- 2 days ago
How Mercedes’ early 2026 advantage disappeared and how Ferrari and McLaren caught up.
Category
🚗
MotorTranscript
00:00Zandvoort lap 72.
00:02Lando Norris takes the win, with the two Mercedes coming home second and third behind him.
00:07You've all seen that.
00:08Nobody needs it explained.
00:10What's a lot harder to explain is that five months earlier in Melbourne, that same Mercedes
00:14qualified eight tenths clear of the entire field.
00:17Eight tenths clear of Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull, who were all within a tenth of each
00:22other.
00:22That's the kind of margin that normally decides a championship by Easter.
00:26Now at the time, everyone thought they knew why.
00:28Mercedes had built the best engine of the new rules and the rest of the grid would just
00:33have to wait until they caught up.
00:35But then you look at McLaren, the reigning champions, running the exact same engine and they're
00:40eight tenths back as well.
00:42So it's something Mercedes built on top of the engine and the best way to look at it
00:46is in layers.
00:47The first layer is the engine itself, because it did give them something.
00:51The rules cap how much electrical energy a car can use per lap at 7 megajoules.
00:56And that's not enough to run full power everywhere.
00:59Use it up too early and the electrical power cuts out while the driver is still flat out.
01:04That's what's called clipping.
01:06In Melbourne, every car on the grid hit that, Mercedes included.
01:10If you look at the speed traces, you can see the acceleration drop on every car.
01:14On the Mercedes, it drops later and by less.
01:16And it was still pulling away at the end of the straight.
01:20Though through the fast corners, it was actually closer to the Ferrari than people remember.
01:24The gap was mostly on the straights.
01:26McLaren with the same engine had none of that.
01:29So the advantage was in knowing what to do with the parts.
01:33Under the rules, it works like this.
01:34A customer team gets the same hardware as the works team and the same base software to
01:39start from.
01:40Everything after that is on you.
01:42How you set up, how you spend the energy across a lap, how you build a car around it.
01:47And Mercedes had been doing that work on this engine for years.
01:50McLaren got the final hardware and the final software very close to the first race, which
01:55is completely legal.
01:57But it meant that they were learning the new engine at the racetrack.
02:00Stella put it quite nicely.
02:02He said it was basically run the car, look at the data, react to what you find.
02:07In Formula 1, that's backwards.
02:09You want to know how the car is going to behave, ideally before it leaves the garage.
02:14That head start shows up in every decision made around the engine.
02:17And Mercedes made every one of them already knowing the answer.
02:21It goes right down to how they drive it.
02:24At Silverstone, McLaren spotted both Mercedes drivers lifting off for a fraction of a second
02:28just before the line, to save energy for the lap that counted.
02:32McLaren couldn't work out exactly what it was doing and Stella said he wasn't sure the
02:37technique was even available to them, because it probably needed something in the power unit
02:41they didn't have.
02:43All of that mostly explains the straights.
02:45The last layer explains everywhere else.
02:48And that's the floor.
02:49Mercedes and Ferrari both went the same way there.
02:52They lifted the side pods up and away from the floor.
02:54That opens up the edge of the floor and lets you use more of it to make downforce.
02:59That's the region Allison built this car performance around.
03:02And it's the area Mercedes understood better than anyone before 2021.
03:07So Mercedes had the engine, the knowledge behind it and the aerodynamics all working
03:12at the same time.
03:13That's why no single upgrade from anyone was ever going to close that gap.
03:17To catch this car, you had to take it apart one layer at a time.
03:21And two teams that did it went about it in completely different ways.
03:25Ferrari went first and the interesting thing about Ferrari is their car arrived in Melbourne
03:30deliberately unfinished.
03:31They launched a simple car on purpose because nobody knew what a good 2026 car looked like
03:37yet.
03:38And committing hard on an idea you can't test is the expensive mistake.
03:42They built something safe, ran it and developed it around what the first few races told them.
03:48And what the first few races told them was the floor wasn't working consistently.
