The 18th round of the 2025 Formula 1 season at the Singapore Grand Prix had big title fight implications and some important drives for those fighting to save their F1 careers.
Here's what we learned from the Singapore weekend:
The gloves are off in McLaren's title fight
Oscar Piastri's radio messages during the Singapore GP hint that McLaren has a new, unfamiliar tension to deal with in the final six races.
He played the PR game well after the race but Piastri and his team will be expecting answers from McLaren, and what McLaren finds from its promised review into the first-lap incident with Lando Norris will be important to Piastri's place in the team and how he approaches the next races.
With the constructors' title now sealed and Norris benefitting from McLaren's intervention at Monza and strategic freedom in Hungary, it would be very easy to wonder if Piastri might get more selfish.
Norris certainly showed he's willing to be aggressive and Singapore proved to be his most successful bit of racecraft all season long - earning a podium position and three points on Piastri that would have been very hard to obtain if he'd sat back at Turn 1.
Things have been very tepid between the McLaren drivers for most of the season, but on the evidence of Singapore, the gloves might be well and truly off between Piastri and Norris. That will be a headache for McLaren, but it's great news for F1. - Josh Suttill
Tsunoda's frustrating contrast
Yuki Tsunoda's grand prix featured his best and worst moments for Red Bull ever - his words, not ours.
His opening lap was terrible. "The worst one I have ever had," Tsunoda claimed. No arguments here. He meandered into the middle lane for Turn 1, and ended up stuck all the way to and through Turn 3, losing several places in the process.
That poor racecraft and decision-making compounded an already poor grid position after qualifying badly in 13th, and made Tsunoda's race even harder.
What's frustrating for him is that the pace that followed, he reckoned, is "the best that I have had" since joining Red Bull!
That might not have been obvious watching as progress is hard to make here, but Tsunoda did creep into points contention.
That he fell short was just another example of how costly his first lap was - and it was also quite disappointing that he failed to beat a hobbled Isack Hadjar, even if Tsunoda did forfeit an unnecessary amount of race time by being extra cautious making sure he didn't get in team-mate Max Verstappen's way while being lapped. - Scott Mitchell-Malm
Russell lays another ghost to rest
With two wins and eight podiums overall, this is now George Russell's best season in F1 - and his pair of victories have come at tracks where he had something to prove.
Whether it was overzealousness or lapses in concentration, Russell had made costly errors in Canada and Singapore in previous seasons that were at odds with his potential star status.
This year, though, he has evolved into a "very different" and totally dependable top-line driver: as wins at those two circuits have proven.
Crashing out of a podium position on the final lap of Singapore two years has clearly stuck with Russell, who made mention of it several times after winning - including the very obvious reference that all he had to do while managing his gap to Verstappen was "watch out for the wall at Turn 10".
Curiously, Singapore hasn't been kind to Russell in the past. He finally scored points for the first time last year at the fourth attempt, and this win was also his first podium. That has closed the chapter on his "missed opportunity" from two years ago. - SMM
Ferrari drivers feel like passengers
The Ferrari drivers were just "passengers" in the car over a deeply underwhelming Singapore GP weekend in which their car was a clear fourth best, frozen out of the podium fight.
It wasn't a disaster weekend like the double Zandvoort DNF or even as bad as Baku, but it was perhaps more galling in that Ferrari just never looked like it was in the fight at a circuit it was victorious at just two years ago.
Singapore is tough on brakes, but Ferrari suffered more than any other team with Lewis Hamilton losing over 40 seconds in the closing laps.
And it was another weekend in which a McLaren rival (this time Mercedes) impressed with the kind of step the Ferrari drivers wish their team would make.
"McLaren always had the same gap on us compared to the beginning of the year, Red Bull did a step from Monza and are at the same level as McLaren, Mercedes now is at the same level of McLaren and Red Bull. Then there's us," Charles Leclerc summarised.
"It's not easy, you want to fight for better positions, but at the moment it kind of feels like we're passengers of the car, we cannot extract much more." - JS
Colapinto boosts his 2026 case
There wasn't much reason for optimism in the Alpine camp in Singapore given the car's lack of pace. The only positive is that Franco Colapinto put together a good weekend in which he outperformed team-mate Pierre Gasly.
While Colapinto was frustrated by the inconsistencies of the Alpine A525 around a track that's both bumpy and demands good traction, a combination that doesn't play to what strengths the car does have, he was at least pleased with his own personal performance.With defacto team boss Flavio Briatore recently confirming the team is choosing between Colapinto and reserve driver Paul Aron for the seat alongside Gasly next year, this is a timely performance for the Argentinian.
While starting and finishing 16th doesn't look good on paper - albeit after briefly running as high as 13th after a good start and run through the first corner - he did what he realistically could in Singapore's worst car by beating Gasly.
This wasn't helped by a strategic gamble to start on softs then switch to mediums after just 14 laps, which it was hoped might yield undercut gains. Instead, it left him battling hard in the closing stages even to hang onto 16th on tyres he said were falling apart.
With Gasly complaining that the team didn't even get the best even out of the limited machinery, switching floor spec and starting from the pits as an experiment in a bid to learn something, Colapinto's low-key success was at least something. - Edd Straw
Red Bull's an even bigger threat to McLaren
Remove Russell from the weekend and Verstappen would have taken 10 points out of Piastri's lead, and brought it down to 59 points.
