Racing
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Toto Wolff said at the Hungarian Grand Prix that McLaren was right to argue it started the 2026 Formula 1 season at a disadvantage as a Mercedes customer team, openly acknowledging that a works operation holds a built-in edge when new technical rules arrive.
The Mercedes team principal said the advantage comes from developing the power unit and chassis together from the outset. Speaking to select media including RacingNews365, Wolff said: “In a period of new regulations, obviously an integrated power unit and chassis team will always have a certain advantage,” adding that chassis development on the simulator “has a lag.”
That assessment backs up McLaren team principal Andrea Stella and CEO Zak Brown, who have both said the Woking team began the year on the back foot. McLaren is the only one of the top four teams operating as a customer outfit rather than a works team, which has left it trying to close an understanding gap under the new 2026 package.
Wolff said that gap has not been limited to pure performance. He also pointed to the extra complications a customer team faces when reliability and integration problems appear, confirming Mercedes had to work through “a phasing issue” and “a mileage issue” on the power unit side. McLaren suffered multiple retirements earlier in the season, and Wolff made clear the team could not react in the same way a factory operation can when engine and chassis development need to move together.
Technical fixes are still being introduced. At the Belgian Grand Prix, both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri ran the latest Mercedes power unit software, which was designed to address battery-related issues.
Wolff also went out of his way to praise McLaren’s handling of the situation rather than frame it as a strained supplier-customer relationship. He said Andrea Stella and Zak Brown had been “very correct and gracious” in the way they assessed the problems, and added that he had not seen the team complain despite the setbacks.
The bigger point for Mercedes is that Wolff does not see the imbalance as permanent. He described 2026 as “a catch-up race” and said the field is moving toward the point where “the development curve and the understanding are going to flatten out,” after which teams should have “pretty much the same level of understanding of these things.” For McLaren, that is the crucial shift: the handicap Wolff has now publicly validated should ease only once customer teams have accumulated enough knowledge of the new power unit-chassis package to erase the works team head start.