Toto Wolff outlines future Mercedes intent to cut customer engine supply

Toto Wolff has said Mercedes plans on reducing the number of teams it supplies with its power units once the next regulation cycle rolls around.

Mercedes currently powers four of the 11 teams on the F1 grid, including the factory team, but Mercedes’ team boss and F1 CEO Toto Wolff has said this number will reduce by the time the next regulation cycle begins.

Toto Wolff: Mercedes will reduce customer team supply

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Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains (HPP) is one of the five power unit manufacturers in Formula 1, alongside Ferrari, Honda, Audi, and Red Bull Powertrains/Ford.

Fully owned by the Mercedes parent company, its power units are fitted into the back of the Mercedes team’s cars, as well as long-standing customers McLaren and Williams, while it will also power Alpine in F1 2026 after Renault pulled the plug on its own F1 engine programme.

It’s the most commonly used power unit on the grid as a result, with Ferrari units up next as the Italian manufacturer’s products can be found in the back of the factory team, as well as Haas and Cadillac (which is developing its own unit).

But while Mercedes has three customer teams for the start of the new regulation cycle, which is currently planned for a full five-year stint after talks to evaluate a switch to a V10 or V8 formula before 2030 fell apart towards the end of 2025, HPP plans on reducing the number of teams it supplies for the next ruleset.

“I think where our current mindset is, also discussing with Ola [Kallenius, Mercedes CEO], is that we will reduce the number of teams we are going to supply in the next cycle,” Wolff told the Beyond the Grid podcast.

“We don’t know whether the truth is between two and three [in total]; I guess it depends on new regulations going forward. Are they rather simple or not?

“What is it we believe we can learn by supplying more, whilst at the same time needing to lock in some designs earlier?

“When you consider how many engines we need to ship to Melbourne, for all of us, 16 engines… you know, if you’re Honda on your own, four or five.

“So that means longer lead times, longer production cycles. All of that going forward, it’s not going to be four [teams] anymore.”

At the start of a new regulation cycle, the advantage of supplying so many teams is that Mercedes will very rapidly accumulate far more testing mileage and data than a rival like Audi or Honda, both of whom will only power a single team.

But there are downsides, as HPP managing director Hywel Thomas explained.

“I think that we’ve shown in the past that having more than one team, you’re getting more data, you’re getting more information. You’re just getting more kilometres,” he said.

“Because you’ve got all those cars, you’ve got four times the engineers all sitting around telling you, ‘No, you can do this better. You can do this more this way’, and that is very, very beneficial to have all that coming at you.

“Doesn’t always feel like it, but it definitely is in terms of making a great product.

“But the flip of that is, we’ve got to make a lot of hardware. We’ve got to make a few decisions earlier.

“Not sure making those decisions earlier really hurts you sometimes, because you can run things a bit too close to the wind. I think that is the flip.

“I’m not even sure whether the right place is one team, two teams, three teams, or four teams. I’m not sure. There’s definitely a sweet spot in there somewhere. I think it’s probably nearer four than one.”

‘Mercedes HPP exists to win championships with Mercedes’

An uncomfortable truth for Mercedes is that HPP has clearly been producing world-championship level equipment, with McLaren  wrapping up comfortable Constructors’ Championship victories in 2024 and ’25, as well as powering Lando Norris to a maiden Drivers’ Championship in ’25.

Mercedes finished in second in 2025, but scored just 56 per cent of the points tally racked up by its leading customer team, with neither of its drivers able to fully join in the hunt for the title.

With Wolff referring to McLaren as the ‘enemy in the house’, Thomas outlined that the remit of HPP is not primarily to achieve success with a customer.

“What isn’t always visible to people is just how much the Mercedes PU is part of the overall Mercedes F1 entity,” he said.

“We are wholly owned by Mercedes. We exist to do one thing, and that’s to win World Championships with Mercedes.

“That’s what we talk about forever at the factory. Of course, we say it’s better to have won that championship than not, but we are absolutely part of the Mercedes team.

“I’m sitting here in Mercedes’ kit. That’s why I sit in a Mercedes garage, and it’s why the relationships with the engineering group in Brackley are so strong.”

Wolff was even firmer in his assessment of the situation, stating that “no one is interested” in the success achieved by a customer team, and that the focus of HPP is on achieving the same level of success with the factory interest.

“The raison detre for HPP is to win World Championships with the works team,” he said.

“This is Mercedes but, in order to make the economies work and also to use it as a test bench and a comparison to the works team, it’s good that we have the customer supply situation.

“There will always be a part of Hywel, and I think HPP, that is allowed to cheer for their power unit to have won a championship. The mindset that we always had is that this power unit has won a Constructors’ World Championship.

“That means our car wasn’t good enough to beat McLaren. And that’s the sheer simple fact.

“For us, being able to benchmark ourselves, you can at least take the power unit out of the equation. That’s the thing that is good enough to win a championship.

“So on the chassis side, we haven’t done that. And in that respect, there are many reasons why we do have these relationships with Williams, with McLaren, Alpine this year, to benefit from the faster development, fault fixes, the investment from the Mercedes group.

“But we are here, and Mercedes gives us this opportunity to decorate the most important shopping window to make the works team win.

“Nobody else is interested in some kind of customer success outside of our little micro cosmos. It is the Mercedes team, and then there is the McLaren team, and then there is the Williams team, and that’s something that we always bear in mind.”

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