McLaren’s team principal Andrea Stella said the “main limitation” of being a customer team of Mercedes has been the timeline it has to operate in.

While the works team started strongly, other Mercedes-powered teams have found themselves playing catch up with the engine supplier being careful about when to release information.

McLaren boss says ‘push programme’ behind power unit non-optimisation

While rules state each engine must be the same from works team to customer team, there are still advantages to being the works outfit, mainly that you are privy to information far sooner than the customer teams.

The optimisation of the engine rather than the engine itself has been highlighted as the key to Mercedes’s strong start and McLaren’s Stella said that while information is not held back, the Woking team has a shorter timeframe with which to work in.

“In terms of power unit exploitation, I would say that the main limitation as a customer team has been the timeline,” Stella said ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix. “It’s been a pushed programme, like it’s been pushed from all teams, for all competitors.

“For us, certainly, it’s been a programme, the delivery of the MCL40 that was pushed up to the last minute. The same has happened for the power unit manufacturers.

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“So, it’s relatively normal that in this condition, as a customer, you tend to be a little bit on the back foot, and we are learning together with our HPP engineers how to use the power unit. They are learning together with us. It’s not like information is held back. There’s maximum sharing. We work very well with HPP and with our engineers.

“We’ve been world champions together three times in the last two years, so the relationship is great. It’s more about catching up with the timeline. So, we remain pretty optimistic that, like I said before, we are now not far from maximum exploitation from a power unit point of view.”

Earlier in the season, Mercedes team principal and CEO Toto Wolff denied this team had hid information and suggested it was a learning curve for everyone.

“I think it’s clear, when you roll out new regulations, there’s so much to learn.

“Whether you have a customer that’s on your gearbox or suspension, and in the same way on the power units, the development slope is very steep, and you can never deploy things to make everybody happy.

“But, I think the most important [thing] is we’re trying to provide a good service. And that’s always our aim.”

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