Lando Norris dominated the Singapore GP race from start to finish as the McLaren driver crushed Max Verstappen who, despite giving his all in the Red Bull, could do nothing against the British driver who had the Grand Chelem within his grasp before Daniel Ricciardo stole the fastest lap from him.
Lando Norris broke his curse of defending a pole position at the end of lap 1 and did it in style. The McLaren driver never let go of the lead of the race, not even after making his mandatory pit stop.
His start was particularly good. He had a very good traction at the start to maintain P1 without even needing to defend the position when braking into Turn 1.
Max Verstappen did have to stick his elbows out to defend his position from Lewis Hamilton who found a great initial grip thanks to the advantage of the soft tyre over the medium tyre and had to brake earlier to cover the outside racing line to keep his P2.
From then on, the race was a monologue of Norris. The Briton quickly opened a gap of over a second to prevent Max Verstappen from attacking him with DRS. In turn, Hamilton could not match Verstappen’s lap times and quickly dropped out of the fight for victory as his soft tyre experienced higher degradation than the medium.
Norris cooked up his third victory during the first stint of the race. At the beginning he pushed just enough to open a safety gap and from lap 10 he started to control the pace of the race from the lead, linearly increasing the gap to Max Verstappen. The Dutch driver was not even able to set lap times half a second slower than the McLaren driver!
McLaren’s idea, seeing the clear advantage over Red Bull, was logical: extend the stint as much as possible and wait for Verstappen to pit to avoid an untimely Safety Car to snatch P1. And so they did.
However, the hearts of Norris’ and McLaren fans stopped for a moment when the British driver said over the radio on lap 29 that he had suffered damage to his front wing. after touching the wall when he went wide at Turn 14 and lost almost three seconds of delta time to Max Verstappen.
Red Bull immediately then pitted Verstappen, who with a pit stop of 3.0 seconds, came out of the pits just behind Charles Leclerc. who blocked him during the first two sectors of his out-lap.
This meant that the undercut effect was severely reduced and practically the 3.81s that Verstappen regained from Norris was only due to the McLaren driver’s mistake, which by just a few centimetres did not end in total tragedy for him.
At the end of the first stint, the gap between Norris and Verstappen was 20.690s. The McLaren driver was almost nine tenths per lap faster than the Red Bull driver on average. An absolutely devastating difference.
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