Wolff: Totally unacceptable where we are on performance

Mercedes have not endured such a difficult start for a Formula 1 season ever since the start of the turbo-hybrid era. Even their 2010-2013 years were not that difficult as they were building years towards 2014.

So dropping the ball with the W13 - as things seem to be up to now - is looking bad for the World Champions, especially when Lewis Hamilton, usually a miracle maker in an F1 car, could not drag his Silver Arrow into Q2 on Saturday in Jeddah.

Toto Wolff looked back on a tough night along the Red Sea coast, and said to the media: "I love competition, I always love competition.

"We had a really strong run of eight years leading the pack – not always but we kind of managed our way into the lead – but this time feels a bit like 2013 where we just weren’t up to the speed of the Red Bulls and probably also the Ferraris.

"We kept fighting and this is how I feel at the moment. We need to fight," he insisted.

The Austrian must be facing a character building experience at the helm of he great team commenting: "It is certainly totally unacceptable where we are on performance, we are third on the road, and sometimes not even like today.

"It’s just not an option to stay where we are," Wolff maintained.

Lewis Hamilton said the team went down a wrong setup road on his car, and his boss elaborated: "You can see between Lewis’ and George’s performance there was not huge set-up changes that happened.

"But they were big enough to have dramatic consequence of the performance of the car, between going out in Q1 and making it solid into Q3.

Wolff revealed that they are carrying too much drag with the car despite having a low-drag rear wing, with the car being tricky to set up.

"We have many parts of the car that don’t work, that we don’t understand, they don’t perform enough, and this is not where we all expect the car to be," the Mercedes boss lamented.