Mercedes Formula 1 team principal and CEO Toto Wolff has reflected on the 2025 season, admitting that walking away with second place in the constructors’ championship has left him in “two minds”.
The Brackley outfit fought off Ferrari and Red Bull for P2 in the standings after McLaren clinched the title at the Singapore Grand Prix.
While Wolff was able to see the positives, he also noted that when he looks back at the last 10 years, the performance was not good enough.
“I’m a little bit in two minds, because in 10 years, you look back at the stats and you can see a vice-world champion, P2 but the reality is that we didn’t achieve our goals,” he said during a team debrief video.
“We want to win. We want to win races. We want to be in the hunt for a world championship and hopefully win. And we didn’t. And that is the pain of the moment that it just wasn’t good enough.”
Russell, who finished fourth in the drivers’ championship with 319 points, was joined in 2025 by rookie driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who replaced Lewis Hamilton at the start of the year after the seven-time champion decided to move to Ferrari. The Italian driver secured seventh in the drivers’ standings with 150 points in his first season.
George Russell, Mercedes, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
Mercedes clinched eight consecutive constructors’ championship titles from 2014 to 2021 and seven drivers’ titles during the same time frame with both Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. But as the ground effect era was introduced in 2022, the Wolff-led team struggled to find a dominant package in comparison to Red Bull at the start of the new era and McLaren in the latter two seasons.Â
The German squad now looks ahead to 2026 when a new wave of regulations is set to be introduced.
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