NICO’S ON POLE
Rosberg favourite now to pip Lewis
FOR most of the night it looked as if Nico Rosberg could win the Singapore Grand Prix while flicking through a glossy magazine. Albeit with the pages having turned soggy in the humid air.
Yes, he had to manage his brakes while sitting in a cockpit as hot as a steam room. But any challengers? No, they were irrelevances in the rear-view mirror for all but the last 14 laps, when Daniel Ricciardo of Red Bull, on fresh tyres, took massive bites out of the German’s lead.
But Rosberg clung on to claim victory by four-tenths of a second, a small margin that hid the depth of his achievements on a weekend that may have a bigger say in the destiny of the title than any other race this season.
His success was this: he turned on its head the dynamic between himself and Lewis Hamilton, the world champion who has whipped him since they were boys.
Hamilton, who finished a place behind Ricciardo in third, reflected the chastening lessons he had been taught afterwards in his countenance. The spring had gone out of his designer trainers.
No wonder, given the statistical blizzard that Rosberg unleashed. It was his third successive victory. It was his eighth of the season — nobody has ever won so many races and not won the title. Seven out of eight times the leader leaving Singapore has gone on to take the championship — and Rosberg heads the standings by eight points with six rounds remaining.
But it is not about facts and figures as much as the delicate workings of the mind.
Is Hamilton, he might wonder, quite the allconquering virtuoso he has been cracked up to be? Sometimes by himself.
Is the desire that carried him to three world titles still burning as fiercely?
One sensed his frustrations as he was a shadow of his best — which is very considerable indeed — all weekend. Rosberg smashed him in qualifying by a mammoth seventenths of a second, a gap he had never before put between himself and the world champion.
In the race, Hamilton looked unlikely to pass Ricciardo in front of him and was instead overtaken mid-race by a snake-hipped Kimi Raikkonen, who danced his Ferrari in front by the Singapore Cricket Club.
Churchill once called the British surrender of Singapore in 1942 the most embarrassing moment of Empire. Hamilton’s capitulation to the Finn was hardly as serious, nor was it terminal because he undercut Raikkonen on his third stop to reclaim the last podium position.
Before that, Hamilton had complained pretty steadily over the radio at the horrible injustice of it all. Why me? Why me?
Hamilton was told, as was Rosberg, to manage his brakes to save them from overheating.
He responded by saying: ‘I’m slowing down so much.’
Then: ‘Can you keep me updated, please. I have no clue what is going on.’
Then: ‘I need a strategy to get me past (Ricciardo).’
Then: ‘You need to come up with some plan to stop me losing third place because this is all I’ve got with these brakes.’
It must be said that Hamilton was faultlessly magnanimous afterwards. He went up to Rosberg’s car to congratulate him and spoke of how his rival ‘fully deserved’ the triumph.
‘I’m still in the fight,’ said Hamilton. ‘There’s still a long way to go and I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.’
Rosberg refused to be swept into the narrative of title speculation. Like the least imaginative post-match football interviewee, he is taking it race by race.
‘I’m just excited to win here,’ said the twice championship runner-up, who spent the summer break with his phone off and changed his sleeping patterns to get more rest. So that’s the secret, is it?
His victory came despite incident at either end of the race. The first, a crash on the first lap when Nico Hulkenburg’s Force India spun around on impact with Carlos Sainz’s Toro Rosso, bringing out a safety car.
The second, when Red Bull pulled a strategy trick by putting Ricciardo on new tyres.
The question then was: could the Australian close a 25-second gap in 14 laps and pass Rosberg on older rubber? He got mighty close, so much so that Rosberg’s boss Toto Wolff said: ‘We nearly peed our pants.’
Embarrassment was averted as Rosberg clinched the deal without a spill.