Speaking following the 2025 F1 season finale in Abu Dhabi, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff discusses the 2026 pecking order. With rumours suggesting Mercedes will be the team to beat under the new regulations, Wolff weighs in on the team’s progress.
With sweeping regulation changes to both cars and power units for the 2026 F1 season, the pecking order is near impossible to predict. Despite this, paddock chatter suggests Mercedes will mirror their 2014 season, starting the new era with a strong power unit.
Following this season’s season finale in Abu Dhabi, these rumours were put to Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. While Wolff admitted the team are set to meet their targets heading into 2026, he remained tight-lipped on Mercedes expectations.
“Yeah, so it’s super difficult to predict,” Wolff said in a print media session in Abu Dhabi.“Because we set ourselves targets that we are on track to meet, but whether those targets were set ambitious enough and whether those targets have been set in the right place in terms of priorities only the future will show and this is not far away.
“Eight weeks, how much? It’s actually awful to say. Today was the first day in the morning where I thought ‘I don’t want to go to a racetrack’ and so to be honest, no idea.”
Reflecting on the buildup to the 2014 regulation change, Wolff claims it is “not comparable”. While he recalled a positive end to 2013 in the lead up to the changes, he cited the much tighter grid in Formula 1 in recent times as a key obstacle.
“I remember that press conference in Brazil where I was calculating with a pen and paper what points we needed to finish second in the championship,” he recalled.“We ended up winning three races and P2 and certainly more cheerful than today considering where we came from and then landing it in ‘14.
“I kind of had the feeling already in the winter when we were the first ones running a full car dyno, the engine was more reliable than it seemed with the other people and obviously on day one testing, nobody did some laps, we did and the same on day two. So it’s not comparable, I would say. The grid is just much more competitive than it was in previous years.”
Wolff was then pushed further on the subject. The media present asked if he was confident Mercedes were set to top the 2026 F1 pecking order. As ever, keeping his cards close to his chest, Wolff replied; “Only the future will show.”
The Mercedes man continued to admit his outlook is always of a ‘glass half empty’ nature. With the team having openly struggled in the ground effect era, these new regulations present a strong opportunity. He explained the team’s objective was simply to do everything possible to create a competitive package for the new regulations.
“People tend to try to pin it down to a single factor and that was determined to or was the basis for more success or more failure,” Wolff explained.“Whether it’s someone new in the management; the team principal or technical director, head of Aero, or lots of geniuses or not geniuses that have come and changed the destiny of the team.
“But fundamentally it’s a group of people working together and taking the right decisions collectively, based on the right set of data, with the right infrastructure, with the most correlation between the virtual world and the real.
“That’s how you find out about your car and if that doesn’t represent the reality once you put it on the road, that’s the biggest risk for any team. You know, I’m never confident. I’m a glass half-empty person. So we just do everything we can that is in our power to come out with a car, with a power unit that is competitive enough to fight for a world championship.”
