After winning the first six races of the season, Mercedes has finally had its Formula 1 dominance challenged in recent weeks – winning just two out of the last five grands prix. However, despite advances for McLaren that helped it take the win from pole at last weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix, Silver Arrows boss Toto Wolff isn’t too worried about his rivals’ progress.
Mercedes was the favourite heading into F1’s new era in 2026, and backed that up with stellar on-track pace that was initially tough for its rivals to match. However, after upgrades for Ferrari and McLaren – and a few issues for Mercedes – the Silver Arrows have faltered at the top in recent races.
This reached a head in Hungary, where McLaren’s Lando Norris romped to pole just 0.012 seconds ahead of Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton and went on to win the race. Mercedes, meanwhile, had to settle for fourth and seventh in qualifying, before its championship leader Kimi Antonelli came home in third on Sunday. But the turnaround in results for the papaya team isn’t bothering Wolff.
“When you ask the artificial intelligence who are the favourite in Budapest, the artificial intelligence is going to say McLaren,” the Mercedes boss said after the race on Sunday when asked about McLaren's step forward.
“They were the dominant team here in the last few years, I think it was one and two and something like this last year. So, definitely one of the good tracks for them, not very good for us.
“We need to be careful not to swing from everyone is suddenly competitive to a team is suddenly not competitive. I think they've definitely done a step, they are in the fight, we haven't brought an upgrade for some time, and you can see that this is going to be a development fight also going forward.”
The development race is a hot topic in 2026, as the ramp up in performance this year is expected to be rapid as teams get to grip with their new cars and the new regulations. Ferrari has brought a raft of new parts to the SF-26 to unlock its performance, and McLaren has steadily followed suit – with new parts arriving in Miami, Spa and Hungary.
In contrast, Mercedes has been more gradual with its upgrades, which Wolff said was a symptom of F1’s new cost cap era.
“We need to be really just strategic about when to bring the upgrades,” he acknowledged. "Rather than just throwing it in at every grand prix like in the past, we cannot do this, so you will have to eventually put an upgrade in and probably you leapfrog a little bit the others and then it kind of flattens out and the other ones coming stronger.
“So, yeah, we're bringing upgrades, we're closely monitoring how much we can bring and at the moment cost cap wise we're in a good spot, we've tried to have it a little bit more second half of the season, waited – and let's see if that's enough.”
