No more America’s Cup sailing for Mercedes after the farewell of Ineos Britannia

The Formula 1 of the sea Do you remember the period in which the Formula 1 teams (or at least some teams) threw themselves headlong into designing sailing boats for the America’s Cup? This period now seems to be over at least for Mercedes F1, which by Toto Wolff’s own admission will not help with its team of engineers any of the boats entered in the next Cup, scheduled for Naples in 2027. The Brackley team had in fact recently collaborated with Ineos Britannia, the English team led by sailing legend Sir Ben Ainsle who had won the last Louis Vuitton Cup against the Italian Luna Rossa also thanks to the work of technical director James Allison, losing However, the final match against the reigning champions Team New Zealand went badly. A resounding and particularly painful defeat, followed by the farewell of Ainsle which had led Ineos itself – the giant that operates in the chemical and pharmaceutical sector headed by Jim Ratcliffe, and which also owns a third of the Mercedes team in F1 – to cut funding for Britannia and the subsequent decision of the English vessel not to compete in the next America’s Cup. A farewell (or perhaps a goodbye) which however did not upset Toto much Wolff, who in a recent interview with the business magazine Forbes admitted that he still would not have been interested in investing resources and energy in sailing, given the particularly challenging period in terms of regulations of the top automotive series (with the team also ending up at the center of controversy due to alleged irregularities in the compression ratio). Mercedes F1 says goodbye to sailing “We don’t want to do it anymore – explains Wolff – because we are a Formula 1 team. We don’t want to go sailing, we don’t want to practice other sports. Complete attention must be paid only to Formula 1”. “In the last regulatory cycle, for the first time we didn’t really understand what to do,” he then adds, admitting that at this point it is essential to focus 100% on the main commitment so as not to repeat the same mistakes of the recent past. “We knew realistically that Mercedes would not fight for the F1 title this year because there was no basis to do so. We are growing, but you can’t take three steps in one. Success doesn’t happen overnight.”