Wolff admits Mercedes lacks budget to match McLaren and Ferrari's 2026 upgrade pace

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has admitted his squad “hasn’t got the money” to match the upgrade rates of McLaren and Ferrari in the 2026 Formula 1 season, with the Brackley outfit constrained by how it has already allocated its $215 million cost-cap allowance.

The admission came after McLaren’s reigning world champion Lando Norris claimed his second consecutive grand prix victory of the season at Zandvoort. Both McLaren and Ferrari have made rapid strides in recent months through sustained development pushes, turning each into multiple race winners, while Mercedes has introduced little significant new hardware since May’s Canadian Grand Prix.

“We haven’t got the money to put developments on the car,” Wolff said. “I said before that we are trying to evenly split that through the season based on our calculations of when we can bring the biggest updates and optimising the championship points. But we just can’t do what we can’t do.”

Wolff acknowledged the competitive cost of falling behind in the development race. “If you bring an upgrade, each of the top teams will have a couple of tenths in it, at least, and that’s what you lose. So, yeah, the ride has been a bit tougher than at the beginning of the year.”

When pressed on why rivals have more budget available at this stage of the season, Wolff suggested McLaren and Ferrari may be front-loading their spending. “Someone might have a different strategy in spending more at the beginning and the middle of the year than towards the end,” he said, implying Mercedes’ rivals could face their own constraints later in the campaign.

Mercedes is not expected to introduce any meaningful upgrades to the W17 until the sport’s overseas swing resumes with the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia at the start of October.

Compounding the team’s frustration is a difficult reliability record with its power unit, which Wolff estimates has cost Kimi Antonelli and George Russell somewhere between 50 and 100 points combined — losses that will also trigger grid penalties further down the line.

“Did we spend too much at the beginning and the initial development? I don’t think so,” Wolff said. “I just think we are an organisation with a certain size and infrastructure. In that respect we had a really quick car. We left between 50 and 100 points on the table due to reliability.”

The comments paint a picture of a team that entered 2026 with genuine pace but has since been outmanoeuvred in the resource allocation battle, leaving Wolff to manage expectations as the championship reaches its critical phase.