Five Winners, Five Losers: Singapore Grand Prix
Max Verstappen swept the board at Marina Bay, but who else had a weekend to remember?
Winner: Max Verstappen
Did you know that Marina Bay is Max Verstappen’s weakest track? The Dutchman clearly didn’t, as he completed the perfect weekend at a circuit that had always previously been his Achilles heel.
At the only track where he didn’t claim a podium in his ridiculous 2023 season, and where even former Sauber driver Antonio Giovinazzi had led more laps heading into this weekend, the four-time world champion was in a different league under the Singapore lights.
Yes, perhaps George Russell’s race-ending error on the opening lap of the sprint race gifted Verstappen victory on Saturday, but as the saying goes – to finish first, first you have to finish.
The Dutchman was also perhaps fortunate that neither Ferrari put a clean lap together in Qualifying, given the Scuderia’s seemingly superior pace over one lap. However, when it came down to it, Verstappen showed a cutting edge that Lewis Hamilton perhaps doesn’t have any more and Charles Leclerc, frankly, has arguably never had.
Verstappen had his mirrors full of Leclerc for the opening 15 laps of Sunday’s race, suggesting the Monégasque may have had the pace to challenge for victory. One simple radio message from engineer Gianpiero Lambiase was all it took, though, for the Dutchman to put the hammer down, and he was soon almost a second a lap quicker than the two red cars behind.
Once he broke clear, the only issue Verstappen faced all race was his long-time nemesis, his team radio. The Dutchman has always sounded particularly unclear over the airwaves, but in Singapore he could send nothing more than muffled sounds back to the pit wall. No worries, though, as GP improvised a new method of communication to discuss strategy options.
It is all ifs and buts, but it is hard not to imagine the title chase we could have had were Verstappen closer than the 119 points he finds himself behind Kimi Antonelli.
Winner: Kimi Antonelli
I noted in my preview to this race that if Kimi Antonelli could eke out his championship lead over George Russell by another 16 points, he would be in a championship-winning position come the next race in Austin.
The Italian duly obliged, putting 18 points into his nearest title challenger over the weekend at Marina Bay.
The championship leader led a charmed life under the lights after qualifying a lowly seventh for the sprint race, while Russell lined up on the front row alongside Verstappen. Russell’s self-inflicted retirement at the end of the first lap, coupled with the two McLarens colliding up ahead, turned a possible six-point loss into a five-point gain.
Antonelli then lined up fourth on Sunday and managed to turn that into a 14th podium of the season. Following his second pit stop under the virtual safety car, the Italian dropped behind Lando Norris, but executed a fantastic opportunistic move on the world champion as the McLaren driver was concentrating on executing his own move on an ailing Hamilton up ahead.
The Italian then passed the Ferrari with ease, with a move that put enough points between himself and Russell to give himself championship point at COTA.
It is worth noting that Antonelli is clearly starting to feel some pressure, even if it has not yet affected his performance. On three occasions within a ten-lap period during the middle of the race did he agitatedly report different issues to race engineer Peter Bonington, none of which came to anything.
However, it has taken Antonelli 18 rounds to start feeling the heat and by this point the job is almost done.
If he wins in Texas, with no Hamilton in the top five and no Russell in the top nine, he will be the 36th Formula One World Champion. If he doesn’t seal it there, then he will inevitably do so not long after.
Winner: Nico Hülkenberg
It has been a season of “almosts” for Audi, with Nico Hülkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto finishing 11th in a combined nine Grands Prix this season.
The German, though, was on the right side of the dotted line in both races in Singapore, picking up the team’s first sprint points of the season with a sixth place on Saturday, before he equalled the team’s best result of the season with eighth on Sunday.
His seven-point haul gave Audi their best weekend of the season and took them further out of reach of Williams and within seven points of Haas in the teams’ standings.
On a personal level for the German, he has now scored in four of the last seven Grands Prix, having drawn a blank in the first ten rounds this year.
Winner: Charles Leclerc
Given the roll that Lewis Hamilton was on throughout Saturday’s sprint and qualifying, kudos are due to Charles Leclerc for not only outqualifying, but then comprehensively beating his teammate on Sunday.
The Monégasque remained within touching distance of Verstappen for as long as he could at the start of the Grand Prix, before dropping back and running nose to tail for a number of laps with the sister Ferrari. A bit of team play could have brought Hamilton into touch with the Dutchman when Red Bull finally brought him in for a stop, but Leclerc never received a call from the pit wall to initiate such a move.
Unlike his teammate, he then followed his team’s advice in taking a cheap second stop under the virtual safety car.
By the chequered flag, Leclerc was running a comfortable second and was even gradually reeling Verstappen in as he claimed his first podium in eight races.
Winner: Liam Lawson
It was a typically complete performance from Liam Lawson in Singapore, as the Kiwi bagged a handful of points in both races.
Despite driving the fifth fastest car on the grid, Lawson has now cracked the top eight for Racing Bulls in a combined 11 sprints and Grands Prix this season as he consolidates his status as “best of the rest”.
With another couple of strong points results in his cameo at Red Bull, the evidence is mounting that Lawson’s promotion to the main team at the start of last year came 12 months too early.
Loser: Lewis Hamilton
While victory was never realistically in view for Lewis Hamilton in Singapore given Verstappen’s race pace, it was still a weekend of what might have been. Seven days on from losing out on a potential victory in Malaysia due to a poor strategy call, the seven-time champion took matters into his own hands on the streets of Marina Bay, but paid the price late in the race.
