Was Mercedes' new floor to blame for F1 Dutch GP woes?

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has admitted the team’s poor performance in the F1 Dutch Grand Prix may be down to their new floor.

After abandoning a new floor following Friday practice at the previous race in Belgium, Mercedes elected to run the new specification at Zandvoort, where the team endured a tough weekend.

George Russell was left “scratching my head” after he slid from fourth to seventh in Sunday’s grand prix, one place ahead of Lewis Hamilton, who recovered from a dire qualifying that saw him exit in Q2.

It marked a stark contrast in recent competitiveness for Mercedes, who came into the second half of the season as F1’s in-form team, having won three of the previous four rounds.

"I think these cars are sometimes a surprise-box. We've had six podiums in a row and that doesn't look like the car three weeks ago that was first and second, at least first on merit,” Wolff told media including Crash.net at Zandvoort.

"You can't really end up with a result like this without any major factor playing in it. It’s something we need to analyse in the next few days until Monza. Was it because we put something on the car that didn't help? Did we engineer something into the car that wasn't good?

"Then how do you justify these swings of performance? Sometimes we looked really good this weekend and then obviously today, in terms of degradation, that was not very impressive.”

Wolff believes limited running throughout practice was one factor behind Mercedes’ struggles.

“We back-to-backed the update kit on Friday, which was at the end left us with not a lot of data - the update kit that we put onto the car in Spa on Friday and then took off again,” he said.

"And then obviously with the lack of running, like everybody else, maybe it didn't decide the right things for the car. So, there could be a few factors in play that contributed to this non-performance.”

Asked if he thought the floor may not be working as hoped, Wolff replied: "I don't want to jump to conclusions too quickly because we're going to look at it the coming days and hopefully trying to find clues in the data.

"Was it a setup? Was it the track? What is it that we got wrong? Was it the floor that we put on the car? Was it all of this together?

"So, hopefully we can sort it out until Monza and become competitive again. But the swing in performance from P1-P2 and P7-P8, there's a biggie in there. It's not something that was simply a setup decision in my opinion.”

Seven-time world champion Hamilton voiced concerns about Mercedes’ latest upgrade after the race.

“I think the car definitely didn’t feel as strong as the last race for some reason,” he said.

“We need to look into that, whether our upgrade is actually delivering or not, we have to wait and see.”