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Toto Wolff labelled Mercedes’s performance at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix as their “worst performance of the year” so far.
The Silver Arrows had hopes of a fourth podium in five races, with George Russell qualifying third on the grid and just a tenth-of-a-second off pole-sitter Max Verstappen.
Yet surprisingly, Mercedes did not have the race-pace of their rivals and Russell was overtaken by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and McLaren’s Lando Norris, eventually finishing P5.
Teenage star Kimi Antonelli, who qualified fifth on the grid, finished a place lower in sixth.
“It was clearly our worst performance of the year so far,” Mercedes F1 CEO and team principal Wolff said.
“The pace just dropped away with blistering, overheating tyres and so far we haven’t got an explanation.
“You manage your expectations being the second quickest, and even that is not obviously what we would wish to achieve, and then you see the race panning out like it did.
“It just adds to the frustration of the situation.”
Russell added that the W16 car clearly struggles with tyre overheating, admitting that it is a “weakness” of their 2025 challenger currently.
“I was pushing hard to stay with Max at the beginning of the second stint,” Russell said. “But I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hold on and we fell off that cliff towards the end.
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Russell finished fifth after qualifying third on the grid (Getty Images)
“I was dropping a second a lap in the last 15 laps, but to be fair, we just didn’t have the pace and even if I had managed more, I think I still would have come home in P5.
“We know that it’s a bit of a weakness of our car at the moment. And coming home P5 on a bad day - we’ll take it - but we need to try and improve it quickly.
“We need to understand why Bahrain was so positive, because that’s also an overheating track, but a very different type of overheating to what you experience here in Jeddah.
“We had higher hopes for the race today than we had for Bahrain, and it kind of turned out the opposite.”
The next race of the 2025 season is the Miami Grand Prix on 2-4 May.
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