Is Mercedes’ dominance coming to an end?
Toto Wolff is celebrating the strong start to the season, where his Mercedes cars have dominated the scene, achieving three pole positions and three victories, including two 1-2 finishes. The third win slipped away, likely due to the unfortunate timing of the Safety Car, which made George Russell’s race significantly more difficult. However, the Austrian team principal, balancing cautious optimism with awareness of upcoming changes, is not yet claiming victory and expects rivals to quickly close the gap, potentially reopening a championship that, for now, doesn’t seem too closely contested.
Key dates: London and Miami
The first key event to mark on the calendar is April 9, the highly anticipated London meeting that could introduce rule changes, potentially eroding some of the W17’s performance advantage. Then comes Miami, the first race after the long break caused by the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia Grands Prix, as well as the first major opportunity for all teams to launch their upgrades—likely determining the outcome of the F1 World Championship. Additionally, Ferrari eagerly awaits the ADUO system concessions, alongside new hot checks on compression ratios, set to be implemented from June.
Toto Wolff speaks
It is in relation to the Florida race that Toto Wolff has chosen to manage expectations, almost echoing the words of his friend-rival Frederic Vasseur, who in Suzuka explained that the “real championship” would start at the next GP. “Miami will be a new beginning of the season,” explains the Mercedes manager. “We will discover how the updates introduced by the teams actually work. How will we have optimized all the other systems? I think it will be exciting. Teams and drivers are beginning to understand how to optimize these systems to their advantage, and we saw the first signs of this in Japan.”
“During the first two races, we were still dominant, but at Suzuka that was no longer the case. We have always warned people about this, because we have only completed three GPs. Right now we seem like heroes, but it is entirely possible that we won’t be in three races,” Toto Wolff concluded.
This cautious outlook from the Mercedes camp suggests that the 2026 hierarchy is far from settled. While the Silver Arrows have set the pace early on, the combination of technical meetings in London and a massive wave of upgrades expected in Miami means the technical landscape could shift overnight. For F1 fans, Wolff’s comments promise a much tighter battle as the sport heads across the Atlantic, where the true strength of the W17 will be put to its most rigorous test yet.
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