A Singapore Grand Prix featuring a surprise winner, a first-lap collision between Formula 1 title rivals and team-mates, and plenty of winners and losers in an F1 race that didn't feature its customary safety car.
Winner - Lando Norris (3rd)
You can argue whether the stewards or McLaren should have intervened for that first-lap collision with Oscar Piastri, but Lando Norris is undeniably a winner from this race, given he’s gained three points on his main title rival.
So many times, Norris has been (in many cases fairly) criticised for the shortcomings in his racecraft, but he was brilliantly aggressive on the first lap in Singapore.
Hitting the back of Verstappen’s Red Bull was a mistake, but so too would have been backing out and sitting behind Piastri.
Norris saw an opportunity to barge his way past his title rival, and he took it, executing it without picking up significant car damage or picking up a penalty - job well done.
It means for the third consecutive weekend, Norris has outscored Piastri and almost recovered the 18 points lost to the Zandvoort car failure. - Josh Suttill
Loser - Oscar Piastri (4th)
Where to start! Piastri really could have done with a strong weekend after his Baku nightmare and it was decent up until the race, where it promptly fell flat.
He was victim of Norris contact at Turn 3 on the opening lap, but just generally looked slower through the first stint as well, which meant even if McLaren had wanted to swap them around it probably couldn’t have.
Piastri closed back in after what felt like a lifetime of Norris being hampered in Verstappen’s dirty air, but ultimately in the race Piastri was the clear second-best McLaren driver.
A second disappointing race in a row but, thankfully for him, not too many points lost and probably the best scenario of Norris finishing behind Verstappen in the race. - Jack Benyon
Winner - George Russell (1st)
There's a very strong case that this is the best season of Russell's F1 career.
But it's been easy to lose sight of that in recent months as the intra-team McLaren fight has developed, as Max Verstappen has become more of a looming threat in the title battle, and as the Mercedes challenge has faded.
Even Russell's assured run to second in Baku a fortnight ago went a bit under the radar. But there was nothing under the radar about this. Two stunning qualifying laps, and an utterly dominant drive to a second win of the season. Emphatic.
It's frustrating that these reminders are so often circumstance-dependent on Mercedes' side, but Russell properly grasped this chance to show just how formidable a driver he can be. - Jack Cozens
Loser - Yuki Tsunoda (12th)
Breakthrough, what breakthrough?
Unfortunately, a genuinely encouraging Baku weekend for Yuki Tsunoda couldn’t be built upon in Singapore as he qualified poorly and made more positions pre-race (two places gained via Williams’ double disqualification) than he did during the race (one place gained).
It looks all the more galling amid Red Bull’s revival with Tsunoda finishing an entire lap behind Verstappen, and he even ending up finishing behind Isack Hadjar’s wounded Racing Bulls... - JS
Loser - Isack Hadjar (11th)
... Speaking of Hadjar’s wounded Racing Bulls, what a quality drive this turned out to be, as Hadjar battled engine issues to still finish 11th, just losing out on the final point to a charging soft tyre-shod Carlos Sainz in the closing laps.
Hadjar has emphatically been the stronger Racing Bulls driver all weekend, but he’s in the loser category because that engine issue cost him a points result.
And his misfortune provided Williams with an unlikely point on a day Hadjar's team should have been doing some damage to its grip on fifth place in the constructors’ championship. - JS
Winner - Fernando Alonso (7th)
You wouldn't know it from the tone of two broadcasted and another unbroadcasted radio messages of his, but Alonso is one of the big winners from this race.
It turned out the Aston Martin didn't have the prodigious turn of speed Friday practice suggested it might, so wringing everything from it to secure a Q3 spot was already a good return - and far in excess of the potential team-mate Lance Stroll could demonstrate.
And then Alonso got even more of it still in both stints in the race - first fighting his way to the front of the midfield pack, then picking off rivals to get back up there following the painfully slow pitstop he endured (that induced his broadcasted frustration).
Another radio rant followed after the chequered flag, as Alonso repeated four times "I cannot f***ing believe it" about Lewis Hamilton's final few laps of the race and subsequently asked his team: "Is it safe to drive with no brakes?".
It wasn't, the FIA later ruled - in a roundabout way, at least, giving Hamilton a five-second penalty for leaving the track multiple times that promoted Alonso one more place in the order.
