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There is no immediate reason for Mercedes to panic, but the Dutch Grand Prix has certainly given the championship leaders plenty to think about as rivals begin to apply more pressure after the team had looked untouchable earlier in the season.

Zandvoort was not a poor weekend for Mercedes by any means, considering George Russell claimed sprint pole and then converted it into victory. However, Lando Norris and McLaren had the upper hand in qualifying for the main race as well as in the race itself. Kimi Antonelli still came home second and Russell finished third, meaning both drivers collected solid points, but it was Norris’s second win in a row and Mercedes’ fourth loss in six races, in a sequence that began with Lewis Hamilton’s win in Spain in June.

Antonelli is still the clear favourite to secure the title. He currently holds a useful 59-point advantage over Russell and Hamilton, and is 83 points ahead of Norris. Even so, history has shown that fortunes can swing quickly after just a couple of poor races, and Antonelli is heading into a difficult weekend at Monza because he will take grid penalties for fitting a new power unit. It is not the sort of compromise he would likely have wanted for his home race, but it had to be taken somewhere, and it is expected to be offset later on—at least in the internal team contest—by a similar penalty for Russell.

“With Kimi, we're taking the full thing [at Monza],” team principal Toto Wolff said in Zandvoort last weekend. “In theory, our calculations say that’s the best track to take it. Obviously, algorithms don't take the nationality into consideration, but we're here to fight for a championship and not get the most PR. So yeah, that's what we're going to do. With George, the discussions are ongoing, if we were to take it.”

Max Verstappen’s strong charge in the second half of last season showed that anything can happen in the title fight, particularly when two team-mates are battling for the championship and taking points from one another. Norris and Lewis Hamilton do not enjoy number-one status within their respective teams, so they too could end up losing points to their team-mates. Even so, if both continue scoring strongly, Mercedes will not have the luxury of relaxing.

“Absolutely conscious of the threat,” Wolff said. “It's not only Norris—if you have a gap of 50 [ sic ] points to Lewis, that's something you need to be worried about. So this is going to be tough, and it could become tighter. And yeah, we just need to do the optimum job every single weekend, every single session. I think we as an organization are good enough to win races. And they [McLaren] have got two now, on tracks where they've been very, very good in the previous years also. So let's see if we can regain some momentum.”

One of the most fascinating elements of this season has been the sheer intensity of the development race, with teams still getting to grips with the new regulations and therefore unlocking major performance gains whenever a fresh aerodynamic package arrives. Every update that comes through has to justify itself within the limits of the cost cap, and Wolff has openly admitted that he remains surprised by how McLaren and Ferrari have kept introducing new parts almost every race weekend.

“We haven't got the money to put developments on the car,” he said last weekend. “And I said it before, that we are trying to evenly split that through the season, based on our calculations of when we can bring the biggest updates and optimizing the championship points. But we can just do what we can do. And that's why it is a development race. If you bring an upgrade, each of the top teams will have a couple of tenths in it at least, and that's what you lose. So yeah, the ride has been a bit tougher than at the beginning of the year.”

“You will see how towards the end of the year whether they are going to be able to deploy as much stuff onto the car as they do now,” he added. “Someone might have a different strategy in spending more at the beginning and in the middle of the year than towards the end.”

Why Mercedes seems to have less room to spend on development than its closest rivals is not an easy question to answer. Managing the budget within the cost cap is a complex equation. For instance, teams differ in terms of head count, salary structures and the way they run their operations.

“There's many reasons you can look at,” Wolff said. “Did we spend too much at the beginning in the initial development? I don't think so. I just think we're an organization ... we have a certain size and infrastructure, and in that respect, we had a really quick car. We left between 50 and 100 points on the table with reliability issues that would have given us a little bit of a gap, a little bit more of a gap than we have today.”

So have Ferrari and McLaren, as Wolff suggested, already used up a large chunk of their development budgets early, or is there still more to come from them? And has Mercedes held back on updates over the past few months because it believed it had enough pace through the summer, preferring instead to delay new parts until it could deliver a bigger step for the crucial closing phase of the campaign? Only time will provide the answer. What is clear, though, is that Antonelli suggested after Sunday’s race that Mercedes does have something in the pipeline—and he is eager to see it arrive at the circuit.

“For sure, we’re clearly not the fastest car anymore on the grid,” the Italian said. “We’re probably second or third, at least in today’s race. And McLaren has taken a huge step, especially since Hungary, since the big upgrade package they brought. But I’m confident with the team; the team has been working super-hard on this next package that is coming up, and they just want to make sure that it’s going to work out well, once we put it on. It’s going to be more difficult, it’s going to be challenging, but we’re ready to do our best and to maximize every opportunity. And then hopefully it’s going to be our turn to bring the package that’s going to give us a little bit of the upper hand again.”