Mercedes has confessed that it did not have adequate cooling on its car at the start of last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton finished fourth behind Max Verstappen, Lando Norris, and Sergio Perez in Sunday’s race having started on pole.

The seven-time world champion fell back during the opening phase of the race, losing places to both Norris and his McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri at the first corner.

From there, temperature concerns meant he was unable to immediately attack those ahead.

“We had one issue where the way that we predicted the cooling had meant that we were undercooled, so we are investigating why that wasn’t in line with expectation,” admitted Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director.

“The consequence was that we had to ask the drivers to do lift and coast.

“This helps cool the power unit, but it costs lap time. It also meant that neither driver could really attack the cars ahead of them.

“Later in the race, we got into clearer air, so things were in a better window in terms of the temperatures.

“We could let them attack the cars ahead and we were able to show better pace.

“It was also that the degradation of the tyres was good,” Shovlin added.

“The end of our stints were looking better than the early parts of the stints.

“You could see that trend and decent performance, particularly for George [Russell], at the end of that first stint where he was going very well.”

Russell qualified just 18th after being caught out by traffic on Saturday afternoon, but raced his way back to sixth on Sunday.

It was a performance above what the team had expected.

“Our simulations didn’t really have him quite get into the points,” he explained.

” It is a very difficult track to overtake on, so he actually exceeded the expectations of all our models and simulations.

“It was some really nice overtaking that he was doing and having to balance that with managing the engine temperatures.

“Obviously, he would have been a lot happier to start further up and finish further up. So we will try and to that next time.”