Mercedes is currently the manufacturer that supplies engines to more teams in Formula 1. In addition to the official team, the Brackley team also supplies power units to McLaren, Aston Martin and Williams.
As for the rest of the suppliers, Ferrari has its team and two clients, Alfa Romeo and Haas. Honda, although it exited F1 at the end of last season, is backing Red Bull Powertrains (the new Milton Keynes division) to make engines for the energy drink team and AlphaTauri. Alpine, for its part, is the only one that uses Renault engines.
Toto Wolff , Mercedes team principal, has told the Financial Times that due to new spending rules related to the introduction of the budget cap, Mercedes no longer earns substantial amounts from supplying engines to other teams.
Formula 1 teams are now subject to a spending limit of 140 million dollars (about 130 million euros at current exchange rates) for this season. Some of the larger teams want to extend the maximum amount due to increased transportation costs and inflation.
Precisely for this reason, Mercedes could soon reduce its customer teams, from the current three to two.
“In an ideal world, you would perhaps see Mercedes supplying engines to two customer teams, so the effort would be reduced,” said Wolff.
In fact, the Austrian manager pointed out that the engine leasing business is not “attractive and interesting”, precisely because of the limit on the amount that can be charged to customers to help smaller teams.
Wolff’s statements only increase rumors about one of the three teams supplied by Mercedes. McLaren and Williams have often been in the spotlight in recent months, because Porsche and Audi will enter F1 from 2026, when the new engine regulations come into force.
In this way, the prediction of the head of Mercedes becomes more and more concrete. The question now is: Mercedes will almost certainly lose at least one customer team in 2026. But could the dismissal of one of them come sooner?
