F1 Singapore Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton roars back into title lead as Nico Rosberg draws a blank

Hamilton overtakes Mercedes team-mate Rosberg with the win

After all his problems this season, Lewis Hamilton desperately wanted a clean weekend and for once he got it and more, dramatically regaining the lead of the drivers’ world championship for the first time since May after winning the Singapore Grand Prix.

This time it was his Mercedes team-mate and title rival Nico Rosberg who struggled, retiring with electronic problems as he slipped three points behind the Briton in the championship standings, with five races to go and 150 points available.

Hamilton briefly lost the lead to Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel at his final pit stop but soon swept past him to take his seventh win of the season. Vettel finished in second place after a battle with team-mate Daniel Ricciardo and Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, who were third and fourth respectively.

Hamilton had the grace to laugh when asked whether he was sorry that Rosberg did not finish. He said he arrived in Singapore with the hope of taking seven points out of the 22-point lead Rosberg had before the race, assuming that the German would finish the grand prix in second place. Rosberg’s failure to do so meant Hamilton was able to post 25 unanswered points.

“The extra points are a huge help,” Hamilton said. “We’ve now had several breakdowns with either car and the team won’t be 100 per cent happy until we keep getting those one-two finishes.”

A safety car intervention and worries about tyre life still gave the Briton some anxious moments. Informed by his Mercedes team that he needed a lead of 27 seconds in order to make his third and final pit stop, he gained 25.2sec of that by the 51st lap, but was increasingly worried about the state of his rear tyres.

Drivers and engineers are no longer allowed to discuss the personal performance of the man in the cockpit, but Hamilton’s message to his crew about the car’s performance was succinct. “My right rear tyre is getting seriously worn, I’m not sure if these things are going to explode or not,” Hamilton said.

He had had the race in the bag after sprinting into the lead at the start as Rosberg’s car sat forlornly in the pit lane as the steering wheel’s electronic functions broke down. But the curse of the Singapore GP – with its 100 per cent safety car intervention record – threatened to jeopardise his chances at the race’s halfway point, after Force India’s Sergio Perez and Adrian Sutil had collided and the Force India’s front wing shattered into fragments.

Moments earlier Hamilton’s Red Bull rivals Vettel and Ricciardo had switched to Pirelli’s soft rubber, and Alonso dived in for similar tyres as the safety car was deployed. They all switched to two-stop strategies but Hamilton had only just put on another set of the super-soft tyres on the 26th lap, and would have to stop a third time for the soft tyres.

When the safety car went back into the pits on the 38th lap, after the debris from Perez’s broken wing had been cleaned away, Hamilton was faced with the need to get his head down and open the requisite gap over his pursuers in order to be sure of retaining the lead when he finally stopped for the last time.

As the Red Bull drivers battled with Alonso, Hamilton sprinted away but did not quite have enough in hand when he pitted for the final time on the 52nd lap. Vettel went into the lead as Hamilton rejoined, just ahead of Ricciardo and Alonso. But by then the reigning world champion’s tyres were well past their best, and in a wonderfully committed move on the 54th lap Hamilton sliced past the German.

“Seb went past me before I left the pits,” Hamilton said. “But I knew we had good pace and I took it easy on my first lap on the new tyres. When I passed him it was a bit of a tight gap and maybe I should have overtaken him somewhere else, but fortunately Seb was very fair.”

“I wasn’t quite sure what Lewis was doing, and it seemed like he couldn’t wait to get back into the lead,” Vettel said. “It was quite tight, but I saw he was there and had to back off. There was no point in fighting him as by then my tyres were no match for his.”

Hamilton celebrated with teammate Rosberg

Hamilton streaked away to a victory that took him three points clear of the bitterly disappointed Rosberg. The German had an inkling of what lay ahead when the classic Mercedes taking him round the drivers’ parade lap earlier in the evening had broken down. He started the race from the pit lane after his car failed to move off the grid at the start of the formation lap, but was withdrawn after 13 laps when his crew could not rectify his electronic problems.

“The steering wheel didn’t work so the whole car wasn’t working,” Rosberg explained. “We need to find out what it [the issue] is because again that’s a reliability problem. We’ve had quite a few this year and that’s our weakness. We need to make the car 100 per cent reliable.

“There’s no point in shouting. As a team we really need to get to the bottom of it because it’s happening to us too much.

“It’s very, very tough. Also the way in which it happened, not even leaving the grid and everything. It was not good.”

There was disappointment for McLaren’s Jenson Button when he was forced to retire because of hydraulic problems, having been running in seventh place with six laps to run.