Whock Singapore gp win leaves Mercedes looking for answers

Toto Wolff says that the current generation of Formula 1 cars is a “surprise box” means results such as the victory of the George Russell Singapore Grand Prize has become a characteristic of the time.

In the era of the earth’s effect, Mercedes could have experienced more ups and downs than any other team in the Paddock, with frustrating mediocrity streaks scored by rare victories, but often dominant. But perhaps none was more surprising than Russell’s second victory of the campaign in Singapore, on a hot track that Mercedes would never have guessed that he would adapt to his W16 car.

“If I had to make a list of all the races that I thought we could win this year, this would probably be at the bottom,” Russell said after defeating Max Verstappen to Pole and then control the race from beginning to end. “So I think we need to sit tomorrow and Tuesday to understand why the performance was so good.”

Where did the convincing form of Singapore F1 of Mercedes come from? “You tell me,” replied the chief of the Toto Wolff team. “That was never a pleasant place for us in terms of automobile performance. And if you had told me that we were dominating the way we did today, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

In the race, Mercedes felt flattered by the circumstances and the position of the track, with Russell crucially holding the leadership in media against Verstappen in Softs. When Verstappen vanished, he also kept Lando Norris at Raya, who seemed to be the fastest car on the track. But Russell’s performance and the general weekend performance was convincing.

There are some early signals that could help explain why Russell, and to a lesser extent, his teammate, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who took fifth, could shine under the lights of Marina Bay. While Singapore equatorial is a suffocating place to organize a race, track temperatures during the night race actually rolled the 33 TOT 34 degrees, warm but not excessively.

And although the levels of aerodynamic load are very high, with their lack of rapid and long corners, the 5 km street circuit of Singapore does not put so much lateral load through the tires, something that Singapore has in common with Montreal, where Russell also won the pole.

A third element is relatively lower Mercedes competition. Red Bull was certainly fast, which established it for a strong final at 2025 after its change of season, but was also surprised by its shape in a circuit that is not the strongest and will have delighted with the end of Verstappen in second place. McLaren also found a circuit that did not accentuate the strengths of its 2025 cars, with Andrea Stella arguing that the specific problems of the track were aggravated by rivals that were up to date in the development race. Ferrari, meanwhile, seems to have abandoned the fight for the victories of the race anywhere.

But Wolff’s underlying argument is that the art of exploiting the outgoing generation of ultra sensitive cars, and the Pirelli gum in which they support themselves, is still difficult to dominate. Mercedes was often wrong, including this season several times. This time his silver stars aligned.
“These cars are just a surprise box. If you ask McLaren why the last three races have not gone at all, they would probably fight for the answers. And in the same way, Max returns and then lack of performance again today, and the same with the Ferraris ranges between success and failure,” he added.
“It’s just that the margins are so small to have the car in the correct aerodynamic window, extracting that maximum mechanical grip without killing the tires, and the optimal point of the Pirellis obviously. That does not always correlate what you see in the virtual world, in the simulations, to what happens on the track.
“But (in Singapore), from the first moment, the tires, the driver and the car were synchronized and not be beaten.”

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– The Motorsport.com team