Toto Wolff admits that Mercedes is set to reduce the number of teams it supplies its engines to.
It currently supplies McLaren, Aston Martin and Williams, next season the German manufacturer will supply Alpine also whilst Aston Martin switches to Honda.
“Our current mindset is, also discussing with Ola, that we will reduce the amount of teams we’re going to supply in the next cycle,” says Wolff in the latest Beyond the Grid podcast, referring to Mercedes chairman, Ola Kallenius.
“It depends on new regulations going forward,” he added, having revealed that the company is looking to supply “between two and three” teams. “Are they rather simple or not? What is it we believe we can learn by supplying more teams whilst at the same time needing to lock in some designs earlier?”
Pointing out that in supplying only Aston Martin, Honda merely takes a handful of engines to Australia for the season opener, Mercedes is looking at taking sixteen.
“That means longer lead times, longer production cycles,” says Wolff. “So, considering all of that, going forward, it’s not going to be four (teams) anymore.”
Since the introduction of the hybrid era in 2014, Mercedes has powered cars to victory in 140 of the 252 races (55.6%), compared to Honda (72 wins, 28.6%), Ferrari (24 wins, 9.5%) and Renault (16 wins, 6.3%).
Between 2014 and 2021 Mercedes won eight consecutive constructors’ titles, though for the last two years it has had to look on as McLaren used its power units to claim the title.
Hywel Thomas, MD of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, believes that supplying as many as four teams has its benefits but that there are also negatives.
“We’ve shown in the past that having more than one team means you’re getting more data, you’re getting more information, you’re covering more kilometres,” he says. “Just because you’ve got all those cars, you’ve got four times the engineers all sitting around telling you ‘no, you can do this better, you can do this more this way’, and that is very, very beneficial to have all that coming at you.
“It doesn’t always feel like it,” he admits, “but it definitely is in terms of making a great product.
“But the flip of that is we’ve got to make a lot of hardware,” he continues. “And we have got to make a few decisions earlier.
“I’m not sure, making those decisions earlier really hurts you sometimes because you can run things a bit too close to the wind, I think. That is the flip.
“I’m not even sure whether the right place is one team, two teams, three teams, four teams… I’m not sure. There’s definitely a sweet spot in there somewhere and I think it’s probably nearer four than one.”