More to come from the Mercedes upgrades

Following the race in Singapore, the Mercedes AMG team must have felt a bit deflated.

Not only did they watch seven-time Formula One World Champion Michael Schumacher clumsily plough into the back of Toro Rosso’s Jean-Eric Vergne, but the much hyped upgrades for Singapore didn’t really show many signs of an overall performance enhancement.

A revised exhaust layout had been heavily tested during the young driver test at Magny-Cours earlier this month.

Test drivers Sam Bird and Brendon Hartley were handed the job of testing in France and after completing over 1000 kilometres over the course of three days, Mercedes moved immediately to try its new Coanda-effect exhausts on both Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg’s car during free practice in Singapore.

The German team decided that they would race with it, due to the hopes that the new exhaust would benefit the team greatly around the slower speed turns of the Marina Bay circuit.

However that didn’t transpire to be the case. With Mercedes showing no real signs of improvement although a fifth placed Nico Rosberg did help in their constructors battle with Sauber.

‘It was an exciting weekend for us as a team because we had quite a lot of new parts on the car,’ Rosberg said in his post-race video blog on the Mercedes website, as quoted by Sky Sports.

‘It’s a very complicated development that we’re doing there on the aerodynamics with the exhaust gasses, pointing them in a certain direction so you get hot air on the back of the car which creates downforce so you can go faster through the corners.

‘It’s very difficult to direct that air in the right direction and everything so we found out it’s going to take a while to really optimise it. Of course it really benefited us, it already gave us a benefit this weekend, but it’s going to take some day in the next days and weeks to really get the most out of it.

‘So I’m quite optimistic that we can extract a lot of potential out of that. The others are a bit advanced on that already so maybe we can catch up a bit which would be good.’

In the Formula One constructors championship, Mercedes have little chance of breaking into the top four this season.

Championship leaders Red Bull hold a lead of 162 points over Mercedes, with McLaren 37 points behind Red Bull, Ferrari 16 points behind McLaren and Lotus 14 points behind Ferrari.

Mercedes closest rivals are Sauber who sit in sixth place, just 35 points behind the silver arrows.