MPH: Why Formula 1's fastest car keeps changing hands

We’re poised at an interesting point of the year off the back of two straight McLaren victories from pole after a season which up to that point had been largely dominated by Mercedes.

As we explained in our piece on the Dutch Grand Prix, that was partly to do with the layout of the two tracks at which Lando Norris won – the Hungaroring and Zandvoort – being the best fit in the season to date with the McLaren’s lower gearing relative to the Mercedes.

Around those places, the stronger acceleration from the short gearing brings lap time reward without much of the accompanying high-speed straightline penalty. Maximum fuel flow is set by the regulation at 10,500rpm, after which it must decrease in a specified series of steps. The McLaren reaches those revs in top gear at around 180mph, the Mercedes at around 190mph. So at anything between 180 and 190mph, the McLaren will bleed lap time to the Mercedes as its fuel flow has started to decrease while that of the Merc is still increasing.

So the McLaren is going to spend a lot of the Monza lap being penalised. On the other hand, the extremely impressive high-speed corner performance of the McLaren will be shooting it out onto those straights faster from Lesmo 2 and Parabolica. At some point on each of those straights, the speeds of the two cars would be expected to converge, with the Merc then becoming increasingly faster. One car quick onto the straight, the other quick at the end, which gets down it in the shortest period of time is the crucial question.

Then bring into this equation Ferrari and its newly upgraded power unit. If the new turbo and associated changes bring it anywhere near power parity with Mercedes, to add to its great cornering performance at a better speed spread than McLaren’s, there’s a realistic chance it becomes F1’s new fastest car.

That status has been Merc’s for most of the season of course – and that it should be looking anxiously at the performance of both McLaren and Ferrari seems incongruous given the performance dominance it enjoyed at the beginning of the year. It turned up at Melbourne 0.862sec faster than the identically-powered McLaren team which had dominated ’25 and 0.809sec faster than Ferrari. The respective development programmes of these three teams are lending promise to the idea that there might be nothing between them for the balance of the season.

If we consider the season as one long straight, ironically the respective Mercedes and McLaren development profiles are inverted from their on-track performance: Mercedes quicker out the blocks but struggling the further the season goes on. Just like how the McLaren performs down the length of a straight.

But how has Mercedes lost an advantage which was initially so resounding? It has put fewer performance upgrades on its car than either McLaren or Ferrari yet the boss Toto Wolff talks of not being able to afford (within the cost cap) to put on many more, certainly not at the rate Ferrari and McLaren have been.

There are a few theories on that, but factually, before even thinking about cost cap shenanigans, we need to acknowledge that in a radically new formula such as this, the power of upgrades is immense. Mercedes F1 Technical Director James Allison recently put some numbers on it.

“These are very, very young rules… The aero gain for each week in the wind tunnel is six or seven times what it was last year; that’s half-a-second every two months… Because that curve is so steep we took a decision internally to keep developing the aero and bodywork later than we’ve ever done [before committing to manufacturing], by several weeks. There was no contingency in it. So I think we benefitted from that in the early races, because we’d emptied everything out. Other teams were maybe not as close to the wire in their approach – and so they updated sooner. So we are a bit out of phase and it would appear everyone is on the same steep slope as us in the tunnel so their upgrades are bringing a lot and being out of phase is bringing a much bigger swing than before. You can be half-a-second clear and one upgrade [by a rival] will bring that to nothing.”