Lewis Hamilton will have to consider leaving Mercedes if they cannot deliver a competitive car “in the next couple of years”, his team boss says.
Toto Wolff said he was “absolutely confident” Hamilton would sign a new contract at Mercedes this year.
But he added: “Nevertheless, if he wants to win another championship, he needs to make sure he has the car.
“If we cannot demonstrate we are able to give him the car in the next couple of years, he needs to look everywhere.”
Wolff added: “I don’t think he’s doing it at this stage. But I will have no grouch if that happens in a year or two.”
And he said that he and Hamilton were already well on the way to agreeing a new deal.
“We are talking about when we want to do it and how,” Wolff said. “We just need to change some terms – the dates basically.”
Hamilton finished Friday practice in Jeddah 11th fastest, with team-mate George Russell fifth, to underline the fact that Mercedes have started a second consecutive season with no chance of championship success.
Russell was 0.467 seconds slower than pace-setter Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, with Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin second fastest ahead of the Dutchman’s Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez.
Alpine’s Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly were fourth and sixth, ahead of Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin and the Haas of Nico Hulkenberg.
McLaren’s Lando Norris was 12th, and British-born Thai Alex Albon 14th for Williams.
‘We got it wrong’
Hamilton, who was 0.996secs off the pace, has already written off his chances this season, and Mercedes spent the time between the first race in Bahrain and this weekend’s event in Jeddah in meetings trying to work out a new development direction for their car.
“We’re, overall, not happy about the amount of downforce, the mechanical balance,” Wolff said. “All of it. It never comes alone.
“All these meetings are giving us clarity and more focus on where we need to tackle in order to turn this around quick.”
Wolff expanded on his admission at the first race that the team had made a mistake in pursuing the design direction they chose last year rather than switching to the one pursued by all other teams.
He said this had been influenced by the progress they had made last year, when they became more competitive as the season went on and Russell won the penultimate race of the season in Brazil.
“The car got better and better,” Wolff said, “and then you start to question the concept of the car less than you probably should.
“We really tried hard to make it work because the data that we have extrapolated showed us that this works. We were proven wrong. Very simply.
“You can see that the three quickest cars, including the Ferraris, have a similar concept of how they generate performance. That’s very different to ours.
“At a certain stage, we came to the conclusion that we got it wrong.
“Why we got it wrong, we’re still analysing because we followed data and we followed what simulations tell us and in that case, we were misguided by what those data.
“All of us involved in the decision-making process came to the conclusion that we can’t continue that way.
“We really tried to stick to it and we don’t want to, under any circumstance, run in a one-way street saying: ‘We’re going to make this work no matter what’ because it doesn’t work.
“I don’t want to lose more time. My colleagues don’t want to as well.”
Another team facing the reality that their car is not where they expected it to be are Alpha Tauri, whose team principal Franz Tost expressed his frustration in a news conference between the sessions.
“The engineers tell me we make some good progress but I don’t trust them anymore, I just want to see the lap time because this is the only thing that counts,” Tost said.
“Because during the winter months they told me: ‘The car is fantastic, [we] made big progress’ then we came to Bahrain and we are nowhere.
“There’s not enough downforce therefore the car is unstable under braking, and overheats the rear tyres. Washing out at the apex, then [hurts] traction. Everything that you need to do a good lap time.”
Their drivers Yuki Tsunoda and Nick de Vries were 13th and 17th fastest.