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The overtaking delta around Singapore – how much quicker you need to be than another car to make an overtake – is around 1.5s. That’s feasible when you are comparing new tyres with old. But when Singapore is a one-stop race, then cars which have qualified together will essentially sort themselves out in the opportunities of the first lap and then remain in that position.
Just circulating at high speed under the floodlit night, drivers sweating away a few kilos, looking after the vulnerable brakes, waiting for a safety car chance, staying just out of the turbulence of the car ahead lest you damage your tyres. George Russell, with the clear air his pole position had given him, dominated for Mercedes.
It may well have been different had Max Verstappen snatched pole from Russell the day before – as he might have done but for encountering Lando Norris’ dirty air - but he didn’t.
Red Bull’s reaction to that in terms of the choice of the soft as Verstappen’s starting tyre (from alongside the medium-shod Russell on the front row of a still-damp track) just made Russell’s evening more straightforward.
The soft’s traction wasn’t enough to overcome the big grip deficit of the left-hand side of the grid to that of the pole side, allowing Russell to lead into T1 with zero ambiguity, the Red Bull then fading after a few laps because of the less robust tyre.
This in turn kept what was probably the outright fastest car on the night – the McLaren – off Russell’s back.
“Lando looked incredibly fast today,” said Russell. “He was within 1s of Max the whole race and around here that’s not easy.”
That was Russell’s realisation as he reflected post-race on why he had dominated around a track which he would have put “near the bottom of those which I thought might suit our car.”
Upon first alighting from the car he’d said: “I don’t really know where this performance came from.”
Indeed it would have been hard to understand from the cockpit. But essentially Russell was in clear air, Verstappen was on the faster-wearing tyres and Norris was limited by the wrong-tyred Red Bull's pace.
“Yes, it looks like because there was significant tyre degradation, and our car has very good deg, we had very strong pace,” assessed McLaren’s Andrea Stella.
“But we did not have the fastest car in qualifying and that determined the outcome today.”
Verstappen’s choice of softs – once it hadn’t worked in beating Russell off the grid – then prevented the McLarens from getting anywhere near Russell, who escaped into the night like a burglar.
Dirty air here is all-powerful. Russell initially couldn’t even get close enough to trigger the blue flags as he came to lap Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin. Yet Norris was able to sit in Verstappen’s slipstream for lap after lap.
Third for Norris was a good outcome from fifth on the grid. The first of the places was made up by being on the grippier side than Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes ahead of him.
The other came at the expense of team-mate Oscar Piastri a few seconds later as racing’s natural choreography played out, with Norris on the inside for Turn 3 but being squeezed into a gap made tighter by Verstappen ahead making quite a conservative entry.
On the damp track, Norris couldn’t quite avoid hitting the Red Bull’s right-rear corner with his left-front wing, breaking off part of the McLaren endplate and bouncing him pretty hard into Piastri. It was a standard racing incident, but one amplified by the stakes and the tension.
In that moment, not only had Norris turned around the disadvantage of his qualifying two places behind Piastri, but he’d ensured himself pit stop priority. An angry Piastri backed away from the Verstappen-Norris train over the next few laps, the intention being to have his tyres in better shape when it mattered - towards the end of the stint.
But that backfired for him. For it meant he wasn’t as far ahead of Charles Leclerc as he could have been as the pit stop window opened and Leclerc pitted on lap 21.
The Ferrari was close enough that a few laps of Leclerc on fresh hards as Piastri continued on his old mediums was putting Piastri’s fourth at risk. So, despite Oscar feeling his tyres had plenty of life left in them, he was brought in earlier than planned, on lap 27, limiting the tyre offset of both McLarens over Verstappen – who had stopped on lap 19 with his softs spent – in the next stint.
The eight-lap tyre advantage of Piastri’s hards over Verstappen’s (and the seven-lap tyre age advantage of Norris over the Red Bull) was much less than it might have been had McLaren ran as long as its gentle tyre usage would have allowed.
Had the McLarens been able to deploy their superior tyre deg to maximise their first stints, then we might have got to that magic 1.5s lap time difference in the second stint which could have allowed them a realistic chance of passing the Red Bull. But seven/eight laps wasn’t enough of an offset.
So, why was Norris also brought in earlier? Because in exercising his right for stop priority as the leading McLaren, Norris refused to sanction Piastri coming in before him. So McLaren therefore had to first bring Norris in early so as to get Piastri in early enough to prevent the Leclerc undercut. In prioritising his advantage over Piastri, Norris may have actually reduced his chances of passing Verstappen.
Which was just yet-more great news for Russell. He had built up a nine-second lead over Verstappen in the first stint, but as soon as Max pitted out the way Norris and Piastri together were eating fast into the Mercedes' lead.
Verstappen, some way behind on new tyres which should’ve been around 1s faster, was going only 0.2-0.3s faster than the McLarens, good enough to protect his position after the McLaren stops but underlining the true competitive picture.
Verstappen was struggling with the Red Bull. Its rear tyre deg was such that he was later forced to use a brake balance and torque map which reduced the efficiency of the electrical regeneration.
Russell, struggling now with his tyres, was brought in with the McLarens catching him at almost half-a-second per lap, all strongly suggesting that the McLaren was indeed the fastest car on race evening.
Russell’s lead was enough that he still comfortably led after the stops, but the McLarens’ earlier-then-ideal stop timings meant that Verstappen was still the car behind - protecting him from the McLarens.
Norris got super-close to getting alongside Verstappen on a couple of occasions, but essentially it was stalemate after the stops.
Leclerc, having got ahead of Antonelli (and Lewis Hamilton) at the start through being on the grippier side, couldn’t hold onto the position against Antonelli indefinitely – but only because the Ferrari was running out of brakes. The Mercedes passed for fifth eight laps from the end.
Hamilton, suffering the same brake issues as Leclerc, made a second stop for a set of softs as he was so far clear of eighth place. These were so much faster he easily made up his pitstop loss – and Leclerc was asked to move aside for Hamilton to try an attack on Antonelli.
Hamilton's brakes gave up on the penultimate lap, his car trailing sparks into Turn 16 and requiring him to crawl to the flag, only just clear of Fernando Alonso. A five-second penalty for leaving the track too many times as Hamilton crawled around brakeless put him behind the Aston Martin in the official results.
For his ex-Mercedes team-mate Russell, thoughts post-race turned to how to rationalise this unexpected victory.
“I think we need to sit down tomorrow and Tuesday to sort of understand why the performance was so good,” Russell said. “I hope we can carry this through to the rest of the season, but I think realistically, Lando looked incredibly fast…
"So, we'll take the performance for today, celebrate it, and I won’t think too much about Austin yet."
