Toto Wolff reminded of infamous F1 event which is terrible news for Lando Norris

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff conceded Lando Norris’ heartbreaking Dutch Grand Prix DNF reminded him of Lewis Hamilton’s infamous 2016 Malaysia engine failure.

Norris retired from the race at Zandvoort with seven laps remaining due to an engine-related issue.

It’s a decisive blow to Norris’ title chances as teammate Oscar Piastri clinched his seventh victory of the 2025 F1 season.

Norris now sits 34 points behind Piastri with nine rounds remaining.

It’s the first intra-team title battle since 2016, when Mercedes saw Hamilton and Nico Rosberg go head-to-head.

Rosberg ultimately won the title, mainly due to a timely engine failure for Hamilton at the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix.

Hamilton was on course for a dominant victory, but his engine went up in flames, effectively costing him the title.

Toto Wolff has bad news for Lando Norris

Speaking to media, including Crash.net at Zandvoort, Wolff was asked about Norris’ failure and the parallels to Hamilton’s DNF in 2016.

“Like you say, Lewis in Malaysia with a failure cost him 25 points. That’s a bit of what I saw today,” Wolff explained.

“The difference is maybe that there’s nine races left so 225 points to collect. Certainly a blow to the championship but not impossible. It’s tough.”

Mercedes have struggled with reliability issues this year across their customer teams.

Wolff said that there's been no clear correlation between the various issues.

“No, they have been different,” he added. “In their case we don’t know if it was a pure chassis failure yet. We know it was a oil leak but independent of that, it’s a pity when you lose a car or when a car DNFs that’s fighting for a championship in such close circumstances.

“Independent whether that car didn’t have any failures or team have any failures.”

“Tough” for my relationship with Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton lost the title despite winning four races in a row at the end of the year.

The British driver was unhappy about the number of engine-related issues on his side of the garage.

Wolff conceded that it put a strain on his relationship with Hamilton.

“Super difficult because you’re letting a driver down,” Wolff added. “Now, you could say that it’s a long season and that was a single instance but Lewis is doing the job, he’s leading the race, he’s creating a big gap in the championship and then it blew an engine. That was tough. It was tough for him and it was tough for our relationship.

“I think this is when I had the kitchen talk with him. We didn’t speak to each other for a few weeks until I explained to him I don’t want a divorce, we just need to talk about this. I also said I would have handled the end of the season differently today then I did in the past.”