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Toto Wolff believes Lewis Hamilton’s Singapore Grand Prix win was one of the “greatest” of the current Mercedes team’s 74 victories in Formula 1.
As well as coming at a venue where Mercedes has struggled relatively in recent years, only winning last season because a first-lap crash wiped out both Ferraris and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, it also put Hamilton into a 40-point championship lead over Sebastian Vettel.
Wolff said being clearly outpaced by Ferrari in the Belgian GP at the end of August had motivated Mercedes.
”It feels like one of the greatest victories, because it was really our bogey circuit in the past,” said Wolff of the Marina Bay result.
“And we were so motivated to do well here. And we showed that we can also perform in Singapore, and coming here and finishing by winning the race, and with a very solid team result, is really a great achievement for everybody in the team.
“You need to make your own destiny a little bit. We’ve worked so hard after Spa to understand the car, and we knew against many voices that we could perform well in Singapore.
“We came here, and qualifying was amazing, the lap was really stardust, and then he controlled it throughout the whole race.”
Wolff said there was no specific effort focused on the Singapore track.
“It was just part of the ongoing development, to really try to understand the tyres and the car better, and make it more compact with it all together,” he explained.
“There’s never one silver bullet, it’s tiny little steps that are important to make the car perform like it did.
“There’s marginal gains that will determine the outcome of this championship, because on performance levels we are very close to each other.
“So we have to keep the foot on the throttle and try to avoid mistakes and continue to develop the car.”
Hamilton’s win and team-mate Valtteri Bottas’s fourth place also gives Mercedes a 37-point constructors’ championship advantage over Ferrari with six races to go.
But Wolff insisted Mercedes was still far from comfortable in either championship.
“Forty points advantage or zero, makes no difference for us,” he said.
“You can see, like in Austria when we had a double DNF, how quickly it goes, and you lose 25 points.
We just have to look weekend by weekend and try to perform at our best level.
“It’s only won when it’s won.”