Nico Rosberg insists that it will be a challenge for Mercedes to improve on last year’s performance at the Singapore Grand Prix and has admitted the team cannot travel there with much confidence.

Mercedes endured their worst weekend of 2015 at the Marina Bay street circuit as Rosberg, who is priced at 4.50 to win the World Championship, and team-mate Lewis Hamilton had to settle for a place on the third row of the grid following qualifying.

The Brackley-based outfit appeared to get their tactics completely wrong and struggled to compete on the super-soft tyres in the soaring heat of Singapore.

Rivals Ferrari and Red Bull were handed the chance to battle it out for the chequered flag as Rosberg finished fourth, while Hamilton was forced to retire with a “freak” power unit component failure.

Rosberg insists that despite some impressive performances this season, the team will still head into this weekend’s event feeling a lack of confidence due to events of 12 months ago.

The German feels it will be difficult to close the gap and expects it to be a challenge from start to finish. Rosberg said:

“We can’t go there with too much confidence because we were miles off last year. In qualifying it was 1.5 seconds I think, which is huge.

It was our most difficult race of the last two years. “So it’s going to be a very challenging weekend for us. We think we’ve made progress, but 1.5 seconds, that’s not going to be easy.”

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff believes the team knows what went wrong on their last trip to Singapore.

Wolff added: “We were uncompetitive last year, and I think we understood why.

“We drew some conclusions which helped us in the following races and throughout the season, and in Singapore we are going to check whether our assumptions were right.”