McLaren should build own F1 engine, Steiner says
NXTbets Pro | Published On: July 15, 2026
Steiner blasts McLaren
Former Haas team boss Guenther Steiner has taken aim at McLaren, saying the reigning Formula 1 constructors’ champion should stop blaming Mercedes for its 2026 problems and build its own engine. Steiner said McLaren needs to “grow up” and called the team’s complaints about Mercedes a familiar excuse. He pushed the argument further, saying that as a car manufacturer McLaren should make its own power unit instead of leaning on a supplier and then pointing the finger when results do not match expectations. The message was direct and old-school in tone, with Steiner framing the issue as one of identity as much as performance. In his view, McLaren has the scale and the resources to take that step. He said the team has enough money to launch its own engine program and should use its commercial strength to become fully self-sufficient. He also pointed to Red Bull and Audi as examples of companies that have built their own paths rather than staying dependent on an outside engine partner. For Steiner, the complaint about Mercedes is part of a pattern he says McLaren has repeated before, with Renault and Honda also drawing criticism in the past.
McLaren Mercedes struggle
Steiner’s comments come against a tough stretch for McLaren, which had not won any of the first nine races of the season after entering the year as the championship holder. Mercedes, meanwhile, won seven of those nine races and built a clear early edge in the standings, with Kimi Antonelli and George Russell splitting those victories 5-2. The gap showed on the board as well, with Mercedes leading McLaren 333 to 179 after nine Grands Prix. That backdrop gave weight to the recent discussion around McLaren’s use of Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains. During the British Grand Prix weekend, team principal Andrea Stella said McLaren still looked to be leaving performance on the table from the Mercedes engine and had “a little bit of a deficit” in getting the most out of it. Stella stopped short of directly blaming Mercedes for the issue, but he did point to a gap in extraction rather than a failure in the package itself. McLaren uses the same Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains unit as the works Mercedes team, which makes the debate sharper. The same engine family is producing race-winning results in one garage and a more difficult start in another, and that reality has kept the focus on how much of McLaren’s problem comes from its own side of the operation.
Steiner self-sufficiency
Steiner argued that the answer for McLaren is to stop depending on another company and commit to its own engine project. He said building an engine would strengthen McLaren’s team image and help its road-car business, which ties the racing effort directly to the brand that sells cars to customers. That broader business case sat at the center of his point. He was not pretending the move would be easy. Steiner acknowledged that designing and producing an engine is a difficult task and said the biggest hurdles are funding the work and hiring the right people. Even so, he said McLaren has the money to do it if it chooses to make the leap. The underlying message was that a team of McLaren’s size should not keep returning to the same explanation every time an engine relationship becomes uncomfortable. Steiner sees the current Mercedes criticism as one more chapter in a long-running pattern, and he wants McLaren to break it by taking full control of its own future. For him, self-reliance is the point. If McLaren wants to be judged like a true manufacturer and a front-running Formula 1 organization, Steiner said, it should build the engine that powers it.
