Mercedes Is So Far Ahead in 2026, It's Already Building Next Year's Car

Most Formula 1 teams spend September fighting for every last point of the current season. Mercedes has quietly moved on to next year.

Team principal Toto Wolff confirmed this week that Mercedes shifted significant engineering resources toward its 2027 car well before the sport's summer break — a decision made possible by a commanding 145-point lead over Ferrari in the constructors' championship, and Kimi Antonelli's continued dominance atop the drivers' standings.

"2027 started a while ago, before the summer," Wolff told reporters after Antonelli's win at the inaugural Spanish Grand Prix in Madrid. "We switched resources into next year, and that continues as per the plan, independent of where we're standing in the championship."

The numbers behind Mercedes's current form are genuinely striking. The team has won 10 of the season's first 14 Grands Prix, a dominant run made more notable by the fact that rivals McLaren and Ferrari have continued pushing regular upgrades to their 2026 cars throughout the season, while Mercedes has largely held back. The team introduced updates at May's Canadian Grand Prix, supplemented by minor circuit-specific tweaks since, but has brought noticeably fewer new parts to the grid than its closest competitors — a deliberate trade-off, according to Wolff, in favor of getting an early jump on 2027's car development instead.

One more update is still planned for this season, though. Mercedes intends to bring a fresh suite of new parts to next month's Bahrain Grand Prix, itself being held in Malaysia this year — giving the team one final chance to extend its advantage before fully pivoting attention toward the following season.

Despite the commanding points cushion, Wolff was careful not to sound overconfident about the remaining six races. "It's a mechanical sport. You can DNF, you can crash out," he said. "And if that happens two times in a row, then suddenly what looked like a nice buffer is not there anymore, because you have six races to go." The caution reflects a team that, after years struggling through Formula 1's previous ground-effect regulation era, appears determined not to let a genuinely dominant season slip through unforced errors down the stretch.

For a sport where most competitive advantages get erased within a season or two as rivals catch up, Mercedes's early pivot to 2027 signals a team betting it can extend its current run of form well beyond just this year — even while still, technically, chasing two championships in the present one.

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