03:52Ferrari could stay with the Mercedes in some of the fast corners, but the car only really
03:57worked in a narrow window.
03:59And outside of that window, it was losing time everywhere.
04:02The problem was the front tyres.
04:04A tyre spinning at a racing speed throws a wall of turbulent air inwards.
04:08And that air gets dragged under the car and breaks up the flow the floor depends on.
04:13That's what's called the tyre squirt.
04:15The Barcelona package changed the outer end of the front wing so it catches that air earlier
04:21and pushes it out around the floor instead of into it.
04:24Cleaner air underneath and a floor that keeps working in more corners and more conditions.
04:30That turned Ferrari from a car that was quick in places to a car that was quick in most places.
04:36It took the first real piece out of the Mercedes lead.
04:39Barcelona was the first result that suggested it had worked.
04:42And yes, Antonelli retiring a well-timed safety car made the margin look bigger than it was.
04:49But Silverstone three weeks later removed any of that doubt.
04:53That's one layer gone.
04:54But Ferrari on its own doesn't take a car from eight tenths clear to fighting three teams.
04:59Which brings us back to McLaren.
05:01For a completely different reason this time.
05:04Earlier McLaren was a comparison that showed us what Mercedes actually had.
05:07Now the question is how McLaren fought its way back starting from a car that was compromised before it ever
05:13ran.
05:14McLaren spent the first half of the season paying back decisions made in 2025.
05:19They spent the last months of that year fighting Verstappen for a championship.
05:23And that's wind tunnel time and senior engineers working on a car with four months left.
05:28Their own technical director says the launch car could have been more developed in several areas.
05:33Then the weight.
05:34The minimum weight dropped from 800 kilos to 768.
05:39And McLaren launched over it.
05:41Which costs you twice.
05:42The extra weight costs lap time on its own.
05:45And taking it out uses up development time that adds no performance when you're done.
05:50Then the gearing.
05:51McLaren builds its own gearbox.
05:53So it chose its own gear ratios.
05:55And it went shorter than Mercedes.
05:57That gave McLaren better acceleration and Mercedes better top speed.
06:01On a long straight McLaren ran out of revs while Mercedes was pulling.
06:06At Montreal that was part of a 1.5 tenths gap between Norris and Russell in qualifying.
06:12And by August Hoddy admitted they would have gone closer to Mercedes in hindsight.
06:16Milliseconds not tenths in his words.
06:19Then the concept itself was aggressive.
06:21The MCL40 is the shortest car on the grid.
06:24About 15 centimetres under the maximum wheelbase.
06:27And 35 centimetres shorter than last year's car.
06:30They couldn't take the length out of the front.
06:32Because the nose length is what keeps the front tyre awake away from the side pods.
06:37And shortening it makes the tyre squirt problem worse.
06:40Instead the rear axle came forwards.
06:42And the gearbox casing was made smaller.
06:45Which left less room for cooling.
06:48And the engine cover was closed off at the sides.
06:51Cooling had been one of last year's McLaren strengths.
06:54Better than Mercedes in fact.
06:55And some of that was traded away to make the car smaller.
06:59So McLaren started the year with a heavy car.
07:01The wrong gearing.
07:02An unfinished aero program.
07:04And a tight cooling package.
07:06It was fair to ask whether fixing those things one at a time could ever add up to enough.
07:11Because none of it was going to arrive as a single breakthrough.
07:14Every upgrade that followed was paying back one of those compromises.
07:18Miami and Montreal went after aero.
07:20Belgium fixed the rear of the car.
07:23Then Hungary brought a new floor with more cooling alongside it.
07:26And that was the combination that finally let them run the car the way it was designed to be run.
07:32McLaren themselves say there was no revolutionary breakthrough anywhere in that sequence.
07:36And technically they're right.
07:38What changed the season was all of it arriving.
07:40Hungary is where it became real.
07:42Norris takes Paul at a 50 degree track.
07:45Which ends a run of Mercedes Paul's that had lasted pretty much the whole season.
07:49And then he wins the race.
07:51And goes back to back at Zandvoort when he won again.
