“We weren’t particularly good on radio messaging,” Wolff admitted. “We had a couple of weird calls.”

Also on the strategy front, Mercedes might be accused of having played too conservative a game, given its huge dominance in Australia just two weeks earlier.

Wolff said he might now press the button to speed-up technical developments ahead of China, and said another re-think will also take place at Brackley.

“Maybe with our very ‘fair-play’ ideas … maybe in future we need to make decisions that could be a little unpopular with the Germans or the English,” he is quoted by German-language reports.

He is referring to the fact that Mercedes likes to give Hamilton and Nico Rosberg total equality when it comes to race strategy.

But on Sunday, a better tactic might have been to split the strategies so that one Mercedes was always within sight of Vettel’s Ferrari.