Singapore swings in Hamilton’s favour

Lewis Hamilton went into the Singapore Grand Prix with a 22 point deficit to his Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg.

The Mercedes pair had locked out the front-row of the Singapore grid after a spectacular qualifying which split the two by just 0.007 seconds in Hamilton’s favour.

A combination of the street circuit track and perhaps developments from both Red Bull Racing and Ferrari had appeared to close the gap a little bit to Mercedes.

Starting on the clean side of the track all Hamilton could have hoped for was a poor start from Rosberg, to enable one of Vettel, Ricciardo or Alonso to get the jump on him going into the first corner in a vein hope of being able to secure more than just the seven points that a one-two finish would bring.

In the end all of Hamilton’s Christmas’ came at once, as the unlucky streak and reliability issues that had plagued Hamilton so frequently this season hit Rosberg.

The German struggled with a faulty steering wheel and was unable to even take part in the parade lap, his electrical fault ending his race before it even began.

This handed Hamilton the chance to not only take the victory, the seventh of the season, but also take the lead in the Formula One World Championship for only the second time this season.

It was all going to plan until Adrian Sutil and Sergio Perez collided. The Sauber squeezing the Force India a little bit too much and the two hit, eventually leading to Perez’s front wing failing and disintegrating into thousands of pieces all over the track.

This brought out the safety car and with it a switch in strategy, for all but Lewis Hamilton.

At this point, the rest of the field opted to switch to a two-stop pit strategy, leaving Hamilton on a three-stop strategy.

This meant that Hamilton needed to pull out around a 30 second lead inside 15 laps to be able to win the Grand Prix.

With Mercedes dominance not clear at this track this looked like a difficult task, but Hamilton pulled it off, lap after lap, Hamilton put in qualifying pace times to pull out a lead of around 2 seconds per lap.

By the time he pitted, he lost one place to the Red Bull of Sebastian Vettel and within a lap he had got past the reigning quadruple world champion to secure the win and a three point lead in the championship.

‘It would have been a really hardcore race if Nico had been at the front, as we clearly had the pace. It was all running pretty comfortably until the Safety Car came out, which gave me some problems. I was driving hard to build the gap but then the tyres started dropping off and I wasn’t sure what to do – keep pushing or back off to look after them. So we pitted straight away and I came out behind Seb.’ Hamilton told formula1.com.

I knew they were on a two-stop strategy and that his tyres were old. I went for it down the back straight – the gap was pretty small and maybe I could have chosen another point on the circuit. But I luckily squeezed through and made it stick.

‘Of course, it’s not an ideal result with Nico retiring, so that shows we still have work to do to get on top of reliability. But it’s been a great job from the team at everyone at the factories to make this mega car.