How the chase to catch Mercedes is unfolding

For all of its early-season Formula 1 domination, it’s nonetheless surprising that Mercedes hasn’t ventured so far up the road to be completely unassailable in both championships.  

Reliability has played a not-insignificant role in that, hindering early progress in the points tables and presenting the Silver Arrows’ rival teams with an opportunity to stay within touching distance. Mercedes lost a big chunk of points in Montreal and at Barcelona, owing to the powertrain issues suffered by George Russell and Kimi Antonelli respectively. Then there was Russell’s contentious pitlane speeding penalty in Monaco, Antonelli’s wheel hub issue at Silverstone, and the incident at the start of the Belgian Grand Prix that put Russell out on lap one. 

Yet suggesting that this is the predominant reason behind Mercedes’ inability to build a clear points break in the championship does a disservice to its nearest competitors. McLaren and Ferrari have found much more lap time with their developments than Mercedes. So too has Red Bull, although this team ultimately had more ground to make up than the other three. 

Part of this has been skewed by Mercedes’ development strategy. Rather than set a standard ‘freeze’ point for its 2026 design and wrap any subsequent developments into early-season upgrade packages, the Brackley squad elected to push the build to the latest possible point and therefore start the season in a state that, usually, wouldn’t have been available until at least April.

This bought it a clear advantage in the early rounds, at the expense of embarking upon the season with little in the pipeline for later races. Developments have since been forthcoming, but it accounts for the comparatively smaller level of progress in the first half of the year. 

It’s also not like the other teams in the ‘Big Four’ haven’t had reliability concerns either. Ferrari has been, so far, relatively lucky on that front (save for Charles Leclerc’s hydraulic issue at Barcelona), but McLaren has suffered with a handful of battery and gearbox issues across the year so far. It couldn’t get either car to the start in China, Lando Norris retired in Monaco with another battery problem, just two weeks after a gearbox issue in Canada, and Oscar Piastri had his own transmission-based retirement in Hungary.  

Max Verstappen’s Red Bull has also faced a fight against the reliability gremlins, with a cooling issue in China, a power unit problem at the start of the Monaco GP, and then a fight against his car’s straightline mode in Austria qualifying and at the end of the British GP. It’s not been plain sailing for anyone. 

As it stands, Mercedes and Antonelli remain at the top of their respective championships, and Mercedes can be confident of bringing at least one of them home whatever happens. Yet its pursuers have hope that the German manufacturer can be caught, especially as it pleads poverty and claims it cannot match the rate of development of its rivals on budgetary grounds. So, where does the opposition really stand? 

Hamilton’s Barcelona victory sprung from a moment of strategic genius. Other decisions weren’t so inspired

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

Ferrari – time to deliver on its potential

The Prancing Horse has been an interesting case thus far. Since the start of the season, Ferrari has been billed as Mercedes’ closest competitor, and the championship tables reflect that as it stands. Yet it’s currently sitting in the frustratingly uncomfortable hinterland of ‘so close, yet so far’. Comments about the team’s progress therefore remain caveated with ‘if it could just…’ or ‘it only needs…’ as it seeks to present Mercedes with a genuine challenge rather than a series of occasional frights. 

It is attempting, to its credit, to redress the balance. Ferrari’s powertrain, in pure power terms, was lacking enough for it to earn upgrade tokens from F1’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) system, and it has been willing to be proactive in spending them.

Finding advances in power through its internal combustion engine updates at the Red Bull Ring and Monza has spearheaded that progress, pushing its ‘hot engine’ concept to maximise fuel burn with a steel-alloy cylinder block. Fuel supplier Shell has also accommodated this in its own developments, aiming to assist with recovering peak power output. 

If Ferrari’s pursuit of engine performance is somewhat characteristic of its time in F1, the chassis itself also provides a logical follow-on from its previous designs in demonstrating good compliance and excellent cornering performance. By focusing on mechanical grip through the corners, Ferrari ensures that the drivers suffer little with unpredictability overall. This tends to snowball in races, where the car is less prone to sliding around and keeps the tyres relatively well protected; the results at hard-to-overtake venues are not a fair reflection of the SF-26’s strengths in race trim. 

If Ferrari can crack qualifying, it would be more likely to save Leclerc and Hamilton from losing time stuck behind other cars in the early stages of a race

Instead, it’s a reflection of Ferrari’s largest weakness so far this season: its top-end performance does not dazzle in quite the same manner as Mercedes and McLaren. Ferrari starts a weekend strongly, suggesting that its pre-weekend baseline set-ups are easy to come by but, as it moves through the qualifying sessions, its own rate of progress is not nearly as strong versus that of other teams, at least over one lap. 

Of course, much of that comes with engine power and the latest batch of PU updates has aimed to address the power deficit to the Mercedes-powered teams. If it can at least get in the same ballpark as the McLarens and Mercedes in terms of traction and straightline speed, this means it can shift its deployment strategy around slightly, and use the battery energy in other sections of a course rather than compensating for the discrepancy in engine output. 

Similarly, if Ferrari can crack qualifying, it would be more likely to save Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton from losing time stuck behind other cars in the early stages of a race. The team perhaps was over-reliant on its smaller turbo to cover this in the early stages of the year but, since that advantage has waned with the addition of the pre-start procedure and other teams getting on top of their launches, it has lacked the ability to unlock the first-lap stalemates. 

Then there’s the question of strategy. Ferrari has the occasional moments of genius (see Hamilton’s Barcelona three-stopper), which are all too often overpowered by its moments of vacillating between being too conservative (indecision with team orders at Zandvoort) or being too outlandish (stopping Hamilton under the VSC in Hungary and costing track position, plus a speeding penalty). Of course, having a car that’s a bit quicker decreases strategic variance by some magnitude. 

