F1 is racing towards the mid-season break with the two foes of Sabastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton battling for the championship lead.
Vettel has an eight-point advantage over Hamilton going into the back-to-back races that precedes a four-week breather.
But ungraciously, the Mercedes team blame making too many mistakes on their lagging Vettel’s Ferrari rather than the abilities of the rival driver or car.
And the next race is in Germany in front of a home crowd for Vettel.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said: “We’ve left points on the table and had to damage limitation more than we wanted.”
Mercedes mistakes
Hamilton last won in France in June, but he was forced to retire in Austria the following week and was then shunted to the back of the grid at Silverstone for colliding with Kimi Raikkonen on the first lap of the British Grand Prix.
He recovered to come second behind Vettel.
Each time, Hamilton had won pole position at the start with the fastest practise laps.
“We didn’t score as many points in the triple-header as we had hoped for,” Wolff told the BBC. “A lot of that was down to our own mistakes.
“However, there is a silver lining to all this – while we didn’t maximise on points, we did bring the quickest car to all three races.
Faultless performances
“We still scored a good amount of points, both drivers have shown strong performances and we have a fast car. So there are many reasons why we’re looking forward to the second half of the 2018 season; we’re hungry, ambitious and want to kick on from here.”
Hamilton wants to grab the lead back from Vettel with faultless performances in Germany and the next race at Hungary before the break.
Vettel has not won the world title for five years – Hamilton won last year.
The German says the key to the title is improving the car and racing strategy at every grand prix.
“I think we need to improve our car until the end of the year,” he said. “I think our car is very good. I think our car is working well,” he said.