Sao Paulo Grand Prix: ‘Inexcusable performance’ – Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff lambasts car after poor showing

Hamilton and Russell qualified in fifth and eighth on Friday, but the former finished eighth and the latter posted a DNF as tempers flared in the Mercedes paddock.

Wolff, the Austrian billionaire CEO of Mercedes, could not hide his frustrations after the race as he spoke to Sky Sports.

He said: “Inexcusable performance. There’s [not] even words for that. That car finished second last week and the week before, and whatever we did to it was horrible.

“Lewis survived out there, but George, I can only feel for the two driving such a miserable thing. So it shows how difficult the car is, it shows it’s on a knife’s edge. We have to develop it better for next year because you can’t, within seven days, be finishing on the podium with one of the two quickest cars, and then finish eighth.

“This car doesn’t deserve a win. We need to push for the last two races and recover; that’s the most important thing, and see what we can do in Las Vegas on a totally different track and Abu Dhabi, but the performance today… I’m lacking words.”

“We’re clearly not world champions on Sprint race weekends,” Wolff added. “We do some good work here on the track to get it done, but still it doesn’t explain what went wrong. The car almost drove like it was on three wheels, not four.

“Straight-line speed was one issue, but I think it wasn’t the main factor. That was that we couldn’t go around the corners with the bigger wing with the pace we needed and we were killing the tyres, eating them up within a few laps.”

Russell, occupying Mercedes’ second seat, retired while running in 11th, which would come as a disappointment as the former champions had built up momentum in recent races.

“George’s issue was a PU (Power Unit) at the end,” Wolff confirmed. “We were over old metrics and cooling, not sure where it came from, it was the last race of the PU but you know it is what it is. I’m not sure if we would have finished with a point or not.”

Hamilton, whose eighth-placed finish was not the desired follow-up to last week’s second in Mexico, said: “It didn’t feel as disastrous as yesterday, [when] I literally had no tyres left, they were worn to zero.

“I feel like I drove a better race today in terms of managing the tyres to the best of my ability. There are moments the [car] works and moments it doesn’t and it’s so inconsistent throughout the lap so we have to figure out what that is.

“Also we are really slow on the straights and really slow on the corners. One to forget, but hopefully there are lots of learnings from today.

“The car is really unpredictable in the sense of one weekend and one session it feels good and then not, but I’m sure we will go and look at things and find out how we could have done things differently but with the one session it’s difficult.

“I’m still proud of the team, they still came here and did the work, they hold their head up high and that’s what we continue to do, just keep pushing forwards, two more races with this thing and then hopefully no more driving it.”

Russell added: “Clearly we got something wrong this weekend. The pace just hasn’t been there. We thought yesterday was a one-off but, clearly, it wasn’t.

“We need to regroup and try to understand it, because 12 months ago, this was our strongest race of the year, and 12 months later, by far our weakest. Very strange.”

When asked about the problems he was experiencing with his car, Russell replied: “The car was slow. The tyres were sliding around and what we were doing was the maximum.

“Something doesn’t quite add up. You don’t suddenly just lose a second’s worth of performance and go from a podium-fighting car to just fighting for points. We need to sit down and understand. But clearly a massive one-off this weekend.

“It wouldn’t be ideal [to replace the engine]. We had a failure because the engine was overheating, and it would’ve broken had we not retired. That would have topped off the day but we really need to understand what happened to the pace.”