Lewis Hamilton suffers as Toto Wolff fumes over Mercedes’ “inexcusable” Brazil Grand Prix performance.

After a terrible Brazilian Grand Prix for his Mercedes team, Toto Wolff was unable to control his rage.

Mercedes had a horrible weekend at the Brazilian Grand Prix with only minor points scored by Lewis Hamilton and George Russell across both races of the F1 Sprint format

The team clearly got its car set-ups wrong after just one hour of practice on the final Sprint weekend of the season. Their rear wings were too big, slowing the W14s on the straights and causing too much damage to the tyres in the corners.

Lewis Hamilton got off to a strong start that put him in third place, but he could only manage eighth. And when Mercedes cut their losses due to an oil temperature issue, George Russell did not even finish, trailing his teammate.

After the race, team principal Wolff spoke with Sky Sports and was frank in his assessment of the weekend. He was full of quiet rage. He called it “an inexcusable performance.” “To put it in words, there are none. Whatever we did to that car was awful because it finished second both the previous week and the week before.

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’s on a knife’s edge. We’ve got to develop it better for next year because it can’t be that in seven days of finishing on the podium with a solid, quick car, you’re nowhere.

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

Mercedes won in Brazil last year – the team’s only victory of the season. But Wolff does not believe his team will be able to manage the top step of the podium in 2023 and does not think it would be appropriate for the W14 to achieve that.”This car doesn’t deserve a win,” he added. “We need to push through the last two races, recover – I think that’s the most important thing – and see what we can do in Las Vegas, a different track, and Abu Dhabi. But the performance today was… I’m lacking words.

“Speed in a straight line was one problem, but not the primary one. The main reason, in my opinion, was that we were killing the tires—eating them up in a matter of laps—because we were unable to turn corners quickly enough with the larger wing.”

Due to his performance, Hamilton now trails Sergio Perez by 32 points in the drivers’ championship. This implies that he is still mathematically vying for second place in the drivers’ standings, but in practice, the Mexican must withdraw from the next two races in order to have any chance of overtaking him.