate Mercedes’ new power unit.

After qualifying in Australia last weekend Stella noted that McLaren had discovered via studying data that Mercedes was using energy management strategies that it didn’t yet know about.

He says that it is “pretty natural” that the works team would have such an advantage, especially at the start of a new formula.

“First of all, let me clarify that when I talked about exploitation of the power unit I was referring to HPP in terms of we need to work together with them,” Stella told media including Crash.net in Shanghai.

“It’s a very complex power unit. And when you are in a position of a customer team, you sort of need to learn. And this is pretty natural. This is pretty natural when the product you receive is relatively simple to understand and exploit, then that’s not a big gap.

“But in this case it’s so complex because of these unique sensitivities, I don’t recall I’ve ever seen anything like that in a power unit in previous championships. Then you kind of need to go through a journey. And we are thankful to HPP for how supportive they are.

“They have given us the information we need, but somehow you need to run on track, and learn.”

The Mercedes team has benefited from a free flow of knowledge: “Obviously, when you are works team, it’s normal that you will be more integrating. There is no IP, there is no protection of data. You just work as one entity.

“So fair enough that there’s a little bit of an advantage from this point of view. We’re not complaining about it. Our only focus is to learn as rapidly as possible, and exploit the power unit at its best.”

McLaren power gains a work in progress

Stella says that process is ongoing, with the team having sampled two more qualifying sessions in China this weekend, as well as the sprint race.

“Every session and every event so far, we’ve been able to learn a bit more about how the power unit works,” he said. “It’s a very complex I would say way of working. The complexity lies mainly in the sensitivities to small variations, which lead to big outcomes in terms of lap time speeds.

“For those of you who look at the GPS overlays, you will be able to see that from lap to lap of the same driver, or two drivers of the same team, they can have quite a different speed profile.

“So you sort of have to learn where are these sensitivities originating from? And for doing that, you need to understand also what tools you can use. So every session and every event we have learned.”

He added that even today’s Shanghai qualifying session showed that there are still steps to be taken.

“We are in a better position than we were in Australia,” he said. “I would like to thank our technical partners at HPP, because they’ve been extremely supportive in our journey of discovery, let me say, and optimisation.

“So I think we are able now to extract more performance from the power unit. Still, I would say that having done the review of the qualifying, it would look like we still have some performance that we can extract.

“So this is positive, because we can further improve the lap times that we are in condition to produce. And here I’m talking about qualifying, where everything is kind of fixed in terms of reference conditions.

“But also we learned in the race in Australia and this morning in the sprint, as to how you use the engine in the racing situation, you will have seen how much overtaking we have, and very much this has to do with the way you are using the power unit.

“So definitely steps forward. Thank you to HPP for having helped us in this progress. But more to come in the coming events.”

Stella said that McLaren is working hard on the chassis side, and indicated that the loss of the Bahrain and Saudi events would not impact the upgrade schedule, which has targeted Miami.

“We are trying to develop the car as fast as possible in every single area,” he said. “And I think after having run at the test and then in the start of the season, we have learned even more what we need to improve based on looking at our own data, and we have taken definitely inspiration by looking at the other cars.

“So we are merging now this important amount of information that we have gained, and we are designing the new parts.”