Lewis Hamilton sent early threat by Toto Wolff as Brit turns from friend to foe

Lewis Hamilton will race against Mercedes for the first time in 13 years when he joins up with Ferrari.

Lewis Hamilton has been warned that Mercedes will be a strong competitor when he moves to Ferrari at the end of the season. Toto Wolff’s squad have no plans to ease up their development path to focus on the 2026 regulations period.

Hamilton made the decision to join Ferrari before the season had started, but Mercedes’ early woes would have only made the decision seem more timely. The Silver Arrows were forced to wait until the ninth race of the year to claim their first podium finish of 2024.

However, since then Mercedes have made significant progress, winning three races before the summer break and establishing themselves as sporadic threats to McLaren and Red Bull in the fight for race victories. Team principal Wolff expects that this trajectory will continue into 2025.

“This is the crux of the matter every year, and especially if you have such a big regulatory change, are you going to compromise one year or the other?” he told Autosport. “But I’d like to take it from Niki’s [Lauda] motto, when being asked. ‘Would you rather win this one or the next one?’ And he says, ‘Both.’

“Sometimes it is much less complex than one thinks. Probably the transition of people and capability into the 2026 regulations is going to happen a bit earlier than it would under stable regulations, but it’s not going to be game-changing.

“Nobody’s going to switch the machines off in January unless you are really nowhere. But there is nothing to gain because between P10 and P7 doesn’t make a difference for us anyway. We are fighting for victories and podiums, and cannot write it off.”

The prevailing sentiment in F1 is that the Silver Arrows will up for it when the 2026 specifications come into effect given Mercedes’ rampant engine production. Mercedes power unit was the key as they came out victorious in the turbo-hybrid era; The first hint of their latest offering sounds positive.

“I believe that Mercedes had done an excellent job which is why I was more than pleased to agree to sign up for an extension to it,” Williams team principal James Vowles added to the Beyond the Grid podcast.

“And I think you’re going to see differences in power units that don’t exist.” It is apparent that today virtually all power units are similar to one another. That, I believe, will change in 2026 and there will be a variation between the power units. I do not think it will be the levels you saw in 2014 where there was such a great divergence between the field.”