Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has questioned how Ferrari has been able to bring so many upgrades to its car this year while staying on track to remain within Formula 1’s budget cap.
Mercedes has made the strongest start under F1’s new regulations in 2026, winning seven of the opening eight races while leading both the constructors’ and drivers’ championships.
Ferrari is the only other team to win a race this year -- at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix last month -- and did so after bringing its second significant upgrade package of the season.
F1’s budget cap is designed to limit spending on car development to create a more level playing field between the sport’s biggest teams and its smaller outfits.
Ahead of each race weekend, teams must declare aerodynamic upgrades to the FIA, which are then published to the media.
This year, Ferrari has declared 32 individual upgrades, including two big packages in Miami and Spain, while Mercedes has only brought 17, with a major upgrade added to the car in Canada.
Although the number of declared upgrades may not correlate directly with money spent on development and production of the parts, Wolff doubts Ferrari can keep up its rate of development without going over the budget cap.
“We’re a little bit surprised that Ferrari can throw these huge updates at the car in the way they do,” Wolff said. “In my opinion, they need to be running out of money soon -- cost cap money -- because we can’t do that.
“We’re simply lacking the buffer and the cost cap to be able to bring so many parts in the way they do. So hopefully that’s going to change towards the end of the season when they won’t be able to bring any parts anymore. At least, let’s say, the logic would say that and we’re going to come up with more.
“The only ones who are not slowing down is Ferrari. For ourselves, you can see we had one big one that we introduced in Montreal. We have small parts that come in between. I think the same for Red Bull and McLaren. It’s just Ferrari, who seems to be limitless in that way.”
By comparison to Ferrari and Mercedes, McLaren has declared 26 upgrades this year, including a big two-stage package in Miami and Canada, while Red Bull has brought 31 upgrades, including big steps in Austria and Miami.
Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies admitted his team has front-loaded its car development this year and expects the rate of new upgrades to tail off in the second half of the year.
“For us, we look at how difficult the start of the ’26 campaign has been, we’ve decided to make the big push as early as we could from an engineering and engineering resource perspective,” Mekies said. “So yes, we have invested a large amount of our development capabilities to try to diminish that gap as early as we could.
“We would like to hope that things will slow down for certainly most of the top teams in the second part, but we may have some surprises. We are very large organisations now, very different structures.
“So, let’s see who is investing early on next year, who is investing a bit more this year, and who has managed to somehow unlock a bit more capacity.”
- British Grand Prix 2026: Race start time, how to watch, full schedule, predictions- George Russell’s breakthrough, Ferrari’s setback as F1 title race shifts again at Austrian GP- Max Verstappen ‘started laughing’ after Silverstone simulator runs: ‘Felt like a different track’
New chassis and aerodynamic regulations were introduced at the start of this year, creating more headroom for each upgrade package to deliver significant performance gains during the season.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella believes his team is “at least two months” behind its rivals, and expects the 2026 development race to be more competitive than ever.
“I think what we see in 2026 is a Formula 1 operating at a level that has never been the case before. If we see the upgrades that Red Bull did [in Austria], they are quite voluminous, so the overall gain in terms of pure performance development, but also performance delivery at the track, is to a higher level than I have every seen before,” Stella said.
“These are the conversations we are having internally and we need to make sure that at McLaren we can, if possible, out develop and out deliver our competitors, and this will allow us to close the gap.”
