Lewis Hamilton says there is an engineering reason why Mercedes struggled so much in Singapore and has rejected suggestions the drop in performance was due to a conspiracy against his team.
After a year and a half of dominating F1, Mercedes was over a second off the pace at the Singapore Grand Prix last weekend as it failed to extract the same levels of grip from its tyres as its rivals. Hamilton said he had never experienced such a fluctuation in performance from one race weekend to another, but has ruled out some sort of conspiracy surrounding the tyres.
"I believe there were reasons in our balance and set-up that we had because of the avenues we went down that affected the car and tyres the way it did," he said. "The other teams perhaps did better than us and so I don't believe in all that conspiracy stuff. We just put it down to the technical side of things and we need to do a better job.
"I can't tell you what the team have come up with, but they have come up with a lot of solutions and reasons for it being the way it was. The majority of them believe at least one of the many solutions we came up with and the reasons had a domino effect. They are confident that it has been understood but they will continue to do an analysis."
Hamilton doubts a repeat will happen again this season, but said Mercedes still needed to gain an understanding of what happened.
"I'm not thinking it was just a fluke or anything like that, at some point there are going to be situations like that, whether it's this year, next year or the year after. But I'm hoping we have learned from that weekend and it won't happen again."
Hamilton's retirement in Singapore, which was due to a failure of a minor part in the engine, saw race winner Sebastian Vettel close to within 50 points of the reigning world champion with six rounds remaining. However, Hamilton said the Singapore result alone had not changed the threat Vettel poses in the title race.
"For me it hasn't changed since Malaysia. They have been a threat since they won in Malaysia and since then they have always been in view. When we got to Monza they took another step, but we have been aware of them all year. Nothing has changed for us but the media is talking about them more, which is great for the sport."