Toto Wolff carrying same mindset into F1 2026 of seeing things glass half-empty, as he pins on doing all they can to be able to fight for championship.
After McLaren managed to go from last to first in a space of few seasons, even beating its provider Mercedes, the pressure is on the German manufacturer to deliver under new regulations in F1 2026. The factory team didn’t read the previous regulation right, the one that started in 2022.
They faltered which allowed McLaren and Red Bull to prosper. But with a fresh start in 2026, there is a chance to make a comeback and reports link the Mercedes power unit to be the best of the lot from the onset. Wolff, though, is not getting ahead of things just yet.
He is carrying the same mindset of seeing things from glass half-empty mindset. He highlights that the team is doing all they can and it is a collective effort in the end, which is what worked for McLaren after they roped in new people and got things right in their attempt to read the regulations better.
“Only the future will show,” said Wolff to media, when asked if they have everything in place to return to the top, as did McLaren in the last few seasons. “It’s very easy. People tend to try to pin it down to a single factor and that was determined to or was the basis for more success or more failure. Whether it’s someone new in the management, the team principal or technical director, head of aero or lots of geniuses or not geniuses that have come and changed the destiny of the team.
“But fundamentally it’s a group of people working together and taking the right decisions collectively, based on the right set of data, with the right infrastructure, with the most correlation between the virtual world and the real, because that is with all the limitations we have, that’s why you find out about your car and if that doesn’t represent the reality once you put it on the road, that’s the biggest risk for any team.
“I’m never confident. I’m a glass half-empty person. So we just do everything we can that is in our power to come out with a car, with a power unit that is competitive enough to fight for a world championship,” summed up Wolff, for whom this regulations will be a test, if he can help Mercedes return to the top again and win world championships.
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