MARINA BAY, Singapore -- Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said qualifying for the Singapore Grand Prix has been a "personal highlight" after his team overcame the issues it faced at the same circuit 12 months ago.
Nico Rosberg took pole position by over 0.5s from Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo on Saturday -- a significant turnaround after Mercedes qualified 1.4s off pole last year. Wolff said the team had identified last year's Singapore issue at the following race in Japan but did not know for certain if they had solved it until qualifying on Saturday.
"First of all, you hear often sentences from the drivers or management, saying they are really thankful of the job the team did," Wolff said. "I must say, and we have just had the debrief, I am so proud of the job the engineers have done around really finding out about the root causes of last year's performance - and the severity of our lack of performance last year opened up new ways of thinking.
"I remember last year after the race, when we had the situation of crisis, we discussed it and we wanted to find out [the cause] and there was a worry it would maybe drag on into Suzuka and the following races. We kept our heads down and a small designated group looked at the data and then parked the topic and concentrated on Suzuka and this is now the proof today that we have understood where we had the weakness of the car and I think we had quite some learning for the other tracks throughout the 2016 season that we benefitted from Singapore last year. So sometimes those difficult moments give you the possibility of really driving from there on.
"This is actually my personal highlight today that we have a car that is performing well. Obviously it is only Saturday and we haven't started the race, we haven't won it yet and tomorrow is going to be a totally different challenge. But having got the car where it is today I must really say the team has done a great job."
Wolff was still not willing to go into specifics about the issue, but said it was related to the bumpy nature of the Singapore circuit.
"The interaction of the aero with the mechanical set-up on a particular circuit like Singapore, a street circuit and riding the kerbs, and a bumpy circuit, gave us a challenge in the way our car has been designed. Our car overall is pretty balanced throughout the season, on all race tracks and we struggled on a twisty road circuit like Singapore.
"You could have said this is a particular circuit that is not suited to our car and that is how it is, but we tried to find out how we can optimise our car for this particular circuit."