Toto Wolff raises concerns for Lewis Hamilton ahead of final nine Mercedes races

Toto Wolff has warned that the issues experienced by Mercedes at the Dutch Grand Prix were not just caused by a ‘simple set-up issue’, hinting at a deeper problem that could affect Lewis Hamilton and George Russell during the final nine races of the campaign.

The Silver Arrows headed into the summer break as the team to beat in many regards with Hamilton’s triumph at the Belgian Grand Prix marking the team’s third in four races. However, in Zandvoort on Sunday they were the fourth-fastest team on the track, losing ground to McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari.

Russell and Hamilton crossed the finish line at the Dutch GP in seventh and eighth place respectively. Even more concerning was that the former was over 44 seconds behind race winner Lando Norris, who demolished the competition in a dominant victory.

Unfortunately for Hamilton, there may not be a quick fix before the end of his time at Mercedes. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly, because we’re going to look at it in the coming days, and hopefully try to find clues in the data,” Wolff said, assessing the team’s struggles.

“Like I said before, was it the set-up, was it the track, what is it that we got wrong? Was it the floor that we put on the car? Was it all of this together? So hopefully we can sort it out until Monza and become competitive. But the swing in performance between P1, P2 and P7, P8, there’s a biggie in there. It’s not something that was a simple set-up decision in my opinion.”

He added: “I think the car, these cars are sometimes a surprise box. We had six podiums in a row, and that doesn’t look like the car that three weeks ago was first and second. At least first on merit.

“You can’t really end up with a result like this without any major factor playing in it. It’s something we need to analyse in the next few days to Monza. Was it because we put something on the car that didn’t help? Did we engineer something into the car that wasn’t good?”

Wolff’s lack of certainty will be concerning for Hamilton, who is hoping to add to his tally of two wins for the season before he departs for Ferrari. His Dutch GP weekend was a disaster, although the seven-time world champion took some comfort from his Sunday display.

"I was much happier today," he told Sky Sports F1. "I was moving forwards, progressing, moving in the right direction, just too far back, unfortunately. If I qualified where George was then I think I would have finished at least there, if not further ahead.”