He may also have had a first pole position in three years to celebrate, too, after dominating Q1 and Q2, but couldn’t put a lap together when it mattered.
Despite starting Sunday’s race on medium tyres, Hamilton was the first driver in the whole field to pit as he boxed for softs on Lap 18. Poor communication from Ferrari cost him valuable time once he caught back up to Leclerc in second place, and he would have been nip and tuck with Verstappen as the Dutchman emerged from his own stop less than five seconds up the road had he been allowed through.
Given the Brit’s flurry of purple sectors and fastest laps on the soft tyres, an aggressive two-stop strategy seemed inevitable, and the deployment of the VSC following Lance Stroll’s latest retirement fell perfectly.
Hamilton, however, opted for track position, which seemed a gamble worth taking on a circuit where overtaking is notoriously difficult.
It soon became clear, though, that his pace deficit of around 2.5 seconds a lap to Leclerc, Norris and Antonelli behind him was not sustainable, while Oscar Piastri wiped out a 46-second deficit to take sixth place from him on the penultimate lap.
In Hamilton’s defence, he does not go racing to finish third, so the loss of an almost certain podium will not cost him much sleep. Nor will the very real possibility of him losing his third place in the championship to Verstappen or even Norris or Leclerc.
It was, however, the latest in a growing list of recent races in which Hamilton has come away with fewer points than he and his car were capable of.
Loser: George Russell
Even despite George Russell’s immense bad luck at times this season, the Mercedes man has not helped himself.
For all his misfortune in a number of races this season, the Brit has generally been outdriven by Kimi Antonelli and was guilty of overdriving in Singapore.
The eight points Russell lost through crashing out of the lead of Saturday’s sprint, coupled with the handful his teammate gained as a result, are unlikely to be decisive in this year’s championship fight, but do represent a culmination of disappointing results for Russell that forced him to push his car beyond the limit.
It has been a scarcely believable couple of races for Russell, who just two weeks ago claimed the most dominant victory of his career with an imperious performance in Baku.
His retirement from the Singapore sprint was squarely on him, while his recovery drive from 19th to ninth place on Sunday was necessitated by a grid penalty incurred through his engine failure in Malaysia.
All Russell can do now is match, or ideally substantially beat, his ninth-placed finish next time out in the US to prolong the title battle by at least a week.
Loser: The FIA
For two race weekends in a row now, legitimate concerns have been raised about how little control drivers and teams have over their own cars.
The radical new engine regulations for 2026 have not only completely redefined how drivers drive the car, but have also given away substantial control to the FIA.
In Malaysia, several drivers, including the leading pair of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, ground to a halt on the formation lap as their cars reacted adversely to the low speed and wet conditions. The race start was aborted and delayed by almost an hour until after the FIA had issued a software update to tackle the bug affecting the electronic components of the engine.
Hamilton, Verstappen, Norris and Antonelli all issued scathing remarks regarding the engine regulations following the race.
Five days later, Sprint Qualifying in Singapore was the scene of another bizarre error from race control. Following the restart of SQ1 after Sergio Pérez’s Cadillac sent debris all across the circuit, the FIA reactivated Overtake Mode for 27 seconds before disabling it again.
When activated, Overtake Mode provides around half a megajoule of extra electrical energy to the engine at high speed.
Williams’ Carlos Sainz, who was eliminated from the session, said he had lost around half a second compared to drivers who set their lap times while the mode was available.
The FIA admitted “human error” for the inconsistency, but rejected Williams’ appeal for all cars to progress to SQ2.
Loser: McLaren
The title battle between Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri last season was generally rather gentlemanly, with arguably the most acrimonious moment coming at the start of the Singapore Grand Prix when Norris ran Piastri out of road.
12 months on and history almost repeated itself, with Norris again the aggressor as he tried an unnecessary move on his teammate for fourth place on the final lap of the sprint race.
The pair spun in synchronisation, with the Australian’s race over on the spot, while Norris recovered to take a point for finishing eighth. That constituted eight points lost.
With Red Bull now just seven points behind the reigning constructors’ champions in the battle for third this season, such small sums of points could yet be the difference.
What is worse for McLaren is that even with various problems for Russell, Hamilton and Hadjar, affecting Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull respectively, they could still only muster fourth and fifth in the Grand Prix with the fourth fastest car.
On current form, McLaren will finish this season fourth in the constructors’ standings, as the defence of their back-to-back teams’ titles threatens to end as it began – with a whimper.
Loser: Gabriel Bortoleto
It was a toss-up between Gabriel Bortoleto and Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar for the final place on this week’s “Loser” list, but at least Hadjar got to show some pace towards the end of the Grand Prix and scored a point after a whole weekend of unreliability.
Bortoleto had a thoroughly miserable time in his Audi, though, completing a combined 13 laps across the sprint and main race.
The Brazilian was rear-ended by Williams’ Alex Albon at the end of lap six of the sprint, just as the field was preparing for the safety car restart, and limped back to the pits to retire his car.
Qualifying 14th for the Grand Prix, as he had done for the sprint, Bortoleto was given little opportunity to make amends in Sunday’s Grand Prix as his gearbox failed at the end of Lap 7.
All in all, two retirements through no fault of his own while his teammate enjoyed his best weekend of the season was a rough ride for the Audi man.
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