Mercedes won’t give up on F1 2025 to get a head start for F1’s new rules
“But I'd like to take it from Niki's motto, when being asked. ‘Would you rather win this one or the next one?’ And he says, ‘Both.’"
Toto Wolff has confirmed Mercedes won’t give up on their hopes in 2025 to get a head start on the new F1 rules in 2026.
Mercedes have endured an up-and-down campaign this year.
Ahead of the summer break, they were the in-form team, winning three of the four races ahead of the shutdown.
However, since Zandvoort, Mercedes haven’t competed at the front, falling back behind Ferrari in the pecking order.
2025 will be the final year of these current regulations, with entirely new rules introduced 12 months later.
In a bid to start 2026 strongly, some teams might opt to abandon focusing on the year before.
Wolff has categorically ruled this out for Mercedes, with the Austrian eyeing title success in both seasons.
“This is the crux of the matter every year, and especially if you have such a big regulatory change, are you going to compromise one year or the other?” Wolff told Autosport.
“But I'd like to take it from Niki's motto, when being asked. ‘Would you rather win this one or the next one?’ And he says, ‘Both.’
“Sometimes it is much less complex than one thinks. Probably the transition of people and capability into the 2026 regulations is going to happen a bit earlier than it would under stable regulations, but it's not going to be game-changing.
“Nobody's going to switch the machines off in January, unless you are really nowhere. But there is nothing to gain, because between P10 and P7 doesn't make a difference for us anyway. We are fighting for victories and podiums, and cannot write it off.”
Mercedes’ inconsistencies aren’t strange at the front of the field though with Ferrari and Red Bull also facing similar troubles.
Wolff conceded it was difficult to understand the lack of consistency in performance between teams besides McLaren.
“This variance in performance from race to race, or over a few races, is very difficult to compute, because what looks like an unchanged car can go from race winning to P6,” he added.
“The only team that is not a victim of that is McLaren, who I think have such a solid baseline and a less narrow window than all of us, that they're able to keep the performance stable.
“All of the others bounce between exuberance and depression. Before the summer, everyone wrote off Ferrari. But they have come back very strong.
“Before the summer, it was Mercedes who was the leading team, and clearly not today anymore. So it is so intricate to identify those performance contributors that at times even that most clever people are lost.”
