Why Mercedes is still quicker than McLaren

It’s known that one of Mercedes boss Toto Wolff’s key demands of his team for this season was for it to cease being trounced by a customer. Mercedes underperformed for much of the ground-effect era, while McLaren recovered from a slow start to win the previous two constructors’ championships – and take Lando Norris to the drivers’ title this season.

That was then. This, indubitably, is now.

Resetting the technical rules often creates a shake-up of the order and Mercedes began the latest era far better prepared than McLaren. Not only was the launch-spec W17 more aero-efficient than the MCL40, Mercedes had a head start in understanding the nuances of the new power unit format.

Indeed, there was much disgruntled huffing among Mercedes’ customers about how much information was being shared, and a suspicion that some was being held back.

McLaren has worked hard to maintain a harmonious and productive relationship with Mercedes-Benz High Performance Powertrains to close the knowledge gap. But the Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend provided another subtle demonstration of how the works team remains at least one step ahead in terms of optimisation.

On the chassis side, although McLaren brought a substantial upgrade package to Baku, it wasn’t expecting this to change the MCL40’s fundamental characteristics. On paper this isn’t a track where the car could be expected to challenge for victory on pace alone, given its slightly draggier envelope and handling deficit in slow corners.

“The upgrades worked well, they were relatively noticeable, because in this case they included the shape of the side pods and also the floor,” said team principal Andrea Stella. Even if they were possibly even more noticeable than what we took in Hungary, in terms of impact on performance it was a little bit less. In general we’re happy with the data we’ve measured and we’re happy with the impact on performance.

McLaren is aware it has not optimised its power unit as well as Mercedes

Photo by: Peter Fox / Getty Images

“I think in a circuit like Azerbaijan we knew that it would have been on the difficult side for McLaren. One reason is that it goes back to the speed in the straights, which is not our strength. And the other reason is related to the fact that there is no medium or high-speed corners.

“So we are constantly fighting in a range where the car doesn't express its best qualities. And this has not been fundamentally changed by the upgrades, which just add a little bit of aerodynamic load in all conditions.”

McLaren has been trying to add aerodynamic load as efficiently as it can all season, having observed the MCL40 was both draggier than the W17 and endowed with less downforce out of the box. But it faces certain fundamental limitations because of the well-intentioned design choice to save weight by running the shortest permissible wheelbase. This gives less floor area to provide real estate for aerodynamic furniture to manage the flow around the rear tyres.

Shifting the balance of where it harvested and deployed, and giving up a little bit of pace around the start of the lap, enabled Mercedes to deploy more and for slightly longer at the end of the lap

The deficit in straightline speed is harder to pin down. Some of it is in the aero, some in the power unit – but not in the simplistic explanations being bandied around. There is no special mode only the works Mercedes team has access to, no two-tier system in which the customers receive a lesser spec. The difference is in the integration, exploitation and optimisation, and this is where Mercedes is ahead of its customers.

“It would be incorrect from an engineering point of view to say there's a difference in power unit or they use the power unit a little bit better,” said Stella.

“I'm saying it’s the package that is more effective for them. Like they might have even less aerodynamic drag. We know that drag is an area we need to keep working on. So, we take it as a fact, we take it as an opportunity to do better. We keep working with our HPP engineers. We kept making changes to our power unit optimisation up until before qualifying.”

Watch: Is Mercedes’ Baku Pace Real? | Azerbaijan Grand Prix 2026

Nevertheless Mercedes has consistently been ahead in finding clever ways to circumvent the regulations legally, such as the throttle-lift trick seen at Silverstone and Hungary, for instance. Practice and qualifying in Azerbaijan provided another example of how Mercedes uses its experience to exploit the same power unit differently.

As revealed in Autosport’s post-practice video from the paddock on Thursday (above), during their qualifying simulations the Mercedes cars were opening the lap in a lower gear than the other frontrunners and harvesting energy via super clipping. Counter-intuitive as this might seem, given that it cost 8-10km/h on what remained of the straight, during Russell’s FP2-topping lap he recouped the time deficit to the non-Mercedes frontrunners within a handful of corners. He was noticeably later off the throttle into Turns 3 and 4, inverting the delta through there.

It was expected that the Baku circuit’s deterministic layout would promote a convergence of harvesting and deployment strategies here but both Mercedes and Ferrari were thinking outside the box. Ferrari went for what you might call an England vs Argentina strategy, boosting strongly between the timing line and Turn 1, then again between Turns 2 and 3, to build an advantage it hoped to preserve. Mercedes did the opposite.

Shifting the balance of where it harvested and deployed, and giving up a little bit of pace around the start of the lap, enabled Mercedes to deploy more and for slightly longer at the end of the lap. Comparing the speed traces reveal a broadly linear difference in top speeds between the Mercedes and McLaren, followed by a delayed ramp-down phase for the W17 as it approached the line.

You can see why Mercedes was understood to have been particularly vocal in opposing Lewis Hamilton’s proposal to improve safety through the final corners in qualifying by permitting drivers to use more energy through that section when on an out-lap.