'We haven't got the money' - Wolff says Mercedes can't match rivals' upgrade rate

Mercedes' team principal suggests the championship leaders don't have the spending leeway in their approach to 2026's budget cap to immediately counter rivals' currently more regular car updates; watch the Italian Grand Prix at Monza live on Sky Sports F1 on September 4-6

Toto Wolff says Mercedes do not have extra money available to quickly respond to the growing threat from McLaren and Ferrari through car development.

The Silver Arrows continue to lead both world championship races, and grew their leads in both standings across the Dutch Grand Prix Sprint weekend, but have seen their early-season dominance eroded in recent months.

After winning the opening six rounds of F1's new rules era, Mercedes have won two races in the last six, the same number as Ferrari and McLaren.

McLaren have taken the last two wins after upgrades to their car at each of the last two events, while Mercedes have brought only smaller revisions to their W17 since its last big update at the Canadian GP in late May.

All teams operate to a yearly budget cap governing car spend, which for 2026 was raised to $215m due to the huge change in regulations, and have to decide how they each allocate spend on car development through the season.

Wolff suggested Mercedes' approach to the full year meant they could not accelerate any upgrades - or bring more - to their W17 earlier than already scheduled to counter what their chief rivals were doing.

"And I said it 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 do what we can do. That's why it is a development race. If you bring an update, each of the top teams will have a couple of tenths in it, at least, and that's what we lose.

Put to him that Ferrari and McLaren seemed to have the money, Wolff said: "You will see towards the end of the season whether they are going to be able to deploy as much stuff on to the car as they do now.

"Someone might have a different strategy in spending more at the beginning and then in the middle of the year than towards the end."

Wolff did not explicitly state why Mercedes were not able to match their rivals' current rate of bringing upgrades to the track.

He was asked whether they had forward-loaded their development spend to ensure they had started the season and F1's new era of rules most strongly.

They won all six of the opening races - and have still remained a victory contender at most other rounds too - although reliability problems proved costly over the first half of the campaign with the loss of likely big points alone through driver retirements in Montreal, Barcelona and Silverstone.