Malaysia ‘very painful’ for Mercedes despite title picture

Toto Wolff admits the Malaysia Grand Prix weekend was "very painful" for Mercedes due to a lack of pace, despite extending its lead in both championships.

After dominating the Italian Grand Prix, Mercedes struggled relative to Ferrari and Red Bull in both Singapore and Malaysia. After taking advantage of a first-lap crash to win in Singapore, Lewis Hamilton won pole position at Sepang while Sebastian Vettel missed qualifying and then finished second to Max Verstappen, but was unable to match the Red Bull's pace, while Vettel climbed through the field to fourth.

"It's these moments that make you progress," Wolff said. "I had the best race debrief in five years right now, this is one of the feelings I have, because it's just so painful.

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"We benefitted in the championship from the misfortune of Ferrari, but we didn't have the pace to challenge either Red Bull or Ferrari and this is what remains the underlying feeling with all of us. We need to understand why we underperform on certain circuits and in certain ambient conditions.

"I think that Lewis extracted the maximum in qualifying, benefitting from cooler temperatures and obviously on one lap he's a real force. Maybe on one lap the underlying problem that we had in the car wasn't as obvious or as visible as it was in the race. The race started two hours earlier, it was very hot. For me it was a very painful Sunday also."

And Wolff says he takes no satisfaction from the points gained over Vettel and Ferrari in the drivers' and constructors' championships when he believes they were the result of misfortune, having seen Kimi Raikkonen fail to start from second place on the grid.

"This is a sport where you take no prisoners. We take the points and Ferrari would have done the same, but somebody else's misfortune or underperformance doesn't cheer me up at all. We're looking at our own performance, our own level of performance, whether it was good enough or better than anybody else's.

"This is the underlying feeling that exists at the moment – how can we fix our issues? Benefitting from Ferrari's problems in the championship shouldn't hide that they have caught up 30 seconds this race.

"All credit to Red Bull and Ferrari for their performance, I think they merited to win the race. But I think we have underperformed in Singapore and we have underperformed in Sepang, so this is what we need to concentrate on."