A hard-fought Sunday in Singapore gives Kimi a podium finish and George a points finish
- Kimi Antonelli finished third at the Singapore Grand Prix on Sunday, George Russell placed ninth after a hard-fought race.
- In a race that was characterised by different strategies throughout the field, both cars had to make up positions in the closing stages.
- Kimi managed to catch up with McLaren driver Lando Norris and Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton. He had relinquished his position during a virtual safety car period to switch to a fresh set of soft tyres – the preferred compound that evening.
- With third place, Kimi secured his 14th podium finish of the season and extended his lead in the World Championship.
- For George, this race was all about limiting the damage. He had started from 19th place due to a grid penalty for exceeding the permitted number of power unit components.
- He made good progress in his first stint on the medium compound before switching to the soft tyres to attack the cars in front of him.
- He successfully overtook Pierre Gasly's Alpine, but was unable to get ahead of Nico Hülkenberg's Audi due to the great difficulties in overtaking and had to settle for ninth place.
Driver | Launch site | Result | Schn. Runde | Starting Tyres | Stop 1 | Stop 2 |
Kimi Antonelli | P4 | P3 | 1:35.589 | Soft | Medium (R23) | Soft (R39) |
George Russell | P19 | P9 | 1:36.722 | Medium | Soft (R39) | - |
Kimi Antonelli
It was a tough race today and I'm very happy to have finished it with a podium finish. We knew that overtaking would be difficult, so we did some things a little differently in terms of strategy. Although we had to give up our position to Lando Norris in the McLaren, we knew that we would be on the better soft tyres. Our goal was to catch both him and Lewis Hamilton. I managed to capitalize on the duel between the two, overtake them both and secure third place. After a few difficult race weekends, this is a fantastic result for the team.
We've made really good progress with our update package this weekend. It has proven to be a very useful experiment and has shown us a good direction to get the maximum out of it. Of course, this was a sprint weekend, and after a difficult Friday, there was only so much we could do. So it wasn't like we had the car in the perfect window today. This gives us confidence that we can make further improvements in Austin and fully exploit the potential of the car.
George Russell
In my first stint I was able to make good progress and work my way up to the edge of the top 10. We took the opportunity to pit when the virtual safety car was called, but unfortunately we couldn't take full advantage of it as it ended just as I entered the pit lane. Unfortunately, this kind of bad luck sums up my season pretty well! We fought the soft tyres, but Nico (Hulkenberg) defended eighth place well against me.
We knew it was going to be a difficult race tonight, given our starting position and the fact that overtaking is a big challenge here. To get back into the points was a decent result, but of course it was a disappointing weekend for me here in Singapore. We will now regroup ahead of Austin and the last six races of the year. We've gathered a lot of useful data about the update package and hopefully we can build on it in the final stages of the season.
Toto Wolff, Team Principal and Managing Director
We knew it was going to be a difficult race tonight as our cars started from 4th and 19th place. Overtaking is notoriously difficult here in Singapore, and the race was therefore driven by strategic decisions. We had given both drivers the task of making overtaking manoeuvres on the track in order to make up positions in the closing stages, and fortunately they succeeded. Kimi had the pace to secure the final podium spot, overtaking both a McLaren and a Ferrari to do so, while George showed some great manoeuvres throughout the race. He fought his way up to ninth place, where his advance stalled, but it was still a good performance. Kimi's third place and George's valuable points haul is a good result in a Grand Prix that we knew was about limiting the damage.
We spent this weekend comparing the update package to the previous specification, and that was a useful experiment. Up until yesterday's qualifying, and as we saw in today's race, we managed to get the update package to work much better and we were able to see a little more of its potential. It's undoubtedly a bit trickier to find the right setup window, but the car clearly has its strengths and we need to build on that in the future.
Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director
We leave Singapore with a podium finish for Kimi and a points finish for George. That's a solid result – especially considering the positions from which we started the race. We knew that overtaking would be difficult. Therefore, our chances were in strategy and in making the most of the performance of the tyres in the closing stages. Kimi drove a mature race, handled his tyres well and then had the pace to make the crucial manoeuvres that secured him the podium finish. George's race was a challenge from the start, as he had to start from the back. But he fought hard the whole time, showed some brilliant overtaking manoeuvres and made it back into the points.
One of the main goals this weekend was to continue evaluating the update package and deepen our understanding of how to get the most out of it. We learned a lot over the three days and, most importantly, we saw encouraging signs in both qualifying and race conditions once we were able to get closer to the right window of operation. At the end of the weekend, Kimi's package was clearly the faster one, which gives us confidence that we are on the right track from a development perspective. There is still some work to be done, but the data collected will help us a lot in preparing for Austin. We now have a clearer idea of where the performance is and what we need to focus on in order to exploit the potential of the package even better in the final races of the season.
