Mercedes baffled by ‘worst performance of the year’ in Jeddah

Mercedes F1 team principal Toto Wolff has admitted his team is at a loss to explain the severe tyre degradation that plagued George Russell during the 2025 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, resulting in what he called the team’s “worst performance of the year so far.”

Starting from third on the grid and running in the top three early on, Russell looked poised to battle for a strong finish at the high-speed Jeddah Corniche Circuit.

But Mercedes’ hopes quickly unraveled as the Briton began to suffer severe tyre blistering during his second stint on the hard rubber, dropping him down the order to fifth at the checkered flag – a distant 18 seconds behind fourth-placed man Lando Norris.

“It was clearly our worst performance of the year so far,” Wolff admitted. “The pace just dropped away with blistering, overheating tyres and so far we haven’t got an explanation.”

The Austrian expressed his frustration at the team’s inability to capitalise on its promising one-lap pace, which had hinted at a potential pole challenge.

“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,” he added.

Russell: “We Just Didn’t Have the Pace”

Russell, meanwhile, rejected the suggestion that his attempt to keep up with race leader Max Verstappen early in the second stint had triggered the extreme degradation. He made it clear that the issues were systemic — not strategic.

“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.

“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.”

Russell believes the root of Mercedes’ issues lies in the way their W15 handles tyre temperatures.

“It’s about how fast we’re going through these corners, and for whatever reason, we’ve generated more temperature than our rivals,” he explained.

“Then suddenly you get to a point where the tyres are like a balloon. We had blistering on the front, blistering on the rear, and then suddenly you just have no grip from the tyre at all.”

A Head-Scratcher Compared to Bahrain

With Mercedes having shown strong race pace in Bahrain – another track known for pushing tyre temperatures to the limit – Russell was left puzzled by the dramatic shift in performance between the two weekends.

“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,” he said.

• Read also: F1i Driver Ratings for the 2025 Saudi Arabian GP

“We had higher hopes for the race today than we had for Bahrain, and it kind of turned out the opposite.”

With a long season ahead and rivals McLaren, Ferrari, and Red Bull currently leading the charge, Mercedes now face an urgent task: decoding what went wrong in Jeddah before the next race compounds their frustration.

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