Andrea Stella calls on McLaren to step up development…

McLaren Formula 1 team boss Andrea Stella says the team needs to step up its development program if it is to catch Mercedes and keep up with the other top teams.

McLaren has been consistently behind the leading Mercedes cars this season and in recent races it saw both Ferrari and Red Bull make bigger swings with rafts of aerodynamic upgrades. McLaren didn't bring significant upgrades to this weekend's Austrian Grand Prix, with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri qualifying sixth and seventh respectively - four tenths behind polesitter George Russell over the Red Bull Ring's short lap.

Team principal Stella acknowledged McLaren is two to three months behind Mercedes regarding its aerodynamic development and has called on his team to step up the intensity of its upgrade programme to keep up with what he called the highest level he's ever seen in F1.

"We talk about three months of development that we need to catch up. There's only one way of doing so, which is to out-develop competitors," Stella acknowledged on Saturday night. "We need to rev our engine higher. We need to have more intensity in the business. We need to be good at delivering effective solutions.

"What I see in the pipeline is very promising, especially in terms of aerodynamic upgrades, but at the same time we need to land with these upgrades trackside as soon as possible.

"I think what we see in 2026 is Formula 1 operating at a level that has never been the case before. If we see the upgrades that Red Bull did, they are quite voluminous. So, the overall game in terms of pure performance development, but also performance delivery to track, is to a higher level than I've ever seen before. These are the conversations we are having internally, and we need to make sure that at McLaren we can, if possible, out-develop and out-deliver our competitors, and this will allow us to close the gap."

Lando Norris, McLaren (Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images)

When quizzed specifically about where McLaren's MCL40 is lacking, he said the Spielberg weekend didn't uncover anything the Woking squad wasn't already aware of, further exposing its general lack of aerodynamic load and efficiency. Stella also suggested his team is still trying to figure out how to get the same performance out of its Mercedes power units as the works team.

"Our gap to Mercedes has always been between three and four tenths," Stella explained. "It comes in the corners predominantly, probably 70% in the corners and 30% in the straights.

"In the corners, it's very clear why that is the case, it's the fact that their car generates more downforce than our car, and this is something that we are working on. The 30% happening in the straights might have to do with some additional aerodynamic drag that we have on our car, but we are also looking at the way we exploit the power unit, because the speed deficit is quite significant.

"Certainly, the power unit is the first [factor], and we are looking into why we are somehow in a position of deficit, but also you have the drag of your car, the straight mode efficiency. There's probably one and a half tenths, one tenth at least that we lose in the straights, and definitely we need to go and look into why that is the case."