Toto Wolff, Mercedes team principal, believes Ferrari optimized its car which led to the victory.
Singapore Grand Prix was dominated by Ferrari’s great performance from qualifying to race. Ferrari managed to find one-two at podium for first time this season.
Mercedes was also surprised by its rival performance. German team was believed to have more advantage on Marina Bay Circuit over its Italian competitor.
However, Ferrari manage to turns the table by extracting maximum pace for a single lap during qualifying leading to pole position.
Ferrari had upgraded its SF-90 but Wolff believes that optimization has helped them more. They had to lose stint performance in order to enhance their pace.
“I think this is not about upgrades,” said Wolff. “This is about doing the best out of your package.
“They have a tremendously powerful engine which is an important ingredient that allows you maybe more strategic choices on set-up.
“But this is no excuse. Overall it’s about making the best out of your package and I think we had a package capable for pole. We had an opportunity today to win. We made too many mistakes, too many opportunities lost and we are very aware about it.”
Wolff admired rival team. He pointed out that an upgrade can’t turns the table around but rather the teams have to work toward “having a strong package overall and getting things right.”
“They tuned their car for one lap, which was powerful [on Saturday]”, he explained. “You could see that they were nowhere in race pace but very quick from the get-go.
“If we would have had less Safety Cars – ‘would have’, I guess you need to expect Safety Cars around here – I think the race rolling, we would have had a good car at the end and maybe even an opportunity to even win the race. But it wasn’t the right strategy today, it wasn’t the right calls.”
Anger in Wolff’s team
Wolff also provide insight to its team situation. The team is “angry” for not making the best out of itself at Singapore which led to podium less race costing them their ranking points.
“We are all angry and we just had a little get-together with the engineers and the drivers and there is a general feeling of ‘we got it wrong’.
“We got it so wrong this weekend. But it doesn’t mean that this is having a long-term impact on us.”
