Oh, McLaren—you’ve really gone downhill these past few years in Formula One. Ever since the ill-fated decision to swap to Honda in 2015, then Renault in 2018, races have just been a mess. It makes one wish for the good ol’ McLaren-Mercedes glory days, a time when— wait. Hold on. Holy shit, McLaren-Mercedes is coming back to F1 in 2021!
You heard that right, people. The iconic McLaren is sucking it up, admitting it made a mistake, and opting to just go back to using tried-and-true Mercedes power, Formula One reports.
McLaren’s current power unit partner, Renault, is way more concerned with providing its factory team with the best possible power unit—which leaves customers like McLaren hanging high and dry trying to pick up the scraps. There’s no way in hell McLaren will go back to Honda, and no one can see Ferrari offering its engines to yet another competitor. All that’s left is Mercedes.
But it does seem like it’ll be a good move. Mercedes has been pretty damn successful these past few years. If I were to come into billions of dollars with which to start an F1 team, I’d absolutely choose Mercedes to be my power unit supplier.
The previous Mercedes partnership lasted from 1994 through 2014 and saw three championships: two from Mika Hakkinen and one from Lewis Hamilton. That’s not a half bad success rate.
While the upcoming 2021 regulations present a pretty big question mark over the fate of pretty much all the teams involved in F1, there’s no real guarantee that Mercedes will still be making the most competitive power unit, nor can we really predict what kind of car McLaren will end up producing.
But it will be pretty damn cool to see the McLaren-Mercedes union back on the grid once more.