Wolff relieved to win at Mercedes’ “bogey circuit”

Toto Wolff hailed Mercedes’ victory at the Singapore Grand Prix as a “great achievement” after describing the track as the team’s “bogey circuit”.

Lewis Hamilton won from pole position around the Marina Bay circuit to extend his championship lead to 40 points from Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari.

“It feels like one of the greatest victories because it was really our bogey circuit in the past,” says Wolff.

“We were so motivated to do well here and show that we can also perform in Singapore and coming here and finishing by winning the race with a very solid team result is really a great achievement for everybody in the team.

Wolff believes the performance they lost to Ferrari at the Belgian Grand Prix forced Mercedes to work hard to see where they could make up the gap to their championship rivals.

“You need to make your own destiny and we have worked so hard after Spa to understand the car and we knew that against the many voices we could perform well in Singapore and we came here and the qualifying was amazing, the lap was really stardust and then [Hamilton] controlled it throughout the whole race,” says Wolff.

After Ferrari gambled on the ultra soft tyres to try and undercut Hamilton during the pit stop cycle, Wolff says Mercedes always believed that the Soft tyres were the right option for Hamilton.

“It was a bit of a bold call because it was not clear whether the ultra softs would make it to the end,” he says.

“But in order to make the undercut work, the ultra softs were the right tyre. We were already pretty sure the softs would be the tyre to go to the end and it was the right call.”

Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free

2018 F1 season

• Honda’s jet division helped F1 engineers solve power unit problem
• McLaren Racing losses rise after Honda split
• Ricciardo: Baku “s***show” was Red Bull’s fault
• “Drive to Survive Episode 1: All to Play For” reviewed
• F1’s television and social media audiences rose last year