Mercedes intends to reduce the number of Formula 1 teams to which it supplies power units, according to CEO and co-owner Toto Wolff.

Besides Mercedes’ works F1 team, its power units were also used by world championship McLaren plus Williams and Aston Martin this year. Aston Martin will switch to using Honda power units next season and Alpine will take up its supply of Mercedes engines.

All three of Mercedes’ customer teams have deals to use their engines until 2030. However Wolff says he and Mercedes chairman Ola Kallenius have discussed scaling back the number of teams which use its power units after Formula 1 introduces its new engine formula next year.

“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,” he told the official Formula 1 channel. He said the optimum number of teams is likely to be “between two and three, I guess.”

“It depends on new regulations going forward,” said Wolff. “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?”

Supplying a total of four teams means Mercedes will have to bring a total of 16 power units to the first race of next season.

“If you’re Honda on your own [it will be] four or five. So that means longer lead times, longer production cycles.

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“So [considering] all of that, going forward, it’s not going to be four anymore.”

Mercedes produced by far the most successful power units of the V6 hybrid turbo era, which ended this year. Their engines powered McLaren to victory in the constructors’ championship for the second season in a row this year, while Mercedes won eight in a row from 2014 to 2021.

Hywel Thomas, the managing director of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, said there are benefits and downsides to supplying multiple F1 teams.

“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 said. “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, 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. We’ve got to, you know, 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.”

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