2024 Singapore Grand Prix | 6 talking points

Norris survives two scares

A pair of skirmishes with the Marina Bay circuit’s walls, at Turns 14 and 8, almost left Norris with the kind of sick feeling that Ayrton Senna experienced for McLaren at Monaco in 1988, when he threw away a giant lead with a nose into the Portier barrier. Unlike Senna, Norris was left breathing a sigh of relief – twice – as he escaped from close calls to make the most of his pace-setting McLaren and score an emphatic third win of his F1 career. It should never really have been in doubt once he’d (finally) made the most of a hard-earned pole position.

Norris finished more than 20 seconds up the road from Verstappen, only to miss out on a rare ‘grand slam’ win: pole position, leading every lap to victory and fastest lap. That’s because the RB team called in Daniel Ricciardo for fresh tyres right at the end so the Aussie could nick the fastest lap and deprive Norris of what might be a crucial extra point. Every single score counts right now.

Verstappen sworn to near-silence

In the circumstances, Verstappen maximised his scoring capability by exceeding expectations in terms of a result, in a Red Bull that has fallen behind McLaren and Ferrari on pace. That was cause for quiet satisfaction – on a strange weekend in which the triple world champion felt compelled to stage a (non-)verbal protest against a penalty most of his fellow drivers have branded as “silly.”

FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s crusade against drivers swearing in public is the latest bewildering episode motorsport’s world leader has created out of nothing. When Verstappen poked the nest by using a ‘colourful’ term to describe his RB20 in an official FIA press conference, the governing body bit back by punishing him with a community service penalty. Silly really is the word.

Verstappen’s response, to only offer monosyllabic answers in subsequent FIA press conferences, but happily speak to the press away from the official forum, was a little childish. Then again, it did highlight just how daft this needless point of tension is for all involved in F1 – and Verstappen even suggested after the race that such petty refereeing could hasten his departure from grand prix racing. His patience runs thin at the best of times, so he probably wasn’t exaggerating.

Piastri enhances his ‘pass master’ reputation

A week after his Baku victory, Oscar Piastri cost McLaren a potential one-two with an error in qualifying that left him down in fifth on the grid. But how he atoned with another fine drive to take his seventh podium of the season added to the growing body of evidence that the Aussie is the most effective racer on the grid at the moment.

The aggressive pass for the lead against Norris at Monza; the committed but controlled dive on Charles Leclerc in Azerbaijan; now a pair of near-identical moves on both Mercedes drivers in Singapore. Piastri is F1’s new pass master, and while Verstappen was too far up the road to be challenged, his third place did at least increase McLaren’s newly-won lead over Red Bull in the constructors’ standings to 41 points.

Leclerc left kicking himself

Italian GP winner Leclerc also made a crucial mistake in qualifying, but it cost him more. Instead of challenging Norris for pole position, the Ferrari driver ended up only starting ninth and facing a race night of damage limitation. Like Piastri, Leclerc ran a long opening stint and had the pace to split the Mercedes duo to finish fifth. A case of what might have been had he started closer to the front.

Even with a tyre offset advantage, George Russell remained just out of reach of the Ferrari in the final laps. As for Lewis Hamilton, starting on the soft tyre from third on the grid in the hope he could scrabble past Verstappen at the start left him on a vulnerable strategy. He had no choice but to stop early and ran long for the second stint on the hard Pirelli, leaving him powerless to slip back to sixth.

A first for Singapore

Behind Hamilton, Sainz was seventh in the other Ferrari, while Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin jumped head of Nico Hülkenberg’s Haas in the stops to claim eighth. Meanwhile, Sergio Pérez was a lacklustre tenth in the second Red Bull, edging Franco Colapinto out of what would have been a second consecutive points scoring finish for Williams.

What didn’t shake up the order was the safety car, which wasn’t called upon – and that was a first for this demanding street race. Remarkably there wasn’t even a yellow flag, even if Norris wasn’t the only driver to brush a wall. Drivers can usually bank on an interruption to perhaps encourage a gamble on an alternate strategy in Singapore. But not this time.

Ricciardo’s final contribution?

Last word this week to Daniel Ricciardo, whose fastest lap to aid Verstappen’s title lead looks set to be his final act in a grand prix. Everything points to the inevitable, that the eight-time GP winner is facing his F1 exit. He just hasn’t delivered anywhere near enough in the RB team and it is expected that when the season resumes at the United States Grand Prix in Austin at the end of October, young Kiwi Liam Lawson will have filled his seat.

After claiming that fastest lap and bringing his car to a halt in parc fermé, Ricciardo paused in the cockpit to soak in what might well be his final moments as a grand prix driver. There was emotion afterwards too as he seemed to face what is coming. Verstappen was grateful his friend could rob Norris of that extra point and paid fulsome tribute – but how sad that Ricciardo’s once-brilliant career should peter out so mildly.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images