Toto Wolff says Mercedes almost “peed their pants” as Daniel Ricciardo slashed away at Nico Rosberg’s lead in the final laps of the Singapore Grand Prix.
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The German emerged victorious at the Marina Bay Street Circuit to move to the top of the Drivers’ Championship standings, eight points clear of Hamilton, who could only secure a third-place finish in the race.
With six races left this season, Rosberg has snagged the momentum from teammate Lewis Hamilton.
Rosberg was in unbeatable form in Singapore as he captured a dominant pole position and held off a late surge from Daniel Ricciardo to retake the lead of the world championship.
Rosberg topped the podium for the eighth occasion this season via a 0.488 second victory, but his heart would have been in his mouth in the closing stages after Ricciardo had threatened to gate crash his party. “[I] had a great start, had a good vehicle in the race.we knew it was going to be tight at the end, but it worked out, so I’m really, really happy”.
“The whole auto was on the edge, it always is in Singapore”.
But he was happy to hear about boss Toto Wolff’s claim that Rosberg is now in the form of his life.
“We almost peed our trousers at the end”, Wolff said.
“I pushed so much at the end on the supersoft and really tried to do something but it wasn’t close enough”.
But Hamilton started to gain pace near the end as the problem eased and he regained the podium by undercutting Raikkonen during the final pit stops. Although things once had looked promising for him, Rosberg was quicker than him during the 58th lap as he got stuck in traffic.
Perhaps the revelation of the race was Sebastian Vettel who finished fifth. “I think just as we didn’t expect the restart, he didn’t either, I think, because the restart was somehow pretty abrupt”.
There was drama at the start as Nico Hulkenberg hit Carlos Sainz’s Toro Rosso and careered across the track before smashing into the pit lane wall and bringing out the safety vehicle.
Amid the drama of the opening lap, during which Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg crashed out after clipping Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz, Rosberg fended off the challenge of Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo in second place and led comfortably for most of the race while managing his brakes to keep them from overheating.
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“Our statistical tool told us we had seven seconds [predicted advantage at the finish after Ricciardo’s stop], then over two or three laps he was going three, three-and-a-half seconds faster and suddenly the algorithm showed no gap anymore”.