The McLaren-Norris combo is on a bit of a roll – the car is continuing to improve and the world champion is driving brilliantly

Photo by: Attila Kisbenedek / AFP via Getty Images

McLaren – parallels with the charge of 2024

If Ferrari’s race pace comes at the expense of top-end qualifying performance, then McLaren – by its own account – faces the opposite problem. A steady stream of developments around this year’s MCL40 has slashed the time gap to the top two teams, to the point where Norris bookended the summer break with successive poles and victories – even if, in both cases, the reigning champion made it slightly harder for himself by losing positions at the start (or rather, a standing restart at Zandvoort).

Luckily, Norris is excellent when it comes to making a strategy work, and has gathered significant tyre deltas with a light touch on the tyres to extend his stints before putting the hammer down in free air.  

And, although McLaren talks down its race pace, Norris has been able to make it work in recent rounds. Something appears to have clicked within the driver and team combination, to the point where it begins to feel familiar to his exploits in 2024. He’s driving incredibly well, the car is continuing to improve, and Mercedes is starting to feel slightly hot under the collar.  

At circuits like the Hungaroring and Zandvoort, where much of the braking is carried out in combination with turning, the McLaren seems to be relatively stable and Norris appears to enjoy throwing the car around like a go-kart. It’s not easy to scrub off the speed in those particular corners, and you need the rear end to remain settled despite the mid-braking change in direction, but it’s something that Norris seems to revel in. McLaren tends to struggle more when there’s more threshold braking involved, like at the end of a long straight when a driver is using a bit less trail to keep the car turning. 

And if McLaren is to perform a late smash-and-grab for a drivers’ title this year, it would need to back Norris to do it. Oscar Piastri is a phenomenal driver, and this was no more evident than through the opening half of 2025, but the lower-downforce properties of the 2026 machines are very much against the grain of Piastri’s strengths. Take his win at Barcelona last year, for example; on a circuit that requires a considerable amount of high-speed corner grip and commitment, the McLaren-Piastri combination was pretty irresistible and was an exhibition of their combined strengths. 

But the 2022-25 high-speed grip properties are no longer there, and team boss Andrea Stella’s theory is that Piastri is having to think more about his inputs. The driving process is no longer natural, and Piastri’s adaptation to the demands of the 2026 cars is slowing him down. “When the car has this low level of grip, like we saw last year for instance in Mexico or in Austin, he needs to adapt the way he drives, the way he thinks, the driving, his expectations,” says Stella. “And this requires a bit, I would say, of mental effort, which gets him to lose a couple of tenths of a second. 

“You sort of have to process rather than drive through pure instinct. Because what happens is what you expect. So I think it’s one of those cases in which you have to adapt your natural driving style to the demand of the car.” 

This is something that’s keeping Piastri from attaining the same high notes as Norris. He’s a smart driver and you would expect him to adapt eventually but, short-term, McLaren might require the amiable Aussie to play something of a supporting role if Norris has a shred of an opportunity to secure a second consecutive title.

Piastri is needing time to fully adapt his natural style to the 2026 car. Will he be called on to play wingman for Norris?

Photo by: Steven Tee / LAT Images via Getty Images

Red Bull – switching focus to 2027 and beyond?

If we’re talking about a potential Red Bull push against Mercedes and its top-four rivals, then it’s probably not unreasonable to say it won’t happen this year. The RB22 has come on in leaps and bounds in terms of lap time gained, having started the year barely ahead of Alpine, and has enjoyed the occasional role as the second-fastest car. This was perhaps most evident in Monaco and Austria, coinciding with chunky update packages. 

This hasn’t been sustainable, however. The development cycle means that it can wade deeper into the top eight with an upgrade package, then fall back whenever another of its nearest rivals introduces a small set of updates. 

What we know is that the FIA considers Red Bull’s own internal combustion engine to be the most powerful on the grid – both a blessing and a curse. It demonstrates the incredible job that the nascent Powertrains arm of the company has done in conjunction with Ford, but Red Bull itself disagrees and knows it needs more performance out of the electrical systems on board. When you look at the overall top end performance, however, it’s certainly at least on a par with the Mercedes.  

The problem with the RB22 is the balance seems to shift around the lap, and it’s very hard to get the car dialled in for a range of corners. At Monaco, for example, the sole corner type is low-speed, so it’s much easier to bring the car into a given window – and that’s something Red Bull was able to take advantage of.

What we know is that the FIA considers Red Bull’s own internal combustion engine to be the most powerful on the grid – both a blessing and a curse

At circuits such as Zandvoort and Shanghai, where there’s a wider range of corner profiles and a lot of combined brake-turn events, the Red Bull seems to fluctuate between oversteer and understeer, making it unpredictable. The Red Bull Ring was another circuit it performed well at; although it features those combined events, the RB22 offset those with the more direct braking approaches into the tighter corners.  

Realistically, Red Bull can’t be expected to chase Mercedes down this year. It would be reasonable to assume it will turn the development tap off, once it is guaranteed fourth in the championship and has little chance of more. Then, the focus should switch to 2027, and in understanding how to make the car approach the Mercedes in terms of all-round performance.

Even without ADUO, Red Bull has some opportunities to improve its power unit, particularly around the turbocharger, exhaust and flywheel, but would have to wait until 2028 before the MGU-K and associated elements fully open up – and the internal combustion engine would need ADUO tokens to improve.  

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the October 2026 issue and subscribe today.

The Red Bull RB22 is hard to get dialled in for a range of corner types, making it unpredictable to handle

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images