Mercedes’ Wolff wary that Norris and Hamilton are genuine F1 title contenders

McLaren’s Lando Norris and Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton are genuine contenders for the Formula One world championship, according to the Mercedes team principal, Toto Wolff, who watched Norris take a decisive win at the Dutch Grand Prix.

With Mercedes’ early-season dominance looking to have been all but erased, Wolff noted that there would be no quick fix for the team who could not develop at the same rate as their rivals because they had opted to use their budget differently.

Norris won the race at Zandvoort for McLaren with the team having brought several car upgrades to the meeting, beating the Mercedes’ of title leader Kimi Antonelli and George Russell into second and third. Ferrari have also moved closer to Mercedes, who won eight of the opening 12 meetings, including all of the first six.

Antonelli leads Hamilton, who was fourth in Zandvoort, and Russell by 59 points in the championship and Norris by 83. However, Wolff expected the fight to become tougher in the run-in to the title, with 11 races remaining.

He said he and Mercedes are “absolutely conscious of the threat. It’s not only Norris, it’s also Ferrari, even if you have a gap of 50 points to lose, that’s something you need to be worried about. This is going to be tough. It could become tighter, we need to do the optimal job every single weekend, every single session, every single weekend.”

Norris’s win at Zandvoort was his second in a row this season, while Ferrari have also taken two, one apiece for Hamilton and his teammate Charles Leclerc. Both teams have deployed an extensive series of upgrades while Mercedes have brought only one major development thus far, at the Canadian GP.

The teams all operate under the same budget cap and, as it stands, Mercedes are opting not to use their allocation in the same way as their rivals, who have front-loaded their upgrades early in the season.

“We haven’t got the money to put developments on account,” said Wolff. “We are trying to evenly split that through the season based on our calculations of when we can bring the biggest updates and optimising the championship points. We just can do what we can do. That’s why it is a development race. So the ride has been a bit tougher than at the beginning of the year.”

Mercedes are not expected to bring another major upgrade until the grand prix in Malaysia, branded as the Bahrain GP, in October with three races still to come before then. Ferrari are understood to be bringing their extensive engine upgrade to the next round at Monza in two weekends’ time, where the Scuderia hope to make a major step forward. Wolff confirmed that Antonelli will take a new engine at his home race in Italy and with it the attendant grid penalties.

Both Antonelli and Russell observed after the race in the Netherlands that they thought the McLaren was now the quickest car but Norris maintained that the Mercedes was still the class of the field.

“We certainly have a car now capable of beating them,” Norris said. “We didn’t win [in the sprint race] but I worked a lot on my driving. I want to believe more than everyone else and we turned things around on Sunday. So we certainly have a very similar car all in all to Mercedes but I think they have a better all-round performing car than we do.”