adminLEWIS HAMILTON won yesterday’s Singapore Grand Prix and took a three-point lead in the Formula One world championship as his team-mate and title rival Nico Rosberg failed to finish. Hamilton had to do it the hard way. He had built up a comfortable lead but that was wiped away when the safety car was introduced just past the halfway stage.
The safety car, which outstayed its welcome, came out on lap 32 after Sergio Pérez’s front wing broke off and got trapped under his car after he made contact with Adrian Sutil, with the Sauber driver at fault.
That meant Hamilton had to build up a lead of about 28 seconds (the total time lost in an average pit stop) to allow him to change to soft compound tyres and still
come out in front of the second-placed Sebastian Vettel.
He did manage to build up an advantage of just over 25 seconds but with his tyres failing the Mercedes team brought him in on the 53rd lap. When he came out he was just behind Vettel but ahead of the other Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo and Fernando Alonso.
But with superior speed, fresh rubber and DRS, Hamilton had too many weapons for the world champion and went past him on the 54th lap. Behind Hamilton came Vettel— who had won the three previous races here — Ricciardo, Alonso and Felipe Massa.
It was a disaster for Rosberg, who quit on lap 14 after spending his race at the back of the field, mostly between the Marussia of Max Chilton and the Caterham of Marcus Ericsson.
He failed to get off the grid for the warm-up lap because of electrical problems and though he did manage to start he was immediately told by his Mercedes team: “The only thing working on your dash are your gearshift controls.”
“The steering wheel did not work and then the whole car wasn’t working. We need to find out what the problem was because again we have a reliability problem.
“We’ve had a few this year and that’s our weakness. We need to get to the bottom of it and make the car 100 percent reliable.
“It’s tough not even leaving the grid. I was hoping the team could fix it (after the start of the race) because it was going on and off, sometimes working, sometimes not.
“There’s no point in shouting, it’s reliability issue, and it’s happened again.” — The Guardian
Online Reporter