Mercedes superiority
The second weekend of the 2026 World Championship opened with another clear demonstration of superiority by Mercedes, which put six tenths on all the competition in the Sprint Qualifying of the Chinese GP.
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The first fight for pole in the Land of the Dragon has rekindled the controversies surrounding the Brackley team and especially that power unit that uses a compression ratio capable of rising to 18.0 when hot and then falling to 16.0 (and returning to the parameters required by the technical regulations) when cold. An advantage that makes the W17s fly on the track, which has had the endorsement of the FIA – an aspect that has annoyed Lewis Hamilton, according to whom the World Championship will soon be over.
Wolff’s words
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff relies precisely on the support of the Federation, teasing his rivals: “I have been in Formula 1 for too long not to know that this sport is also a matter of politics and how to make the rules advantageous for your team. I am good at this, but so are the others“, this was his comment to L’Équipe. “I think it is tiring to have someone pointing at you and snitching when you have simply done a better job. They keep going to the FIA to complain, but the FIA tells them that everything is legal. On the compression ratio, President Ben Sulayem has stated that everything is 100% legal. It is an ingenious idea, it respects the rules and has been validated by the FIA. And also on the starts we will do what the Federation says: we will continue like this and we will not complain“.
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Among those who turned to the FIA is naturally Fred Vasseur, Ferrari team principal and a great friend of the Austrian: “The job of the team principal is also to defend his men, and Fred does that too. Never mind if we clash every now and then. I have known him for a long time, he can be as stubborn as I am. It’s not fun to do it with a friend, but one day we will laugh about it. It is normal for the situation to be tense, we are fighting for a World Championship: he can say nonsense, but he remains my friend“.
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