Instead, the gap is down to 63 from 69 - nowhere near the race-by-race gain Verstappen needs - but it's still a decent dent.
And even though Verstappen's Sunday drive in particular was difficult with braking and balance issues, more importantly, it was proof that Red Bull can be a threat to McLaren on higher downforce circuits, too, even if track position rather than superior raw car pace won the day for Verstappen.
It still answered one of the biggest question marks of the weekend. And a bad weekend for Red Bull here would have knocked any dream of a Verstappen title charge dead before it started.
Instead, a second place in Singapore adds to the data set of the last three races post-Red Bull's Monza breakthrough, which suggests Red Bull can challenge McLaren at every circuit.
And if the McLaren drivers are going to get more aggressive with each other, that's only going to boost Verstappen's chances of some late-season wins and a potential sniff at the title. - JS
Antonelli's most complete weekend
Kimi Antonelli may have been overshadowed by Mercedes team-mate Russell winning from pole position, but while his results on-paper don't entirely show it, this was regarded by the Mercedes team as his most complete weekend of the season.
Team principal Toto Wolff, who just two races ago criticised his "underwhelming" weekend at Monza, was this time full of praise for his young charge.
In particular, he talked up his outbraking manoeuvre on Leclerc, in which the brake pressure was so great that the telemetry system couldn't adequately register it.
Wolff explained, "We could see on the telemetry a huge braking event. There was so much pressure in the system that it started to oscillate."
Antonelli was understandably kicking himself for throwing away a likely front row by being too tense in Q3, and then making a bad start that dropped him to sixth – necessitating that later overtaking move on Leclerc.
His final summary was that he could have achieved more, describing fifth as simply OK.
But while his execution wasn't quite there, what really impressed was Antonelli's pace. During Friday practice he was stronger than eventual race-winning team-mate Russell, adapting well to the track surface that provided a high level of trip but that was easy to suffer from sliding on. He did so well enough for Russell to study his data to learn a few tricks for Saturday.
Had Antonelli delivered in Q3, he could easily have been up there with Russell and maybe even threatened for pole position. And from the front row, he would likely have finished on the podium.And it's that underlying performance that grabbed the attention of Mercedes, confirming Antonelli has recovered from his mid-season slump. - ES
Drivers won't win cooling vest battle
F1 had its first official ‘Heat Hazard’ race in Singapore – when predicted weather conditions opened the door for the FIA to activate cooling vest rules.
The new regulations, in response to the medical dramas of Qatar 2023, meant teams were required to fit cooling systems to their cars for the first time, even if drivers wearing special vests to go with them remains optional for now.
But while some drivers welcomed the benefit that came from having a bit of extra ice cool liquid pumped around them in the cockpit, not everyone was in favour.
In fact, some of F1’s top stars including Verstappen and Leclerc are pushing the FIA to back down over making the cooling vests mandatory for next season – amid complaints that they are uncomfortable and pose bigger risks because when they stop work drivers risk getting even hotter.
While the FIA is open to discussing the next steps for the cooling vests – and does not want to get into a situation where it is forcing them on drivers – equally it is not going to give up on the idea.
It feels that teams have been a bit tardy in getting the technology to work properly, and wants to keep the pressure on to make the cooling vests become a component that everyone thinks is normal in the future.
So while they could remain voluntary next season as work continues to improve things, the FIA is standing firm that the technology is here to stay. - Jon Noble
Hulkenberg found confidence but couldn't use it
There's a twisted irony to the fact Nico Hulkenberg recaptured some of his lost confidence and matched his best qualifying performance of the season in Singapore - only to then have maybe his worst race of the year.
Hulkenberg had admitted on Thursday ahead of the event that he has found qualifying tricky in the Sauber, but then he bested team-mate Gabriel Bortoleto on Saturday and very nearly made it to Q3 for the first time.
Falling from 11th to 20th, with a massive spin he was lucky not to crash out with in the middle, was then a very bad night's work given Sauber thought scoring points was possible here.
That isn't entirely on Hulkenberg as he lost ground with Sauber letting him get badly undercut by other cars, meaning he was running well outside points contention by the time he got caught out by Colapinto and lost it big time under braking, flying backwards down an escape road. - SMM
Stroll's struggling with 'lottery' Aston Martin
Aston Martin emerged on top of F1's midfield in Singapore, with Fernando Alonso even beating Hamilton's Ferrari once a penalty had been applied for some blatant track limits abuse.
It marked a return to form for the team after a couple of difficult point-less weekends, but Lance Stroll was absent from that form uptick.
He was 0.204s slower than Alonso in Q1 - not bad considering Alonso is 0.362s quicker on average this year - but more painful was his lack of confidence behind the wheel.
He called the AMR25 a "lottery" to drive all weekend and ended up hanging around for a safety car that never came in the race, ending up 13th.
Stroll says he hasn't felt "harmony in the car for a long time", which is making putting laps together difficult.
When The Race asked about Stroll's comments, team boss Andy Cowell said "our car is especially hard to drive, we've made improvements compared to last year, but it's still exceptionally hard to drive. Some of his commentary was frustration at feeling like he should have been able to get through Q1, but he hasn't been able to get through.
"But I think that's down to us not giving him practice time before, that's a lesson for us."
Aston Martin will hope it can help him find some harmony in the last six races now Alonso has reduced the constructors' gap to sixth-placed Racing Bulls to just four points, and having two points-scoring drivers is crucial in such a tight midfield fight. - JS
