Toto Wolff insists Mercedes hasn’t suddenly stumbled upon some secret weapon for 2026 — and he’s genuinely baffled that the paddock is treating compression ratio like the next great engine scandal.
Speaking in Bahrain as pre-season running continued, the Mercedes boss said the team’s internal view is that the whole debate is being inflated well beyond its real-world performance value. In Wolff’s telling, what began as a dry technical detail has been dragged into the usual late-winter tug-of-war between manufacturers, with the new power unit homologation deadline now close enough for everyone to start counting millimetres and commas.
“I’m a little bit more confused in recent weeks about how it came to the point now that it suddenly became a topic,” Wolff said. “Because until last Friday, I was given the impression that things wouldn’t change.”
At the centre of it is the way the 2026 rules define compression ratio. As written, the regulations specify a maximum 16:1 ratio when measured at ambient temperatures. The chatter in the pitlane is that Mercedes has designed a solution that stays within that limit in the prescribed measurement condition, while effectively allowing the ratio to go beyond it once the power unit reaches operating temperature.
That distinction matters because the sport is now right on the cusp of locking in the new hardware. Homologation is set for March 1, and that’s why the Power Unit Advisory Committee — with all five manufacturers, plus FOM and the FIA — has the issue on its agenda. The expectation in the paddock is that the committee wants a clean answer, quickly, and one potential route being discussed is clarifying how compression ratio should be measured once the unit is up to temperature, not sitting in a theoretical “ambient” box.
Wolff has repeatedly underlined that Mercedes has been in dialogue with the FIA throughout the development of its 2026 power unit, aiming to ensure the concept is legal. What’s changed, from Mercedes’ perspective, isn’t the engineering — it’s the politics around it. Other manufacturers are understood to be pushing for either a rule tweak or, at the very least, sharper wording that would shut down any interpretation they don’t like.
And this is where Wolff’s mood was telling. He didn’t sound like a man defending an edge he can’t afford to lose; he sounded like someone irritated that an issue he sees as marginal has become a lever for rival lobbying.
In Wolff’s own estimate, even if there is a difference here, it’s small — “a couple” of horsepower. Hardly the sort of advantage that rewrites a competitive order. Yet anyone who’s spent more than a season in Formula 1 knows the size of the gain isn’t always the point. A “couple of horsepower” becomes a useful headline, a neat pressure point, a way to force the FIA into interpreting a grey area in a direction that suits you.
Wolff, to his credit, didn’t pretend to be shocked by any of that.
“You know, I’ve been here for a while, and you’re being misled, and you’re misleading all the time,” he said. “So, there is no such thing as surprises anymore.
“The wind can change suddenly… ‘I said A yesterday, but today, my opinion is B’, and that happens all the time.”
It’s classic F1: the winter testing lap times don’t matter, but the committee meetings do. What’s being argued over now isn’t just a number on a technical sheet — it’s the boundaries of interpretation for an entire regulation set that hasn’t yet raced in anger.
Wolff also made a point of saying he’ll accept whatever governance process plays out through the PUAC, and he wouldn’t be looking to take any legal route if the FIA ultimately issues a ruling that clips Mercedes’ approach. That matters because, in previous regulatory spats across the sport’s modern era, teams have occasionally reached for lawyers when they felt the goalposts moved too late.
This time, Wolff’s position is more pragmatic: if there’s a decision, Mercedes will live with it. He even joked that he’d seen an Italian report suggesting changes were coming — and that in Formula 1, once something like that is in circulation, it tends to become reality.
There’s another twist: Red Bull Powertrains is understood to have identified the same grey area Mercedes is alleged to be exploiting, and has denied switching its stance to align with other manufacturers pushing for action. That only adds to the slightly surreal feel of the argument. If more than one camp can access the same interpretation, it’s harder to sell it as a “Mercedes loophole” and easier to frame it as a drafting problem the FIA needs to tidy up.
From Mercedes’ side, the message is blunt: this was never treated as a breakthrough internally, because the team doesn’t believe it’s a meaningful differentiator. The reason it’s now dominating conversations is simpler — others have decided it should.
And that, more than any thermodynamic nuance, is the real story unfolding in Bahrain: with the 2026 era about to be signed off, the manufacturers aren’t just building engines. They’re building the rulebook they want to race under.