07:54With the second half of the same upgrade on the car.
07:57That's the moment McLaren stops calling a closing gap.
08:00And starts beating Mercedes on merit.
08:03And after Zandvoort.
08:04Stella put three teams inside about a tenth of each other.
08:07So where did the gap actually close?
08:10Because it wasn't everywhere.
08:12In the fast corners Mercedes is still there.
08:15Where they lost out is slow and medium speed corners.
08:18And especially the long ones.
08:19Where the driver holds the same steering angle for 2 or 3 seconds.
08:23And the car has to keep gripping the whole way through.
08:25You can see that Hungary turned 5 and turned 12.
08:29Both long and both slow.
08:30And in both of them.
08:32The Ferrari and the McLaren now carry more speed than the Mercedes.
08:36On a track with a lot of corners like that.
08:38Mercedes loses real lap time.
08:40And the team can see it on its own data.
08:43Long before it costs them a race.
08:45Before we blame every result on the car.
08:47One thing needs taking out.
08:49Toyota Wolf says reliability and mistakes.
08:52Cost Mercedes somewhere between 50 to 100 points this season.
08:55Battery failures.
08:57Overheating.
08:58Electrical problems.
08:59Deployment problems.
09:00On the works.
09:01And on the customer cars.
09:03And Russell spent 2 weekends losing time on the straights.
09:07And nobody could work out why.
09:084 tents in Q3 at Spa.
09:11Wolf went on television.
09:12And said the team simply couldn't explain it.
09:15It turned out to be a software problem limiting his stop speed.
09:18And they fixed it for Hungary.
09:20Take all of that out.
09:21And the fields still closed up.
09:23That covers Ferrari and McLaren.
09:26But what about Mercedes?
09:27They had 5 months to answer all of this.
09:30And they could see the problem in their own data.
09:32Long before it cost them a race.
09:34And when you look at what they actually brought in those 5 months.
09:37It doesn't add up.
09:39In Canada.
09:39They brought their one big package of the year.
09:42And it went straight at the thing they were already best at.
09:45The floor edge.
09:46It did 2 jobs.
09:47It fed better air to the diffuser.
09:49At the back of the car.
09:51And it kept messy air from the rear of the tires getting underneath.
09:55Cleaner air in.
09:56More downforce out.
09:58And it worked.
09:59James Allison called it a big weekend.
10:01And their first major upgrade of the year.
10:04The ability was still there.
10:05Mercedes knew what its car needed.
10:08And knew how to build it.
10:09Which makes what happened next quite hard to explain.
10:12Because that was the last major package they brought.
10:14Every team declares its aerodynamic upgrades to the FIA.
10:18And by the middle of August.
10:20It's Ferrari 40.
10:21Red Bull 38.
10:23McLaren 38.
10:24Mercedes 24.
10:26Level with Williams.
10:28Now counting parts doesn't measure performance obviously.
10:31A new floor and a reshaped brake duct.
10:33Both count as one.
10:35But the pattern matches what you can see on track.
10:38Three teams bringing major packages through the middle of the season.
10:41And the championship leader turning up to a race it lost with a modified brake duct.
10:45The team leading both championships had become the quietest developer at the front of the grid.
10:50Somebody chose that.
10:51In August that person explained why.
10:53And the answer goes back to a decision taken months before the season started.
10:58Every car has a cut off date.
10:59At some point you have to stop changing the design so the factory can build it.
11:04Anything the wind tunnel finds before that date goes onto the car for race 1.
11:09Anything after it comes later as an upgrade.
11:11And Mercedes pushed that cut off later than they'd ever done before.
11:16By several weeks with no safety margin at all.
11:19Allison's phrase for it was less than no contingency.
11:22Normally that's worth very little.
11:24This year it was worth a lot.
11:26Because the rules are new.
11:28And the teams are finding lap time 6 or 7 times faster than last season.
11:32Roughly half a second every 2 months.
11:35So those extra weeks were worth a lot of lap time.
11:37And all of it went into a car that showed up in Melbourne.
