Toto Wolff says a car should not break after Kimi Antonelli missed out on British Grand Prix win

Antonelli was chasing Charles Leclerc after his pitstop and catching him at a fast rate when a wheel shield broke on his W17, which made it undriveable, dropping him down the order and earning him a five-second time penalty for exceeding track limits as he struggled to control the car.

This meant the Italian was classified 16th, scoring zero points with his lead in the 2026 Formula 1 Drivers Championship going down to 25 points on teammate George Russell.

While Antonelli claimed it was tough to swallow what happened, Wolff admitted that Mercedes have failed their 19-year-old driver.

He told Sky Sports F1: "We think it happened at Turn Nine because that's when it first appeared. It's on us. A car should not break. I don't think the ride was worse than any laps before.

"He couldn't turn anymore. First, it was blocked by a carbon part. We haven't done the post-mortem for what's happened. It's just fury we have at the moment."

The Austrian was quizzed on whether Antonelli would've won had it not been for the broken part on his car; he responded: "You never know in motor racing, but we had more than a handful of laps with a second and a half more in performance.

"In any case, it would have been great to watch these two drivers [Leclerc and Antonelli] battle it out," he added.

Both Mercedes drivers, Russell and Antonelli, have had their fair share of bad luck so far in 2026, and that has been the case despite the W17 being the pick of the 2026 F1 field.

"They have both had bad luck of DNFing—Kimi now twice, George once, and the season is long," Wolff pointed out. "George just needs to continue to believe he can do it, finding those little gremlins in the car that cause him trouble at the moment.

"It's so many points," he added, discussing Mercedes' reliability problems. "If that continues to accumulate, you can only win a championship if we get this under control."

Despite being in control so far this season, Ferrari are continuously looking like a threat to Mercedes, with Leclerc's win at a track that wasn't supposed to suit the Ferrari SF-26 as proof of that.

Wolff commented: "It's a tough development race, and Ferrari have been bringing parts more than we have.

"Silverstone should have been a bogey track for them with the energy. They were thinking they would have a five or six-tenths deficit, but they were absolutely on par with us for big parts of the race.

"This is a tough fight for us," the Mercedes boss, who has been involved in a war of words with his Ferrari counterpart, Fred Vasseur, concluded.