Mercedes unruffled by F1 rivals' pace in the Singapore GP

Marina Bay F1 race winner Lewis Hamilton and team-mate Nico Rosberg scored Mercedes' seventh front-row lockout of the season in Singapore, but the grid was closer that at any other race in 2014.

Just 0.569 seconds covered the first nine places in qualifying, as the Red Bulls of Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo - plus Fernando Alonso's Ferrari - all qualified within a quarter of a second of Hamilton's pole mark.

Hamilton suggested the fact Mercedes did not bring an upgrade package to Singapore might have made the difference, while Rosberg reckoned the high temperatures and particulars of the track layout closed up the field.

"Singapore is a unique track and the overheating of the tyres was at its highest, maybe compared to all the other tracks with the supersoft tyre," Rosberg explained.

"And the fact you have so many sequences of corners; on the straights you always cool them down, but here you have one corner, the next corner, and short straights and that is just compounding overheating.

"If you then have a car that causes a little bit less of that overheating you can all of a sudden see very big differences, so that could be one reason.

"Maybe we were heating the tyres a bit more. I don't know."

Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff reckoned several circumstances combined to produce the closet qualifying session of the year.

"Singapore generally is different and the gaps tend to be closer, [but] it was closer than we expected," Wolff said.

"Is it because it's not a power circuit? Or you need to be gentle with the tyres because tyres overheating is the issue?

"I think you cannot put it down to one single factor.

"The end result was much closer than we expected; we got used to the less stressful qualifying sessions."

NORMAL SERVICE SHOULD RESUME

Rosberg suggested Singapore might have simply been a blip on the radar, and said Mercedes hoped to re-assert its authority at the upcoming races.

"Definitely the others were close, but if we remember Austria, for example, the Williams were quicker than us in qualifying and then after that different tracks came and we were looking really strong again," he added.

"We need to wait and see how it is the next couple of races.

"I still think we're looking good, and hopefully the next tracks will suit our car better and we can pull away again."