Mercedes lost so much pace in Malaysia, says Wolff

After struggling on Friday over a second off Sebastian Vettel's pace, Mercedes' race pace was no reassurance to team boss Toto Wolff despite seeing his team increase its lead in the Formula 1 world championship.

Despite Lewis Hamilton claiming second place at the Sepang International Circuit, increasing his title lead over Vettel to 34 points, Valtteri Bottas was overtaken by the Ferrari driver on a charge from the back of the grid and ended 36 seconds behind his team-mate.

Wolff said the relative pace to the Red Bulls, in particular, was a major deficit and something which has flagged up concerns attacking the final five races of the year.

"If Max would have pushed to the end we would have been half a minute down,” Wolff said. "How can a car that is so fast on so many circuits, lose so much with a tyre that is overheating?

“If you look at the real pace today then it would have been P5. And that is worrisome - let's see what happens in Suzuka, we've got a couple of days of trying to understand, to put this completely different plan out."

Asked if the team could be optimistic about recovering pace in Suzuka, he said, "On paper, that should be the case."

However, the focus for the team is to analyse what went wrong in Malaysia, where Mercedes were substantially off the pace in both wet and the dry running.

"I'm just very down, I must say because you cannot just say 'well we've scored more points than Ferrari' - we've lost so much pace this weekend."