Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff has warned against taking a “baseball bat” to Formula 1’s controversial 2026 technical regulations, saying he expects Monday’s crunch meeting on the rules to end with targeted changes to improve the spectacle.
Mercedes has won all three grands prix under F1’s new regulations, which have attracted extensive criticism from drivers and raised safety concerns following Oliver Bearman’s heavy accident at the Japanese Grand Prix.
Team bosses are meeting with F1 officials and the sport’s governing body, the FIA, on Monday to decide on tweaks to the rules to address safety concerns and improve the qualifying spectacle.
Wolff, who will attend the meeting on behalf of Mercedes, is confident the sport will be able to agree on minor improvements without needing to overhaul the rules.
“I must really say that the discussions that have been taking place between the group of drivers, the FIA, Formula 1, and the teams have been constructive,” Wolff said during a news conference on Monday.
“We all share the same objectives. How can we improve the product, make it out-and-out racing and look at what can improve in terms of safety, but act with a scalpel and not with a baseball bat.
“So I think we’re coming to good solutions that we’re going to ratify hopefully today in order to evolve. Because it’s only three races in and in a way we need to learn from the past where sometimes decisions were made in an erratic way and then we overshot and realised it wasn’t good.
“Because we are custodians of this sport and in that respect I am carefully optimistic that we’ll align the aforementioned objectives whilst keeping the racing really good.”
It is not yet clear how changes to the regulations, which are expected to focus on the power unit’s use and recovery of electrical energy, will impact the competitive order.
Smaller changes will likely help protect Mercedes’ early season advantage, but Wolff said all competitors have a duty not to play politics over the topic of rule changes.
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“We all — the drivers, the FIA, Formula 1 and the teams — we need to understand our responsibility as the guardians of this sport,” he said. “And we need to respect what the sport has done for us and work constructively among ourselves to improve where things need to be improved and safeguard when it’s needed.
“And we all have our opinions and that’s absolutely legit. But these opinions and discussions should happen among the stakeholders more than in the public eye because the sport is in a great place. And we have many hundreds of thousands of fans that love the sport.
“There are others that don’t love certain aspects of the sport. But in order to protect all of this huge opportunity that the sport gives us, we shouldn’t badmouth our own sport in public. And we’ve been all falling foul to this in the past because of gamesmanship or because of trying to protect a situation or improve a regulatory situation.
“But we need to be very careful because the things we say in public, they may not have an immediate repercussion on how the fans perceive the sport. But that comes with a lag, and that is the responsibility we have.
“Of course, everybody is entitled to have an opinion. But I think we owe it to ourselves to express that opinion in the stakeholder groups. Now, this has happened in the last few weeks in a constructive way.
“We have set our objectives in the way that we want to improve, where we believe it improves. We want to look after the safety of the drivers. And we want to protect what we see in racing.”
