Congratulations to McLaren. With six events to go they have secured consecutive constructors’ titles, and at 650 points they currently have exactly double their nearest rival and power unit supplier Mercedes Benz.

That’s an impressive performance to say the least, even if they’ve lost their absolute advantage in the past three races.

Qualifying and the race in Singapore belonged to George Russell and the Mercedes team. It was a dominant performance reminiscent of Canada earlier in the year, two mightily fast laps in qualifying and a perfect launch from the grid gave George control of the race. And he knew exactly how to handle that for the next 62 laps.

It’s surprising that it was only George’s seventh pole position and fifth GP victory. It would be easy to suspect a higher number, but that’s a reminder that he spent much of his early career in the wilderness of a then struggling Williams team before moving upstairs to the works Mercedes gang.

All the talk was of Max Verstappen having a long shot at beating the two McLaren drivers to the championship, and McLaren sealing that constructors’ title, but after feeling unwell and smashing his car into the barriers on Friday, Russell grabbed the headlines.

As we have become used to, the field are so tightly matched performance wise now and we F1 fans really need to cherish these times, even if overtaking has become increasingly difficult with such heavily aero-loaded and well-sorted cars. It’s tough out there, which means that if a driver has a relatively disappointing qualifying performance, they won’t just be a row or two back on the grid, but nearer five rows.

The McLaren excels in long high-speed corners and track surfaces with high tyre wear and degradation, and we haven’t been to one of those lately. The team expects normal service to resume in Brazil, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, and to be relatively better in Austin, but it seems clear that Red Bull and Mercedes have closed the gap.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for Ferrari, who continue to be off the leading pace, albeit best of the rest despite two fine drivers in Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton. Leclerc would finish this race in sixth some 46 seconds adrift of the winner, and Hamilton a brake-less eighth despite doing well to coax his car home.

‘Opportunistic and brilliant from Norris’

There was a decent rain storm an hour or so before the cars went to the grid, and that circuit can take an age to dry, but it had been sunny all day and the surface had a lot of residual heat and so actually dried pretty quickly, such that everyone started on either soft or medium compound slick tyres.

The racing line for F1 and all support races is down the right-hand side of the pit straight on this temporary city circuit, and that’s therefore much cleaner and grippier. This meant that Russell launched well but drivers such as Verstappen and Hamilton on the left, less so.

This in turn put Piastri in proximity of Verstappen and opened the door on the inside for fast-starting Norris to successfully attack and claim the inside line for turn three. It was opportunistic and quite brilliant from him, but on the damp surface and having tagged the back of Verstappen’s Red Bull and damaged his front wing, he continued his elbows-out overtake by bouncing off team-mate Piastri, who was not impressed to say the least. The race stewards were less concerned on the opening lap, and no penalty was applied.

Piastri appealed to the team to sort that out given the ‘no contact’ rules between them, which they declined. It would have been a feisty post-race team debrief, and I have no doubt whatsoever that the dynamics between the two McLaren drivers will irrevocably change going forward. It was just a matter of time.

Perhaps McLaren should now just let their two drivers duke it out, gloves off, between themselves with zero interference. Any nuclear fallout will be tempered by the need to finish races, score points, avoid FIA in-race penalties, avoid Verstappen catching the pair of them, and running out of the latest specification of parts as the team focuses on 2026.

Just like back in Monza, the team asked Norris, who was the leading McLaren with first pit stop rights, to give up that high ground to once again to help team-mate Piastri defend against Leclerc, thereby helping him score more points. But on this occasion Norris said ‘no’ and pitted first. As pure coincidence would have it, he then received a very fast stop, and Piastri had the lumpy second pit stop, a total reverse of Monza.

Norris had made the right call, but despite hustling him all race long, he couldn’t find a way past Verstappen’s Red Bull, even while Max was vocally unhappy about his gear shifts and other aspects of his car’s behaviour.

‘A great event with unpredictable results’

As the leaders negotiated big queues of lapped traffic the gaps ebbed and flowed. Verstappen had pitted for fresh tyres on lap 19, but despite Russell waiting until lap 25, Norris lap 26, and Piastri lap 27, their fresher rubber didn’t really make that much difference with reference to Verstappen.

Mercedes’ teenager Kimi Antonelli, on his first visit to this track layout and with physical challenges in the heat and humidity, did a very solid job in fifth place, including an excellent overtake on Leclerc’s Ferrari. That helped the team make further ground in the close battle with Ferrari for second in the constructors’.

Fernando Alonso was driving the wheels off his Aston Martin all weekend and despite a nasty nine-second pit stop, along with a couple of feisty overtakes, he finished in seventh place after Hamilton received a five-second penalty for constantly breaching track limits in the final stages due to having very little brakes.

Throughout the field there was a race-long brawl for the minor points, eventually secured in ninth by the ever-impressive Ollie Bearman for Haas, and Carlos Sainz for Williams with a fine effort from the back row of the grid having been disqualified in qualifying for a marginally over-flexing rear wing.

This track was changed in 2013 when we lost the challenging Singapore Sling chicane which caught out many a great driver, and again in 2023 when we lost the section around a football pitch grandstand towards the end of the lap, which is now the location of some serious land reclamation. Both changes increased the speed of the track and took away two critical areas where many incidents happened.

Nowadays here we barely see a yellow flag let alone a safety car, and so it was again, along with being the first of the 16 Singapore GPs to have no retirements. I often think this Grand Prix would benefit from being a 260kms race like Monaco rather than the regular 305kms. But then quite a lot can happen in those last few laps as unfortunately Lewis found out.

Overall, I thought it was a great event with unpredictable results. Russell summed it up when he said if he’d been asked to rate his chances of winning a GP this year, Singapore would have been last of the 24 on the list. Let’s see what Austin, Texas can serve up.

F1’s title race now heads back to North America, with the United States Grand Prix in Austin up first on October 17-19 live on Sky Sports F1. Stream Sky Sports with NOW – no contract, cancel anytime