Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg, who finished fifth in Singapore last weekend, believes there is a lot of
potential in Mercedes' new exhaust package that they have introduced during the race weekend at the Marina Bay street circuit, but he knows it will take some time before they will see all the benefits.
Although the initial feedback from both Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg have been positive, the latter feels they will get the most out of it in the upcoming races.
"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 video blog on the Mercedes website. "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 benefitted 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."
The upgraded Mercedes W03 did its job in Singapore on Sunday though as the 27 year old son of 1982 F1 World Champion Keke Rosberg finished fifth. It was Rosberg's best position since coming second in Monaco in May
"First time in a long time that everything really worked out for me, it was great. I had a good start with the new tyres, good strategy with the first stint. The tyre management perfect...that's what I'm quite pleased with fifth place in the end because it's a lot of points," Rosberg added.
