Toto Wolff downplayed Lando Norris’s growth in the 2026 Formula 1 season and assessed the current situation in the race for updates until the end of the year.
The British McLaren driver secured his second consecutive win in the championship at the Dutch GP. With this, he moved up one more position in the Drivers’ World Championship, appearing in fourth place and reducing his points gap to Kimi Antonelli, the leader.
Assessing, the Austrian executive stated that he knows what difference an update package can make at this point in the season. “If you bring an update, it guarantees at least a few tenths to each of the main teams, and that’s what you lose. So, yes, it has become a bit harder than at the beginning of the year,” he admitted.
Next, when asked if McLaren and Ferrari have the financial margin to continue developing their cars, he said that “McLaren and Ferrari have money. Until the end of the year, until the end of the season, we will see if they can continue putting as many new parts on the car as they are doing now. Someone might adopt a different strategy and spend more at the beginning and middle of the year than in the final stretch.”
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Wolff was also asked if Mercedes might have spent money aggressively in the early part of the calendar. “You can see it in several ways. Did we spend too much at the beginning, in the first year? No, I don’t think so. We are simply an organization of a certain size and infrastructure,” he explained.
“In this regard, we had a very big problem. We let slip 50 or 100 points due to reliability issues. That would have given us a small advantage, or at least a slightly bigger advantage than we have now. Besides that, we will simply continue executing what was planned and what our financial reality allows us,” he concluded.
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