Mercedes winning the constructors championship isn’t the stuff of headlines. It’s the stuff of bottom lines.
The teams title is where the prize money is handed out — close to $15 million per position. F1 employment contracts also tend to pay out bonuses based on championship finishing position.
So you can understand why Mercedes has remained fully focused this week.
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This championship, coming after four years of underperformance behind Red Bull Racing and then McLaren, is historic.
This is Mercedes’s ninth championship, equalling Williams for third on the title leaderboard and putting it just one short of McLaren for second. Ferrari remains on top, with 16 constructors titles.
All nine of Mercedes’s titles have come under the stewardship of team principal Toto Wolff.
That draws Wolff level with the great Frank Williams, founder, leader and owner of his eponymous team until it was sold to Dorilton Capital in 2020.
Wolff knew Williams well, having been a shareholder before joining Mercedes.
“I can’t really grasp it, because I will never be able to reach what Frank has done in his life,” he told Sky Sports. “It’s not only about numbers of titles but also how great of a man he was, how much resilience he had.
“Frank Williams is just in a different galaxy to me. He’s a man that I admire so much.”
The alternative count of a successful team boss is the combined championship count — the total tally of constructors and drivers titles.
Achieving the title double this season brings Wolff to a combined 17 championships, equalling Ron Dennis at the top of the leaderboard.
Dennis, synonymous with the modern McLaren era, claimed seven constructors titles and 10 drivers titles in his time running the team.
Wolff’s statistics are all the more impressive for having been racked up in just 13 seasons, since 2014.
But he doesn’t see this as being the beginning of a new dynasty like the team’s eight years of dominance in 2014–21.
“I don’t think in this day and age, with the professionalism that the teams have, you could replicate what we did with eight championships in a row,” he said.
“You can see how tough it was today. There are three or four teams that will be competing for a championship next year, and it could go either way.”
Certainly McLaren wants to see it that way.
NORRIS SEIZES ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO GIVE MCLAREN SOME 2027 MOMENTUM
Lando Norris won from pole, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
He lost the lead to Antonelli at the start, and then he dropped to third when a fantastically opportunistic Liam Lawson swept around his outside at the first turn.
But with the exception of the first lap, Norris didn’t put a foot wrong in tricky conditions that started wet, dried and got wet again, all with the track temperature stubbornly low, keeping the surface slippery.
He kept close enough to Antonelli after barging past Lawson to remain in contention, and he judged the crossover point from wet to dry perfectly to slash his deficit to less than a second.
Pressure applied at the first turn forced Antonelli into a mistake — although a Mercedes car problem appeared to contribute to his spin — and then built a comfortable buffer from there.
Norris had been worried after taking pole that McLaren wouldn’t have the pace in the dry, but this was the decisive phase of the race. By the time the rain returned, his gap was 10s.
A clean pit stop for inters guaranteed the lead was unbeatable, and he secured a comfortable third victory of the season.
“The main thing today was I just kept it cool and I didn’t make any mistakes,” he said. “I had the pace when I needed to, so it was good.
“This weekend we had an opportunity to get pole yesterday and we had an opportunity to win, and I feel like most times this year, when there’s been an opportunity, I’ve gone for it and we’ve been able to achieve it.”
You can’t deny that’s the case.
When McLaren brought its significant upgrade package in the middle of the year, Norris made the most of it, taking three poles in four grands prix, two of which he converted to victory.
McLaren brought another step to Brazil this weekend, and Norris again stepped up, winning from pole.
It’s not the title defence he wanted, but it could be crucial momentum for a strong start to next season.
Oscar Piastri hasn’t found himself so easily able to capitalise, though in Brazil a sixth-place finish undersold his pace somewhat.
Piastri was in decent form, particularly through the middle stints, and he would have caught and passed George Russell by the end of the race before the rain returned.
“Honestly, it feels like the day went pretty well — but I was hoping we’d be a little bit higher,” he said after finishing sixth.
“Still things to work on, but once I got up to speed after the first few laps, honestly I think the pace was very strong.
“That’s positive. It’s been a while since I’ve been genuinely able to say that.
“In the race today I think the pace was good once we were up and running, but it just took a little bit of time to get there.
“Just need to polish up a few things and start a bit higher up and hopefully we’ll be in the mix.”
REMARKABLE VERSTAPPEN RECOVERY
There was a moment early in the race where it seemed like Norris was destined to be overpowered by another Verstappen Brazil masterclass.
The Dutchman started the race in the 21st grid spot — though Valtteri Bottas was wheeled off the grid, leaving him a net 20th — but he was up to 13th at the end of the first lap and into the top six by the end of lap 10.
Up to fifth at the switch from inters to slicks and in third place shortly afterwards, his victory chances seemed impossible to ignore.
It would be par for the course, really.
Verstappen has won this race from 17th on the grid in 2024 — though it was net 15th after two drivers ahead failed to take the start.
Last year he finished the race third after starting from the pit lane.