11:41What everyone else would bring as their first upgrade.
11:43Mercedes was already racing at round 1.
11:46They started the season one development step ahead of everybody.
11:50And that's also the cost.
11:51In Allison's words.
11:53They spent all the performance up front.
11:55You can only bring that performance once.
11:57So while Ferrari and McLaren were fitting their first upgrades.
12:00Mercedes was still building its next one.
12:02Being a step ahead is why the Melbourne gap was so big.
12:05Being a step behind is why it closed so fast.
12:09And against more than one team at once.
12:12One development cycle.
12:13Allison says we'll bring that to nothing.
12:16And that feels quite scary.
12:17And that's the man who made the call on his own team's podcast.
12:21Front loading the car was the plan.
12:23Losing the lead this fast was the risk that came with it.
12:26And the risk arrived.
12:28Which would be a tidy enough answer.
12:30Except the team gave a different one 10 days later.
12:33Wolf was asked why there was nothing new on the car.
12:36And he said we haven't got the money to put developments on the car.
12:41Now what he means is that there is no room under the cost cap.
12:45And part of the problem is 2027.
12:47The rules change again next year.
12:49And every team has to pay for that out of the same budget.
12:52So the FIA gave every team an extra 3 million dollars on top of the cap.
12:57And it is up to each team.
12:58How much of that to spend this year.
13:01And how much to keep for next year.
13:03And when Total Wolf was asked straight out.
13:05Whether Mercedes had spent too much at the start of the season.
13:08He said no.
13:10So now you got two explanations.
13:12Allison saying the timing went wrong.
13:14Wolf saying money isn't there to fix it quickly.
13:17McLaren doesn't believe it.
13:19When Stella heard the money explanation.
13:21His answer was I would like to believe you.
13:23But I actually don't believe you.
13:25And he pointed straight at that 3 million.
13:28And then Antonelli after finishing second at Zandvoort.
13:31Said he's convinced that the car isn't quickest anymore.
13:34Now that needs saying carefully.
13:36Mercedes is still the most complete package on the grid.
13:39It's the one car that works across the widest range of circuits and conditions.
13:44And finishing second and third at a race you lose is exactly what that looks like.
13:48What's gone is the automatic part.
13:50Ferrari and McLaren now can beat depending on the track.
13:53The corners, the temperature and the weekend.
13:56Where in March none of that mattered.
13:59In our own view we don't take the we haven't got the money as proof this car is finished.
14:04Wolf may be telling it straight.
14:06And the 2027 bill is real for everyone.
14:10But it's also possible that he's bluffing.
14:12Teams in the sport control what they say for a living.
14:15And playing down what's coming is a perfectly normal thing to do when your rivals are deciding how much to
14:20spend.
14:20And Allison who's the one person that actually knows what's coming says there's meaningful
14:26performance still on the way aimed at putting them back where they were.
14:30Now the front three are covered by a tenth.
14:33Mercedes has to find about a tenth to be clearly the best car again.
14:36In a season where teams are finding half a second every two months.
14:40Which is why the next few races are the real test.
14:44Ferrari and McLaren have both shown you what their current development phase is worth.
14:47Mercedes hasn't shown anyone what's in its next one.
14:51That's the only thing left that can still change the order of the season.
14:55There's one team this video skipped though.
14:58Go back to that upgrade table.
14:59Red Bull is near the top of it.
15:0138 declared changes.
15:03A car they've rebuilt all season.
15:05And Red Bull hasn't even won a race.
15:08The engine they built from scratch came out on top when the FIA measured every power unit on the grid.
15:13Then the rules froze it.
15:15So they built the best engine in F1 and got locked out of developing it.
15:20That's the video on your screen right now.
15:22How Red Bull went from four titles to a season without a win.
15:26And what their own technical director finally admitted they've made a mistake.
15:30They actually like their continuance because they didn't want to go by.
15:31Which means they didn't want to go story in barlla so far.
15:33They just want to read it every day and they knew what they wanted to play.
Comments