Toto Wolff admits Mercedes are in ‘no man’s land’ and claims the season is already over… while Lewis Hamilton will be thinking his Ferrari move can’t come soon enough

It’s the hope that kills you. Just a few days ago, Lewis Hamilton could muster an expression that bore the faintest hint of a smile after concluding that his Mercedes was the best he had felt in three years.

On Sunday, as his failing Merc toiled around Suzuka, that optimism quickly disappeared from him. That smile (if there was one), one would imagine, was wiped from his face at an even faster pace.

The 39-year-old did not get carried away when he made that assessment after training on Thursday. Hamilton made it abundantly clear that he still knew the limitations of his car. Let’s not forget that Hamilton said two weeks ago that this was a car that ‘messes with the mind’.

It’s one that seems to throw a new challenge around every corner and one that even fools the hi-tech equipment and army of engineers at their base in Brackley. And an old-fashioned, high-octane circuit like this painfully exposes the shortcomings of a human machine.

That’s exactly what it did for Hamilton, who held on to his place in the top 10 and finished ninth, to turn his points tally for the season into double figures. “I think I suffered a bit of damage in the beginning with Charles (Leclerc), he came on the outside,” Hamilton said.

Lewis Hamilton (above) finished ninth at Suzuka as Mercedes’ battle continued

Hamilton previously believed his Mercedes car was the best in years before the GP started

‘I had a lot of understeer during the first stint. I couldn’t steer the car through any of the corners. ‘The hard tire was quite bad. The medium tire was much better, so yes, in retrospect it looks like we should have had two medium tires. But overall the car was pretty bad.”

That assessment will cause even more sleepless nights for Silver Arrows team boss Toto Wolff. He canceled a pre-arranged break from the brutal journey of this 24-race global spectacle to stand on the ground shoulder to shoulder with his team in their hour of need.

But the dark clouds remain hanging over the Mercedes chief’s head after he saw Max Verstappen romp to victory in Japan. “No one is going to get Max this season, his driving and the car are just spectacular,” said the Austrian, who saw Hamilton’s teammate George Russell take advantage of a late mistake by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri to claim seventh place.

‘Actually, this season is now the best of the rest. That’s the fight going on, hopefully we overtake the McLaren and then the Ferraris and fight for P2 (second). This is what it is this year.

“If your expectation is to ultimately race for wins and championships, then you could say we’re in a bit of a no man’s land.”

However, there is no doubt about where Verstappen stands. That tops the list again after brake failure forced him into early retirement and bitterly ended his nine-race winning streak in Australia two weeks ago.

For anyone wondering whether his inability to win in Melbourne was anything other than a temporary aberration, here is your answer, delivered with the Dutchman’s typically emphatic flair. It was perhaps not as resounding as the victory he achieved when the Japanese Grand Prix was last held just over six months ago.

But a 12-second gap between Verstappen and teammate Sergio Perez in second place was a way of laughing in the faces of those who have spent the last two weeks praying that reliability problems would crop up here again. Instead, it was a third one-two of the season for the peerless Red Bulls, sending another ominous message to the rest of the grid.

Hamilton labeled his car’s performance after the race as ‘pretty poor’

Team boss Christian Horner was less willing to agree with Wolff’s assessment that this championship is already done and dusted after just four races. You might suggest he did this while wearing his best poker face.

“I’ve learned over the years not to listen too much to what Toto has said,” Horner joked. ‘It’s very early to write off your year, there are still twenty races to go. The capacity he (Verstappen) has is very impressive. The form he had last year has continued.

‘The way he managed to extend the belt length here was very impressive. We saw that during the first stint, but he also did very well during the second. He has a very wise head on quite young shoulders.’

Even a brief and unexpected interlude in the form of a red flag on the opening lap – which came after Daniel Ricciardo and Alex Albon made a mess of the tire wall on the way to Turn 3 – failed to faze the peerless Verstappen .

The attack from the rest of the peloton was led by Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz, who fought past teammate Leclerc to claim third place, another impressive performance from the Spaniard after the appendix-less driver pulled off a medical miracle and the claimed victory in Australia two weeks ago.

Although this was another defeat for Leclerc against Sainz, who will lose his seat in the Italian team to Hamilton next season, it was an encouraging day for the Monegasque driver who fought his way up from the start in eighth place to take a a commendable fourth place finish.

For Hamilton, a weekend that started promisingly ended with a painfully familiar ending as Red Bull and Ferrari shared the podium

Hamilton’s final season at Mercedes means no planning ahead before he prepares to join Ferrari next year

He needs to rectify his sluggishness in qualifying to give himself the best chance of delivering a blow to one of the Red Bull duo. Several teams, including Mercedes, used the red flag-induced break to tinker with their strategies. Hamilton was switched to hard tires and switched to a one-stop race.

Not long after, the man who has won at this circuit five times – most recently in 2018 – asked his team to change that plan as he continued to slip through the field. Such is the extent to which Hamilton finds his hands tied to his car that he struggled to even be sure whether a change in strategy would have made a difference to the outcome of his race.

“Nothing, I think,” said the despondent Englishman when asked what he could have gained with a different strategy. “I don’t know what the other strategy would have been, whether it would have stayed on the medium to begin with, but we still had two terribly hard tires to drive through, so a real challenge today.”

For Hamilton, a weekend that started promisingly ended with a painfully familiar ending.