But his momentum was halted by that very 2026-spec Red Bull Racing problem of random and unexpected missing performance.
“As soon as I switched to the slicks, I had an extreme amount of oversteer in the car in the high-speed corners, which made it super difficult to drive,” he said. “We need to understand if something broke on the car, some kind of aero loss or whatever, because this was not normal.
“Even when I switched back to the inter tyres at the end, the car was night and day different to my first stint, which shows that there is something wrong.
“I sit here of course very happy with second, but at the same time, I know there was more in it if the car had been in good shape. Unfortunately that was not the case.”
Had it not been for his mysterious car problem, we could so easily have been talking about the year’s biggest comeback, eclipsing even Antonelli’s 19th-to-first performance in Monza — and that was the second biggest come-from-behind win in Formula 1 history.
Even without the win, however, this was just the latest in a growing line of outstanding Verstappen performances at a circuit he clearly just clicks with.
“Next year I’d love to start a bit further up front instead of starting from the back or the pit lane,” he said.
WHY COULDN’T FERRARI FOLLOW?
Verstappen’s first-lap on-board is essential viewing — but Hamilton’s start was even better.
The Briton sliced through the midfield so fast that he’s up to ninth at the end of the first lap.
Well ahead of Verstappen and already past teammate Charles Leclerc, at that point a Hamilton podium looked highly likely.
But ninth was as good as it got.
Immediately he began sliding backwards, all the way down to 14th.
“We had a great start, but unfortunately the rear tyres just ballooned and overheated, and I struggled,” he told Sky Sports.
Hamilton correctly predicted the crossover point for slicks, the gains from which got him back to ninth, but again his tyres wore heavily, and he was the first to stop for another set of slicks.
The only other time he looked competitive was when the rain arrived with around 10 laps to go — but that was also his undoing.
“The last message I got was it was going to stay as drizzle,” he said. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is my moment to keep pushing’, because I could stay in those conditions.
“I didn’t hear that it was raining more in the first sector.”
It meant he stayed out one lap too long before switching to intermediates — and he spun his car on the run up the hill, miraculously avoiding damage.
The net result? Ninth place — a long and eventful race to finish where he ended the first lap.
Leclerc was similarly muted for much of the race, finishing seventh but demoted back to eighth for hitting Lawson.
More had been expected from Ferrari this weekend, but the car never really looked like it got in the window — something teammate boss Fred Vasseur suggested was down to a change in approach knowing both drivers would be starting out of position.
“The pace could have been much better with the car that we have,” he said, denying it was a track-specific underperformance. “But knowing that we had the penalty, we approached quali a bit differently, and in the race we started in the back, but the pace was far too inconsistent.”
The quest to end the season with momentum just hit an unexpected speed bump.
LAWSON CONTINUES TO EXCEL DESPITE CONTRACT DELAY
The Red Bull driver program has historically been a sink-or-swim situation. Its former overlord, Helmut Marko, was a big believer in pressure making diamonds, and more than a few drivers have been thrown onto the Red Bull scrap heap for not rearranging their carbon molecules with sufficient speed.
One of the ways Marko would apply pressure was simply by wielding the axe. If a driver couldn’t rise to the occasion of feeling as though their career could be ended at any moment, then they weren’t made of the right stuff.
What, then, should we make of Liam Lawson?
The Kiwi has performed extremely strongly all season — and as the threat of him losing his seat has escalated, he’s found an even higher level.
In Brazil he qualified a season-best fifth, started an equal career high third and came home seventh, scoring six more valuable points for Racing Bulls and all but sealing the team into its first-ever fifth place in the constructors championship.
Had the race remained wet, it’s a decent bet that he would’ve finished higher than just at the head of the midfield — though he was classified ahead of both Ferrari drivers, a notable achievement.
“To be honest, I actually thought at some point I might try and take Kimi through the (first) lap!” he said. “But once the pace stabilises, we don’t really have the speed to fight them, and we started to fall back.
“Where I could today I tried to fight with those guys. It was good fun.”
He’s scored at all but five grands prix, and he’s currently on a five-race scoring streak, while teammate Arvid Lindblad has picked up just one point in that same run of races.
Lindblad hasn’t closed in on him in qualifying, and the gap between their performances is growing wider in race trim.
To paraphrase Lawson on Thursday, what more does he need to do to justify a new contract?
“I’m trying every weekend,” he said. “Honestly, I’m just trying to enjoy driving at the moment. The car’s in a great place. The fact that we’re fighting Ferraris and McLarens and Mercedes at different points in the race today is obviously cool.”
There’s some suggestion a call will be made before the next race in Las Vegas — before Nikola Tsolov, the would-be successor, will have a chance to beat Rafael Câmara to the Formula 2 title in Qatar and Abu Dhabi.
There will be options for Tsolov either way — either another season in F2 or a year in Japan’s Super Formula.
How Racing Bulls would sell dropping Lawson, one of the year’s standout performers, is more difficult to imagine.
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