Hamilton: Mercedes now understands Singapore issues

Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes is "confident" it now understands what happened in Singapore, but concedes such problems could happen again.

Mercedes were unable to get the tyres to work at the Marina Bay Street Circuit and trailed both Ferrari and Red Bull.

Speaking ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix this Sunday, Hamilton said the team have busy trying to further understand what went wrong last weekend.

"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," Hamilton explained.

"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."

Asked if he is confident the team won't have a repeat of those issues again, he replied: "You can never say never. I'm not thinking it was just a fluke 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. I believe it's specific for Singapore and it should go back to normal."

"Whatever happened, happened," he added. "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. 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."

Meanwhile, Hamilton was also quizzed on the threat from Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari, but insisted that nothing has 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," he noted.

Finally, despite suffering his first retirement of the season in Singapore - due to a failure of a clamp which led to a loss of boost pressure - Hamilton said Mercedes has no plans to be more conservative.

"It wouldn't have made any difference, the thing that happened at the last race wasn't down to performance or having the engine turned up or down, it's just that a part failed. There was no plan to turn it up or down, we run it exactly the same way as usual.

"I had 20 races without or something like that without reliability issues, which is amazing considering the amount of force and stress we put these engines through. When you consider how far they have to go with just four units, it's amazing really," he concluded.