Mercedes reclaim Constructors' Championship: Wolff praises ‘2,500 superstars’
In the Sao Paulo drizzle, with neither silver car on the podium and Lando Norris disappearing up the road, Mercedes quietly completed one of the great rebuilds in modern sport.
Five years after their last crown and four seasons after Formula 1’s rules reset knocked them off their perch, the team are Constructors’ Champions again in 2026. Title number nine, to sit alongside a Drivers’ Championship already sealed earlier this month by Kimi Antonelli.
Toto Wolff stood in the paddock and allowed himself one emotion above all: pride.
“When you are in these difficult moments, like we all are sometimes in our lives, it's not that easy to keep going,” he reflected. Those weren’t empty words. Mercedes lived that reality from 2022 onwards.
The ground-effect regulations that arrived that season ended an era of suffocating dominance. The team that once treated titles as a habit suddenly found itself wrestling porpoising, wrong concepts and a car that refused to respond. The aura cracked. The numbers, though, never fully collapsed.
Across those four lean years, Mercedes still finished second, second, third and fourth in the standings. They still won races – seven Grands Prix shared between George Russell and Lewis Hamilton. On paper, it was a dip, not a disaster. Inside the garage, it felt like failure.
“I think those last four years were very difficult between getting it wrong, then kind of understanding why it was wrong and then realising no we didn't understand. That was a bit back and forth,” Wolff admitted. The honesty underlined how far they had strayed from their old certainties.
The pressure finally told in a different way: it forced change. Concept, structure, thinking – all ripped up and rebuilt in Brackley and Brixworth. The reward arrived with the first season of the new 2026 cars. This time, Mercedes hit the reset running.
By Brazil, the maths was done. Constructors’ title secured. Drivers’ title already in Antonelli’s hands. A double that had once looked routine, then suddenly felt distant, now reclaimed.
“It feels really good sealing those two titles,” Wolff said. “Not many sports teams have done that after consecutive run of championships, then a difficult spell and then coming back, so I'm really proud that we are part of this very small group of teams that have done that in all sports.”
On the all-time list, Mercedes now stand level with Williams on nine constructors’ crowns. Only McLaren, with 10, and Ferrari, with 16, sit above them. That kind of company tells its own story.
Wolff, though, kept dragging the spotlight away from himself and his drivers and back to the factories.
“Sometimes the drivers, or myself, we are so visible because we are in front of the TV cameras, but there's so many people that are part of this,” he told Sky Sports F1. “I always say there are not two superstars, the drivers, but there are 2,500 superstars, all of them delivering a great job, being all of us contributing to such a championship.”
Those 2,500 people built what, on average over the season, proved to be the best car in the field. They also carried the scars of those years when Mercedes were no longer the benchmark and every defeat was a reminder of what had been lost.
The irony in Interlagos was hard to miss. On the day the title was clinched, the race itself was messy. Norris dominated in mixed conditions, while both Antonelli and Russell spun. No champagne on the podium for the champions, just a fourth place for Russell and fifth for Antonelli.
And yet the mood in the garage told a different tale. Job done.
“They have done an incredible year and it's an amazing group of people, who push every day to do their best and give us the best opportunity to fight for wins and championships,” Antonelli said. “This year they have done an incredible job and that's why they deserve this championship and we will enjoy it together.”
Russell, who joined the team at the start of the troubled 2022 campaign, has ridden every bump of the journey back.
“We achieved what we came here to do and won the Constructors' Championship. We would have liked to have done it in a bit more style, but it's an incredible achievement for everyone in the team,” he said. “We've had four difficult years and the whole organisation put so much work into getting us back into this position. When I joined Mercedes in 2022, we hoped we'd be fighting for championships regularly, so to have gone through that journey and now get back to the top is something we should all be incredibly proud of.”
Wolff knows the record books will compress this saga into a neat line of results: eight straight titles, a four-year wobble, then another championship. The lived experience was anything but neat.
“When you look at the statistics, it wasn't that we were complete losers over those four years,” he said. “We won races, won many races. So it wasn't that bad at all when you look at the sheer numbers, but it felt not good.”
That feeling fuelled the response. It kept people from drifting away, kept belief alive when rivals were quicker and the solutions weren’t obvious. It turned a wounded dynasty into a hungry challenger again.
Now Mercedes stand back on the summit of Formula 1, shoulder to shoulder with Williams and staring up at McLaren and Ferrari’s tall shadows. The question is no longer whether they can come back.
It’s how long they plan on staying this time.
