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Mercedes went from six straight wins to two in six. Here's how it happened

By Kavi Khandelwal

Six races. Six wins. That was Mercedes' opening act to the 2026 season, a run so dominant it looked like the ground-effect years had never happened. Then came six more races — and only two more wins. The car that murdered every rival by 15 seconds in Melbourne is still the class of the field. It just doesn't look unbeatable anymore, and the reasons why are mechanical, developmental, and psychological all at once.

The perfect start

George Russell opened the season with victory in Australia, beating Kimi Antonelli home by under three seconds while Ferrari finished a distant third. Antonelli took over from there: China, Japan, Miami, Canada, Monaco, five wins on the trot, capped by a lights-to-flag masterclass around the streets of Monte Carlo. Six races, six Mercedes wins, two different drivers doing the winning. It was the most complete start to a season the team had produced since the turbo-hybrid glory years, and it arrived off the back of a W17 that reportedly carried a half-second advantage into round one. Then Barcelona happened, and the run simply stopped.

Where the mechanical trouble started

Antonelli was closing on Charles Leclerc's Ferrari at the Spanish Grand Prix, with Mercedes' own race software projecting he'd retake the lead inside six laps, when a power unit failure ended his afternoon. Lewis Hamilton took his maiden win for Ferrari that day. It wasn't an isolated gremlin. At Silverstone, Antonelli was hunting the race lead again when damage to a brake duct and wheel hub assembly stripped his car of downforce and handed the win to Leclerc. James Allison, Mercedes' technical director, later admitted to a "degree of frustration" over reliability that had cost the team points it otherwise would have banked comfortably. The pattern matters because it wasn't really bad luck — it was a car built right on the edge. Mercedes stole a march on engine development heading into the new regulations and had, by its own admission, front-loaded its resources: the team delayed its chassis specification freeze ahead of Australia specifically to squeeze out that early pace advantage, spending development capital that couldn't be spent again later in the year. A fast car built on a tight margin is also a fragile one, and through the middle of the season, Mercedes kept finding the edge of that margin at the worst possible moments.

Falling behind in the development race

The reliability issues were compounding a second, quieter problem: Mercedes stopped bringing upgrades at the rate its rivals did. McLaren and Ferrari brought nine and ten more updates than Mercedes across the first eleven races, according to Allison, who put his own team "one or two races behind" in the development cycle by the summer break. With wind tunnel gains running at roughly half a second every two months under the current regulations, that gap doesn't need long to become dangerous — a single strong upgrade package from a rival, Allison warned, could wipe out the championship cushion Mercedes spent the first six races building. It showed on track. Lando Norris took McLaren's first win of the season in Hungary after Mercedes simply wasn't in contention — Antonelli recovered to third from a grid penalty, but the result had nothing to do with pace. Norris then won again at Zandvoort after the summer break, this time by beating Antonelli in a straight fight. Two different circuits, two different flavours of defeat, and the same conclusion: the car that lapped the field in March was no longer doing it by default.

Starts, suspension, and cracks in the operation

Mechanical failures were the headline problem, but they weren't the only one. Antonelli's race starts became a running sore through the first half of the year — he lost a combined 26 places off the line across the opening rounds and two sprint races, including a six-place loss in the Miami sprint alone. Mercedes called it "not acceptable" at the time, and while it didn't cost him wins outright during the six-race streak, it ate into buffers that mattered once the car stopped being untouchable. Russell had his own version of the problem at Hungary, where a throttle pedal issue wrecked his start and buried him in the midfield. There were signs of a fix. Mercedes reverted to an older suspension specification for Hungary, and Russell noted the car felt more competitive again heading into the second half of the season — though by his own admission at Zandvoort, still not quite as close to the front as the team wanted. More revealing was what happened at Zandvoort itself. With Antonelli running third late in the race, Mercedes ordered Russell to move aside and let his title-leading teammate through, even though Russell was on the move and had a straightforward run at the position himself. Toto Wolff called it an easy call to make; Russell, to his credit, backed it publicly, saying Antonelli deserved to finish ahead. But team orders that clean-cut only get issued when a championship lead needs protecting rather than extending — and that alone tells you how much the picture had changed since Monaco.

What the numbers actually say

Here's the part that keeps this from being a crisis: Mercedes is still winning the war even as it loses individual battles. The team carried a 72-point constructors' lead over Ferrari into the summer break, built almost entirely off that opening six-race blitz. Antonelli's drivers' championship advantage over Hamilton stood at 50 points after Hungary and 53 after Zandvoort — numbers that dipped and steadied rather than collapsed. Antonelli remains the youngest points leader in F1 history, with six wins and ten podiums to his name through twelve rounds, an achievement that would read as a career-defining season for most drivers even before you factor in that he's not yet twenty. But the storyline for the second half of 2026 has clearly shifted. In March, the only question was how many races Mercedes would win. By August, Ferrari has a driver capable of beating them outright on his day, McLaren has closed the development gap enough to win from ahead rather than by inheritance, and Mercedes' own technical leadership is openly discussing where the next upgrade needs to land rather than how big the winning margin will be. Six straight wins built the cushion. Two wins in six nearly spent it. What happens next depends less on pace, which Mercedes still mostly has, than on whether the reliability and development issues that turned a procession into a fight get solved before someone closes the gap for good.