Nico Rosberg took a convincing pole position for the 2016 Singapore Grand Prix yesterday, and today he managed to turn that pole in to a win, but only narrowly ahead of Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo with Mercedes team mate Lewis Hamilton in third place. Or should it let Raikkonen stay out with a lead of around 30 seconds and hope Hamilton can’t catch up? But for the moment, the idea to him is to take one thing at a time.
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“I’m not going to stand here and be disappointed”, Ricciardo said. That’s what I came here to do and now I will celebrate after this.
“After the race I said to the team we will win somewhere”, he added, “Hopefully we can get some rain and get the victory we are after!”
“I want to see how good he is and see if he can make the Mercedes disappear”, joked Ecclestone.
Hamilton, meanwhile, managed to finish in third place behind Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff lauded Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix as a great example of how Formula One should be, with the top three teams using different tyre strategies to keep the result in the balance until the last lap.
“It’s extremely disappointing to end my race in the barrier after just 50 metres, especially because I had made such a good start – probably my best getaway off the line this year”. Daniel tried to pull one on me with the pit stop at the end and I know it was going to be tight but I am really, really happy.
The Manor Racing driver had two hard pit stops during the race, which left him well adrift of the pack, with his first stop incorporating a five second time penalty when he was found to have overtaken another driver behind the safety vehicle. I was still getting the warnings toward the end but, like the last 10 laps, I just kind of just let it continue flashing as a warning and hoped for the best.
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.
Ricciardo then followed suit with his third stop of the race forcing Mercedes to consider putting Rosberg. “He couldn’t really double check the set-up, he wasn’t happy with the set-up, the auto wasn’t like it was”.
“Last year we were absolutely nowhere here, we got destroyed by the Red Bulls and Ferraris, and we understood what we did wrong”.
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“I lost a lot of time behind the Manors but it wasn’t possible to pass them on this track”.
