The first Singapore Grand Prix, which took place in 2008, was soaked in controversy as the Marina Bay circuit was the scene of the infamous “crash-gate” scandal which arguably cost Felipe Massa the championship.
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Hamilton fought back from 43 points behind earlier in the season to establish a 19-point lead – only for his Mercedes team-mate Rosberg to clinch his third straight win on Sunday to go eight points clear.
“No I’m not focused on points.as I always say I’m just happy with the win today”. “Of course Daniel tried to pull one up on me with the pit stop. He drove the race in the same way, he had a great start, controlled the pace and on the contrary Lewis didn’t have a good weekend – he was lacking laps to find out about the right set-up [in practice], so he couldn’t really choose the direction and that caused him to go backwards from then on”. “Obviously it still didn’t give us victory but I think staying on the same tyre probably wouldn’t have given us any better chance”.
With the championship lead secured, Rosberg has no intention to let it slip, especially when he feels that his F1 W07 Hybrid steed is starting to flex its muscles. Team put me on a three-stop at the end. “I was still getting warnings to the end but, the last ten laps, I just let them continue flashing as a warning and hoped for the best”. When the race restarted and the pack headed down to Turn 1 at full racing speed, a marshal was seen picking up debris on the circuit before realising what was headed his way.
Ricciardo, on the faster supersoft tyres in the last 13 laps, was gaining between one and two seconds per lap on Rosberg, who was on soft tyres, but the Silver Arrows pilot held on to beat the Australian by 0.488 seconds to the chequered flag.
“So even if the track’s hard to overtake (on), it was nice to be able to push to the last lap and know that I was at least putting some pressure on him and giving the crowd still a little bit of hope”.
“The next race will tell”, said a downbeat Hamilton when asked whether the manner of his defeat was a one-off.
Lewis Hamilton finished in third ahead of the Ferraris of Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel, with the latter having started from the rear of the grid. It was fun. It was good to push the whole race and I knew I would get close to Nico at the end.
“I don’t really have a reaction [to losing the championship lead]”, Hamilton said.
He intoned: “It really shows that not only do we have the best auto but also, we have a competent group of engineers to extract the potential from the best vehicle”.
“Last year we were nowhere here, we got destroyed by Red Bull and Ferrari”.
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Ricciardo too made his third stop, forcing Mercedes to consider pulling Rosberg in.
