The engine question is following McLaren into the Belgian Grand Prix. As the team bolts on the newest version of Mercedes' power unit at Spa, it is fielding a familiar accusation: that a car manufacturer of its size should not still be a customer.
There is a timing wrinkle behind the noise. The Race reports McLaren only received the latest Mercedes specification at Spa — two races later than the works team, which introduced it in Austria, and after fellow customers Alpine and Williams had already run it at Silverstone. The delay was self-imposed: McLaren still had life left in its existing units after chewing through parts during a bruising reliability run in 2026, one that included a pair of battery failures which kept Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri from even starting March's Chinese Grand Prix.
To Guenther Steiner, the "we got it last" complaint is exactly the problem. Pressed on whether McLaren should cut ties with Mercedes and build its own engine, the former Haas principal didn't hedge.
"Absolutely. They are a car manufacturer; they should make their own engine," Steiner said.
In his telling, the excuse-making is a habit that has outlived every supplier McLaren has used. "They had issues with Renault at the time. They had issues with Honda. It's always something," he said. "At some stage, you need to be a grown-up, and they've got enough money."
He held up the teams that committed to their own hardware. "Red Bull went for it, and they are doing pretty good. Audi went for it. They are a car manufacturer, they don't want to buy a Ferrari engine," Steiner said — while conceding the barrier is real: "Expensive. And difficult. It isn't easy to make an engine, but I think the first hurdle is the money and then the people."
McLaren's own read is very different. Rather than point at the Mercedes unit, team principal Andrea Stella describes a team still learning to wring everything out of it.
"We still seem to have a little bit of a deficit in extracting the most from the HPP power unit," Stella said. "We have work to do to exploit the potential of the power unit — there's more that is available."
That is also why nobody at Woking is billing the Spa upgrade as a fix. Neil Houldey, McLaren's technical director of applied engineering, was careful to temper hopes.
"We're confident that this update will add a bit of performance to our car, but we are fully aware that after a difficult British Grand Prix, mainly in terms of pure performance, even this round won't be that easy, so we won't be expecting any big change in terms of competitiveness," Houldey said.
So the two camps talk past each other. Steiner sees a wealthy manufacturer clinging to customer status and the excuses that come with it. McLaren sees performance it hasn't unlocked yet. The one point of agreement heading into Spa: the power unit, not the chassis, is the headline again.
