Most likely the result of internal struggles after the painful clown show last year.

They often seem to qualify unexpectedly well which makes you think they’ve got the pace, but on Sunday it invariably turns out that no, they do not have the pace.

This year we have 4 to 5 competent teams at the top each race. The other teams are just fighting for scraps this season. Just look at the points distribution it’s more skewed towards the top 5 teams compared to last year. Even when cars are much closer to each other during qualifying the bottom teams just can’t cross that gap during race day since two midfielders have leapfrogged the rest of F1.5

They are: their car is just a dog in the actual race. From a pure qualifying pace POV they are a lot better, with hulkenberg being able to get the car into q3 quite consistently.
That’s also what makes them seem better than they really are: hulk qualifying in p8 (great) and then tumbles down to p16 by the end of the race (usually because they have to stop more often or at least to worse tires since their tire deg is abismal)

I refuse to believe Charles’ race engineer has a job, every time I hear him speak

As a Mercedes fan you had 7 pretty decent years.