Mercedes has the fastest car and the lead in both championships, and it is quietly worried about losing both, not to Ferrari's pace but to its own battery. A run of power-unit failures has already cost two near-certain wins, and now even Lewis Hamilton, watching from a Ferrari cockpit, expects his old team to pay a further price in grid penalties.
The damage is easy to trace. George Russell was leading in Montreal when his car simply switched off. Antonelli was running second in Barcelona with three laps left when an electrical shutdown ended his afternoon. At Silverstone a wheel-rim failure denied Antonelli another likely victory. Three weekends, three results that never reached the flag.
Toto Wolff has not hidden his frustration. "In order to finish first, first you have to finish. Reliability, this is what we need to get on top of. That's number one," the Mercedes boss said after Barcelona. The arithmetic bothers him more than the pace. "We just can't compete for a championship if every second race a car is losing fat points." He summed up the season's contradiction plainly: "Generally, we just had too many DNFs and lost two second places and now one victory." Wolff says he would trade a sliver of performance for dependability. "I'd rather dial back, a little bit, something that is really good, and fix some of the reliability gremlins, rather than running behind on performance."
Technical director James Allison has narrowed the failures to a common root. "They're not all identical, but they do sort of originate in the same broad part of the battery," he said, adding that new modules, Mercedes' term for the battery packs, should ease the problem as they phase into the racing season. He did not soften the cost. "These DNFs are very, very painful." Allison framed it as the sport's oldest trade-off. "You accept that there will be failure. We try to make sure that failure happens in testing or on rigs and that it happens as little as possible when you're out there trying to earn championship points."
The sting is in the rulebook. Each driver is limited to a fixed pool of power-unit parts for 2026, four internal combustion engines but only three of the energy-store and control-electronics components that sit at the heart of Mercedes' trouble, and burning through that pool means automatic grid penalties. Hamilton, whose Ferrari has been a model of reliability, thinks the bill is coming. "At some point there must be a penalty, I would imagine, in the sense that we only have two battery cells or something like that," he said, noting that Mercedes engines "in general have had more issues this year than they normally would have." On Ferrari's contrasting robustness he was simply "massively impressed."
The pressure bites because the title is tightening. Antonelli still leads the drivers' standings on 179 points, but his cushion has shrunk from 65 points after Monaco to around 25 over Russell, with Hamilton a further step back and closing. "We've got a close fight now with Ferrari, so it's not just Kimi and I, Lewis is still very close," Russell said. Mercedes still hold the constructors' lead, but the margin no longer looks bulletproof.
Allison's new battery modules are the fix Mercedes is banking on. Until they arrive and prove themselves, the quickest car on the grid keeps carrying a question its rivals do not: not whether it can win, but whether it can finish.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/mercedes-reliability-crisis-dnfs-penalties-shrinking-lead). Visit for full coverage.*