But while Alonso might not have been able to "f***ing believe" that, it's much easier to believe his pre-weekend claim that he's driving "better than ever".
And a quick word on Stroll: while he was nowhere near Alonso's level, he deserves some credit for making this Aston Martin result possible - as it was the latter stages of his mammoth, incredibly ambitious 38-lap stint on the soft tyre and the resulting bottling up of the pack that brought Alonso back into play. - JC
Winner - Ollie Bearman (9th)
Ollie Bearman scored his first points since Zandvoort in a hard-fought race, which could have ended before it really even began.
He was clipped by Isack Hadjar - who was sandwiched between Lewis Hamilton and Bearman into Turn 1 - on the first lap, and Bearman had to take the run off, but avoided a puncture after his left-rear was clipped.
Settling in, Bearman did a pretty standard 23-lap stint on the medium and passed Hadjar in the second stint as payback for their earlier incident, reclaiming ninth once Liam Lawson and Carlos Sainz stopped late on.
A few other overtakes, on Gasly and Albon notably, made the race a bit busier than his start and finish position made it look on his first visit to this track.
He's often criticised for being fast but inconsistent, but this was the pretty straightforward kind of race he needs to keep producing. - JB
Loser - Ferrari (6th and 8th)
A deeply underwhelming qualifying for Ferrari followed by an equally underwhelming grand prix.
Charles Leclerc fought his way past Kimi Antonelli at the start with a nicely aggressive move, but while Leclerc was later managing his brakes, Antonelli caught him napping with an even more aggressive move.
Leclerc made way for a soft tyre-shod Lewis Hamilton to have a go at Antonelli in the late stages, but that fell flat as Hamilton’s brake problems worsened.
He limped across the line just ahead of Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin, but not without leaving the track enough times to land a five-second time penalty that dropped him behind Alonso into eighth.
In the words of Leclerc, who finished sixth, the drivers just feel like a “passenger in the car” right now and are left wishing Ferrari could make the steps towards McLaren that Red Bull and (in Singapore at least) Mercedes have. - JS
Winner - Carlos Sainz (10th)
James Vowles's declaration on Saturday Williams would "do everything we can" to fight for points from the back of the grid once both cars were excluded from qualifying felt like a bit of a futile gesture. Surely there was no way into the top 10 here from 18th and the pitlane? Certainly not without a safety car...
Cue a perfectly executed race and drive from Williams and Sainz, who had a real pep in his step again after cutting a deflated figure post-qualifying (but pre-exclusion!) as his strong single-lap pace faded due to what Sainz felt was a wrong change of set-up direction.
The key to Sainz's race was, as he put it, making the "the medium look like a hard" and completing a 50-lap stint that set him up for a late charge on softs.
Williams is still making mistakes, but Sainz has accepted that: "As long as we don't repeat mistakes and we keep learning, that's, I think, the key for us." And there really is an impression that a breakthrough's been made in terms of Sainz's understanding of the team's and the car's weaknesses that longer-term will make Williams even stronger.
"We keep criticising the tyre preparation; my feeling, after a few races and the more I understand the car, is that it's a weakness of the car also, not a weakness of switching on and off the tyre," he declared after the race. "And probably that weakness in quali is what makes us also very strong in the race and makes us do 50 laps on a medium. So you cannot have it all.
"We just need to reverse engineer a bit the car and see why and how we can put ourselves in a better position for Sundays."
So this was a great salvage job, but perhaps there's better still to come. - JC
Loser - Nico Hulkenberg (20th)
It feels like Nico Hulkenberg has been getting a bit of stick lately as his rookie team-mate Gabriel Bortoleto has been increasingly impressive in recent months, but Hulkenberg had a chance to at least temper that narrative with an 11th-place starting spot.
But in the race he went straight on into the run-off behind the Isack Hadjar/Ollie Bearman contact, when it looked like Hulkenberg could have stayed on track.
He remained 11th, but broke a front wing endplate on lap 43/62 at Turn 14 after being squeezed slightly towards the wall by Franco Colapinto, and then, one lap later, spun at Turn 7 trying to avoid Colapinto who Hulkenberg felt braked a bit early.
The only upside was how Hulkenberg gracefully spun the car backwards into the run-off so he was facing the right way to drive out, without hitting anything.
A second stop - for a new front wing - consigned him to last place. - JB
