Having endured a challenging start to the second half of the season, Bottas had a particularly difficult time at Sepang on Sunday as he came home fifth and more than 40 seconds behind teammate Lewis Hamilton.

With the Finn saying he had little confidence in his car, and yet to find an answer as to why he is struggling, he went as far as to claim that he has never faced such a torrid time since he has been in F1.

“For sure it is difficult,” said Bottas. “Being honest, it may be the most difficult time of my career so far, in terms of how it feels every time I go in the car.

“I just want to perform. I want to be in a good level and I haven’t been doing that for some time for various reasons. There are many question marks still for me, for the team. So I definitely want to turn it around quickly.

“If I keep doing races like this for long, that is not going to be a good thing for anyone. So, the team needs the points. I need the points, I want the points.

“I want to do much better than this, so definitely I want to turn it around quickly – and we need to do whatever is needed to do it, but like I said - many, many question marks.”

Bottas said that he is facing an accumulation of problems – as difficulties in getting a good balance result in tyre temperatures getting out of kilter and then that further affecting the car handling.

“For me, the main issue was mainly struggling more with the front end, which hasn’t really been the case many times this year,” he said

“Now in the mid-corners I am losing a lot of front end. It is tricky to get the car turned, overheating the front left tyre, also four-wheel sliding in high speed corners.

“That has been the case for me all weekend, and I have been only running the new [aero] package. So that has been the main issue.

“And for me in the race, if I tried to go quicker, I just slide more, and struggle more with the tyre temps. So it is all about just trying to manage and keep the temps under control in the race, and it is definitely not nice."

Worse than Monaco

While the difficulties of finding the right balance for the Mercedes W08 are nothing new, Bottas thinks that the situation he and the team face now is more complicated than it had been after the troubled Monaco GP in May.

When asked if the uncertainty the team faces now is the same as after Monaco, he said: “I think they [the doubts] are even bigger. Monaco is such a unique track, and it is not so easy to get the car right there. Definitely with different type of cars, some cars don’t really work well there.

“But in a track like this, and for us to come here thinking that we should be quite competitive, it has been difficult. So definitely we need to understand very quickly.

"All the next races they are going to be really important. Still for us as a team nothing has been won yet, so hopefully we can understand within a week or two – because otherwise it could be too late.”