Mercedes admit they expect the fight for victory to be much more difficult at next weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix with Ferrari and Red Bull set to be much more competitive despite their dominant 1-2 at Monza.
The defending world champions head into the final seven flyaways leading both championships for the first time this season, as three wins in four races saw Lewis Hamilton overhaul Sebastian Vettel in the Drivers’ standings.
Yet his lead could last for all of two weeks as the streets of Marina Bay have proven a difficult challenge for Mercedes to master, even when they have had the significant performance advantage of recent years.
“Singapore wasn’t the best of all places for us in the past, we were extremely delighted to win the race last year as we had such a difficult time in 2015,” Motorsport boss Toto Wolff reminisced.
With the margin across the top three teams perhaps the smallest it has been since the start of the V6 hybrid era, any problems Mercedes face again this year could well lead to a repeat of two years ago, where an inability to optimise tyres left them struggling behind their two rivals.
Either way, Ferrari has had better pace on non-power demanding circuits this year and in hot conditions, while Red Bull continues to make strong chassis gains and showed great strength under braking at Monza, which is also crucial around the Singapore track.
Mercedes acknowledge this, however, Wolff claims the team will not be giving up easily even if little appears to be in their favour.
“You can see this year slow twisty circuits have rather suited Red Bull and Ferrari, and lots of high-speed downforce was good for our car,” he claimed. “Now, I don’t think that is a pattern you can’t break, it’s about understanding your car, the more we clock mileage, the more we learn about it, nevertheless I still expect it to be a more difficult weekend for us than Monza, or Spa, Silverstone, because of those characteristics but we will try to understand it in the best possible way.”
Hamilton’s previous record in Singapore is patchy with two wins but also three retirements and the Briton couldn’t but accept the facts presented by his team boss when looking ahead to the race.
“I will do all the due diligence it’s possible to make sure that we arrive there best prepared,” he stated. “We have no idea until we get there what the picture’s going to look like but I think we learned a lot from the past but on a hot track, Ferrari is often better in hot places.
“I think we’ll be able to give them a good race,” he insisted. “I think the car is continuing to improve and as I said, our understanding of the car is beginning to… it’s constantly improving. Perhaps if we went back to Hungary for example, maybe we would be in a better position today with the knowledge of being there already.
“I go and approach it with a real positive mindset that we are going to be fighting for a win but if that’s not the case when we get there we’ll just take it at face value and try to get damage limitation, I guess.”
