McLaren has launched an investigation into the power unit issue that saw Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris fail to start the Chinese Grand Prix. And rival F1 team Mercedes are at the centre of the issue because they supply McLaren with their engines.
Piastri and Norris were meant to start fifth and sixth on the grid for Sunday’s race, but neither of them managed to get the car started because of separate electrical issues. It marked the first time Norris hasn’t started a race in his career, while Piastri has now suffered back-to-back failures to start.
Speaking after Kimi Antonelli’s victory for Mercedes, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said they’ll launch a thorough investigation with engine supplier Mercedes HPP (High Performance Powertrains) to get to the bottom of what went wrong. Worryingly, Stella admitted they weren’t quite sure what had caused the issues.
George Russell and Kimi Antonelli (R) shined for Mercedes after Oscar Piastri (L) failed to start once again. Image: AAP
“We are here to go racing, and today we were not in condition to do so because of separate electrical problems on both power units, which is extremely frustrating and disappointing for the team, the drivers, our technical and commercial partners, and of course our fans,” Stella said. “Nothing had changed between Saturday’s qualifying and the fire-up in the garage pre-race, but as we prepared Lando’s car to leave the garage an electrical problem was discovered on the power unit.
“We tried to fix it alongside our partners at Mercedes HPP, but there was no way to do so which resulted in the first prevention of a grand prix start in his career. Then on the grid we found another electrical issue on Oscar’s power unit which couldn’t be resolved, resulting in the car being required to return to the garage for further investigation.
“They look to be separate electrical faults on the power unit occurring at the same time, an extremely unfortunate coincidence which meant there was simply no way to start the race with either car this afternoon. We’ll investigate together alongside our partners at HPP to understand what happened.”
Oscar Piastri looks on after McLaren’s double disaster in China.
(/Sipa USA)Mercedes-supplied engine at centre of McLaren issues
The drama came after Stella made some interesting public comments that McLaren weren’t in the know as much as Mercedes when it came to the power unit they’re being supplied. “It’s a very complex power unit. And when you are in a position of a customer team, you sort of need to learn,” he said in China.
“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.
“Obviously, when you are works team (the supplier), 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.”
Piastri and Norris both admitted on Sunday they were in the dark as to why they couldn’t start the race. Russell finished second behind Antonelli as Mercedes continued their brilliant start to the season.