Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has pondered whether the team’s disappointing race at the Dutch Formula 1 Grand Prix was due to the car’s new underbody not working as expected.

The German brand started the resumption of the season positively, as its competitiveness increased and it managed to achieve two victories in three races.

However, Mercedes could not maintain this positive momentum and George Russell finished a miserable race in seventh place, with Lewis Hamilton finishing eighth.

Russell, who started the race in third place, had expressed optimism that he could fight for the win, but he fell back and eventually had to resort to two stops with his teammate.

Wolff believes that the drastic drop in Mercedes’ speed since its comeback in Canada suggests that a bigger factor was at play than the characteristics or conditions of the track.

“I think the car, these cars are sometimes a box of surprises,” Wolff told the media, including Motorsport Week.

“We’ve taken six podiums in a row and that doesn’t look like the car that was first and second three weeks ago. At least first under its own power.”

“You can’t really end up with a result like that without an important factor playing a role. That’s something we’ll have to analyse in the next few days before Monza.”

“Was it because we did something to the car that didn’t help? Did we put something in the car that wasn’t good?

“How do you justify these fluctuations in performance? At times this weekend it looked really good, but today the performance was enormously worse. Not very impressive.”

Although Mercedes decided to use the new surface in Zandvoort, it decided not to race in Belgium, but rain interruptions during training meant the team was only able to collect minimal data.

“I think it was two factors,” he explained. “We released the update kit back to back on Friday, which didn’t end up giving us a lot of data.”

“The update kit that we fitted to the car on Friday in Spa and then we set off again.

“And then, like everyone else, we may not have made the right decisions for the car due to a lack of driving experience.

“So there could have been several factors at play that contributed to this performance.”

Wolff does not rule out that the underbody is responsible for Mercedes’ unexpected setback. He is convinced that an unsuitable setup cannot explain the team’s lackluster speed.

“I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly because we’ll be looking at this in the coming days and hopefully trying to find clues in the data,” he said of the soil.

“As I said, was it the setup, was it the track, what did we do wrong? Was it the ground we put on the car? Was it all of it?

“Hopefully we can get this under control by Monza and become competitive.

“But the power fluctuations between P1, P2 and P7, P8 are a big problem. In my opinion, this was not an easy setup decision.”