Mercedes left Silverstone with the kind of weekend that should’ve felt like a reset. Kimi Antonelli picked up the Sprint win, the garage looked sharper than it has in recent rounds, and yet the loudest takeaway from Toto Wolff wasn’t about his own car’s upside — it was a warning about the red one.
Ferrari have now won two of the last three Grands Prix, and Wolff is convinced that isn’t a blip. Even with Mercedes’ constructors’ cushion barely dented — trimmed by a single point from 79 to 78 — he sees the Scuderia as the opponent most likely to turn this season into a proper fight.
“We need to look at ourselves,” Wolff said at Silverstone. The interesting part was what came next: the not-so-subtle dismissal of the pre-weekend narrative that Ferrari would be on the back foot in Britain because of its smaller turbo and the circuit’s appetite for power. “They said before the weekend that they were going to be lacking energy at this track. They haven’t.
“They were a strong competitor, and this is to be expected now for the rest of the season.”
For a while, 2026 was tracking exactly as the paddock’s pre-season shorthand predicted. Mercedes started like a team that had landed the new-era sweet spot early, with George Russell and Antonelli rattling off six straight wins and establishing themselves 1-2 in the drivers’ standings. The W17 has been quick enough to make clean air look inevitable.
But the season’s been messier underneath the headline results, largely because Mercedes haven’t been able to cash in every time the car’s been there. Russell “felt the brunt” of reliability trouble early on, and recently it’s been Antonelli watching big points disappear: a battery issue in Barcelona triggered a retirement, and at Silverstone a broken wheel shield turned a weekend that should’ve protected his lead into another damage-limitation exercise.
Ferrari, of course, have been the ones picking up those pieces. Lewis Hamilton won in Barcelona on what was described as an inspired strategy call, while Charles Leclerc took the British Grand Prix. And in a weekend that was supposed to expose Ferrari’s weaknesses, Leclerc was already leading when Antonelli’s Silverstone problems arrived.
That’s why Wolff’s tone matters. A team boss doesn’t publicly reframe the opposition unless he believes the trend is real — and because the constructors’ swing has been so small, it also reads as an acknowledgement that the vulnerable point for Mercedes isn’t necessarily Sundays as a team, but the title complexion at the sharp end of the drivers’ table.
That’s where the pressure has crept in. Antonelli still leads, but the margin has been cut to 25 points over Russell. Behind them, the Ferraris are close enough to start influencing how Mercedes have to race: Hamilton sits 32 points off Antonelli, with Leclerc a further 39 behind.
Antonelli, for his part, sounded like someone treating the last three races as provocation rather than panic. “We lost a lot of points, but the momentum is there,” he said. “I think this weekend we showed the speed, and we showed as well, what the potential can be.
“When I’m in a good place, when you know also we’re in a good place with a team with a car, we showed what we are capable of, so I think that the momentum is still there.
“Actually it makes the fire grow even more, to go out there at Spa and try to do even better.”
It’s a familiar mindset for a championship leader who’s had their advantage interrupted by things they couldn’t drive around. Antonelli’s message was essentially: the ceiling hasn’t changed, only the recent scoreline has. The Sprint win — importantly, ahead of Hamilton — backed that up.
Russell, though, framed it differently. He insisted he isn’t thinking about Ferrari at all, which is exactly the sort of thing drivers say when the bigger picture is starting to move faster than they’d like. “I’m not even thinking about it, to be honest, because I’ve got my own things I need to deal with and improve upon on my own side,” he said.
The numbers tell the story he’s leaning on. “I left Monaco three races ago 68 points behind and I leave here 25 points behind,” Russell added. “So yeah, I would take it, but it won’t continue like that forever unless the results, the performance, gets better.”
That last line is the key. Russell’s comeback has been real, but it’s also been helped by Mercedes leaving points on the table at precisely the wrong moments — and Ferrari being ruthless when the door opens. If Wolff is right and Ferrari’s Silverstone pace wasn’t circuit-specific, then Spa becomes less about who’s quickest in a straight line and more about who can string together a clean weekend without handing the other side a free narrative.
Mercedes still lead both championships. They’re still the benchmark on outright form often enough. But the last three races have shifted the feel of the season: Ferrari aren’t chasing miracles anymore, they’re just waiting for the next Mercedes complication — and, lately, they’ve been getting it.
