Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has described McLaren’s advantage over the other front-running teams in Formula 1 as humiliating after McLaren secured its 12th win of the season at Sunday’s Dutch Grand Prix.
Last year, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen secured the drivers’ title while Ferrari and McLaren scrapped over the constructors’ crown, leading to the belief that 2025 could be the most competitive season in years.
However, McLaren has dominated the first 15 races of the season and now leads the constructors’ standings by 324 points while Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris are in a private battle for the drivers’ crown.
The extent of McLaren’s advantage was clear at last weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix where its drivers fought over the victory until an oil leak forced Norris to retire.
Wolff pointed to the last safety car restart in Zandvoort as a clear example of the gap between McLaren and the rest of the pack as Piastri and Norris, using the slower hard compound tyres, easily pulled away from the chasing pack on faster soft tyres.
“You can see that at the end, the McLaren on the hard tyre, versus all of us on the new soft: this is a humiliation for everyone,” he said.
“You have the headline, right?”
Wolff added: “That’s really not great. I think this weekend, between Max, the Ferraris and ourselves, it’s a little bit balanced at the moment.
“Max was the quickest, but Ferrari was just the same.
“I would say that’s not satisfying.”
Wolff’s headline-grabbing quote was also put to Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur after the Dutch Grand Prix, and while he added that McLaren’s advantage was clear throughout the race and not just after the last safety car, he stopped short of describing it as humiliation.
“It’s not only the last stint, I think that if you have a look at the rest of the race, in the middle of the second stint, I don’t know if they decided to push or not, but they were also much faster than everybody,” Vasseur said.
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“I think they managed their pace in the first 10 laps of the second stint before the VSC, and when they decided to push, they were miles away.
“Clearly, they are a step ahead in quality, but much more than this in the rest. But humiliation, I won’t go so far with it.”
