Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Wolff denies complacency caused Singapore slump

Mercedes motorsport chief Toto Wolff said that it's good to be back on form but insisted that the team's strange slump in form at Singapore hadn't been down to complacency.

"I don’t think complacency is the feeling," he said after a Mercedes 1-2 in the Japanese Grand Prix on Sunday.

"Like always in life, you get used to things and take them for granted. Doesn’t make you work worse, but your own expectations are raised to a level where anything worse than a win is not making you happy anymore.

"Singapore was different circumstances, a different layout, we weren’t particularly good last year and many more reasons we will turn around."

The team has set up an internal group to investigate its poor Singapore performance with Wolff saying he expects many factors to have contributed towards the car not being competitive enough.

The success in Suzuka has in any case restored the team's spirits and made them more positive and optimistic about the remaining five races of the 2015 Formula One world championship.

"It feels good. When you go through the pain of the moment in Singapore and try to bounce back, then you recover in the race like we’ve had here. It’s a difficult race, then you finish the race 1-2, it is just satisfaction.

Not that the race had been quite as easy and straight forward as it looked from the outside, Wolff revealed, despite the margin of Hamilton's victory.

"Lewis was managing the gap. For us that wasn’t visible because the cars weren’t shown, but we had some minor drama with the car, temperature related issues.

"Lewis flat-spotted his tyre and that caused massive vibration. When we took the tyre off the car it was flat-spotted, so that could have ended badly.

"We tweaked the power unit and the chassis a lot because we were seeing signs of reliability issues, which worried us a bit."

Despite Mercedes' clear advantage over its rivals, it's clear that the team knows it still has a lot of work to do if it's to keep its running dominant streak in the sport going and not fall into any more sudden slumps.

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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.