Mercedes was impressed by Lando Norris‘ victory aboard the upgraded McLaren at last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, while detailing its own efforts to improve both reliability and performance.
Norris ended Mercedes’ perfect pole record during 2026 in Budapest before going on to dominate Sunday’s race for the Woking outfit’s first grand prix win of the season.
It came after McLaren fitted a redesigned floor onto the Mercedes-powered MCL40, which Mercedes discussed on its new in-house podcast, the Nu Silver Arrows Radio Show.
Mercedes’ deputy technical director Simone Resta said: “For sure, it’s a sizeable update and it must have had an impact on their performance.
“But also, if you look at the gap between their two cars, it’s significant as well. We have seen, in general, McLaren as a team that has performed well on many occasions this year with a bit of up and down between the two drivers in terms of who is the fastest one.
“We have seen some strong performances from Norris already every time this year. And maybe he was in a very good place with the car and the set-up in these conditions and tyre management and he executed very well. So I think it’s probably a combination of both aspects.”
The current season started with Mercedes domination, winning the opening six grands prix from pole, but Ferrari and McLaren have both since won races thanks to upgrades.
Now after recouping 26 points over the last three weekends, Ferrari trails championship leader Mercedes by 72 points heading into the summer break.
Despite the radically new chassis and power unit regulations providing plenty of scope for the grid to be stretched out, Resta said Mercedes had expected the competition to be as close as it has become in recent months.
“Yes, we were broadly expecting that,” the former Ferrari man said. “Clearly, you only start the season with question marks about potential other contenders, but actually it panned out as we expected.
“It’s great to see these teams developing perhaps on a very slightly different development scenario with different upgrades at different times. It’s nice to see some fluctuation of performance, which I guess is making the racing quite more interesting.”
One factor in the competition making inroads is Mercedes’ on-going power unit problems and other reliability gremlins, which has cost it numerous points over the first half of the season.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes, Isack Hadjar, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
Resta vowed the team is tackling its issues with “relentless effort”.
“I think this is as a result of the level being higher in Formula 1,” the Italian added. “You really need to squeeze out everything in every single aspect, and we are lucky we got a lot of experience in the team.
“We’ve got good processes, good tools. We just have to really keep our relentless effort in just nailing them one by one with the right prioritisation.
“Nothing emotional, just simply rationally analyse all of them, make sure we have the right fix at the right time and speed up this process. We’ll be a better team after we sort out all of this.”
Meanwhile, Mercedes is weighing up its own upgrade programme over the second half of 2026 after seeing its rivals bringing much bigger packages so far.
“Those are the conversations that are happening at the minute,” said deputy team principal Bradley Lord. “When do we bring the performance that’s in the wind tunnel or working its way through the factory at the moment?
“What races do we introduce those, where do things come with the ADUO opportunity on the power unit, with the aero upgrades on the chassis as well? And making sure we’re pacing that in the right way and not tripping ourselves up by trying to almost overreach too quickly.”
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