Chinese GP: Mercedes says that Nico Rosberg was driving blind

F1 championship leader Rosberg finished a distant second to dominant team-mate Lewis Hamilton at Shanghai, having only qualified fourth, fallen to seventh at the start in an incident with Valtteri Bottas, and battled with issues on his car.

"We lost telemetry before the formation lap actually," Wolff explained.

"It was zero data. It was like driving the car blind, and he was really doing an awesome job because he was giving us fuel consumption [information].

"Normally there is a switch that shows the state of the tyres - he was telling us where the tyres were with the best guess, and it lasted until the end of the race."

Rosberg was heard complaining over team radio that providing the fuel information was "annoying", but clarified that his concern was more the point on the track where he had to focus on it.

"I was completely on my own out there," he said. "I was telling the team what my fuel level was so that they could judge if I was using too much fuel or if I'm safe - and I had to do that in Turn 1 and Turn 1 is a difficult corner anyway, so I didn't enjoy that point.

"It was just once in a while so they could put a few dots and see where it's going, so that wasn't a problem at all, it was just that I didn't like where I had to do it because it was in Turn 1 and that was not good."

Hamilton is now just four points behind Rosberg after taking his third successive victory. The German admitted he had ended up in a weekend of damage limitation.

"It's definitely good I'm still in the lead, especially considering that the whole weekend was really, really bad for me," said Rosberg. "It went completely wrong in so many different respects."