Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Mercedes facing 'an emergency situation' - Rosberg

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Nico Rosberg says Mercedes is facing "an emergency situation" after being so far off the pace at the Singapore Grand Prix.

Having dominated qualifying throughout the last two years - only beaten once since the start of 2014 - Mercedes was never in the hunt for pole position in Singapore and ended over 1.5s slower than Sebastian Vettel. With Mercedes unsure of the reason for its lack of performance, Rosberg admits he still thought he would be fighting for pole based on the feeling within the car.

"Yeah, everybody is surprised," Rosberg said. "We don’t understand it for now. We tried a lot of things because we understood we had an emergency situation.

"This morning we tried a lot of things and didn’t manage to make progress, we were just lacking grip. If I wasn’t looking at the lap times, I would think we would be on pole but then I look at the lap times and I am not on pole."

And Rosberg says he was amazed by how much more performance Ferrari had in qualifying trim.

Asked if he'd ever experienced a similar drop-off, Rosberg replied: "Not this extreme, because we were so dominant and faster everywhere massively, then to go to the next race, we can’t lose 1.4secs on one lap.

"I just watched Sebastian’s on-board – I didn’t want to – but I shouted out in the engineering room ‘what the hell?!’ It seems like he is on a different planet in some corners."

REPORT: Vettel storms to Singapore pole as Mercedes dominance ends

AS IT HAPPENED: Singapore Grand Prix qualifying

Click here for some of the most memorable crashes at Singapore

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.