The Saturday in F1 Singapore GP saw George Russell bounce back after crash to top spot, as Williams left disappointed after double disqualification.
It was dramatic scenes under the floodlights on Saturday in F1 Singapore GP qualifying. No one from McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari could stop Mercedes’ George Russell to take pole. The Brit recovered from lost confidence after FP2 crash to take top spot after two quick laps.
In fact, he admitted that he was nervous still but managed to have that confidence to hit the mark in Q3, even though it involved a wall brush. Teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli backed the pace, finishing fourth. The Italian survived two scares in Q1 and Q2, to deliver the lap when it mattered.
However, he felt he had more in his tank. He got a bit over-excited and made mistakes on his final attempt in Q3 to end up only fourth. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen felt he was close to beat Russell, but potential dirty air and distraction from McLaren’s Lando Norris hurt his chances.
The Dutchman didn’t seem as quick as Russell in his final attempt, but was not happy with Norris’ move. The Brit was not too worried about the complaint from Verstappen, but he was troubled by the lack of pace and lost confidence in places where it was much better last year when he dominated.
Verstappen’s teammate Yuki Tsunoda was knocked out in Q2 after he was forced to abort his final lap due to lack of grip and mistake on his end. Oscar Piastri, meanwhile, managed to put the car in third, crucially ahead of Norris by two places in their F1 title fight.
The Ferrari F1 pair were left disappointed. Charles Leclerc had no pace or confidence to attack and no amount of setup worked on his end. Lewis Hamilton felt good early on but by Q3, he lost that pace and once again was down in the order in the Top 10. He reckoned the prep lap can be done better.
Russell: “Yeah. It’s been a challenging weekend, to be fair. I’ve not been comfortable with the car, not been comfortable with myself, and it just sort of all came towards me in Q3, to be honest, even the end of Q2. That was my first good lap of the weekend and probably the first lap where I felt semi-reasonable, but I knew I had a bit of margin to go further. And then my lap one in Q3 was really strong and then obviously matched it on the second lap. So pretty pleased with that. I don’t know, to be honest. I mean, sometimes some weekends you just hit the ground running a bit sooner. Other times you don’t. I’ve found this weekend quite strange. The grip has been really high from the tarmac, but the cars have been sliding quite a lot.
“It feels a bit reminiscent of Miami, where it’s really high grip, but the car is sliding. And I just didn’t have much confidence in myself, and obviously the crash yesterday set me back again. But I always sort of remind myself, it doesn’t matter what happens on Friday. It’s Q3 when it counts. Probably these two next to me, to be honest. We know the McLarens are usually exceptionally good on their tyres in the hot conditions. I think we’ve all been a little bit surprised at their sort of lack of pace this weekend. We were probably all expecting them to run away with it, and we certainly didn’t anticipate being in the fight for pole position here. So, not sure going into tomorrow. I’m the only driver who hasn’t done a long run, so that doesn’t play into my favour. But, of course, overtaking is challenging here. Races have been a bit of a one-stop recently, but now with the 80 km/h speed limit in the pit lane, it probably brings it closer to a two now.
“I’m a very different driver today than I was a couple of years ago. Yesterday was my first crash in over a year. But this season, I’m sort of more within myself. I know the limits better. But the fact is, on a street circuit, you’ve only got to have a 1% lapse of concentration. My mistake two years ago, it wasn’t a big mistake. It was a mistake of five centimetres, but the consequence was massive. And that’s the thing on a street circuit. You can’t afford one single corner not to be 100% focused. But that’s the greatness of it too.”
Verstappen: “Yeah. It was close. I mean, the lap itself was coming nicely. But, again, around here to nail all the corners is very tough. Unfortunately, I had a car, like, two seconds in front of me in the final chicane. So in qualifying, you cannot have that. You cannot have any kind of disturbance when you want to push in Q3, and that’s what happened. I had to abort the lap because of that. So that was a bit unfortunate. Otherwise, I think it would have been a very close battle for first, but it is what it is. Nothing you can do about that. So you just move forward. I think for us so far this weekend has again been a very solid one. No major trouble.
“We were always kind of there, and I guess that’s good. So that is, of course, for us very promising. I mean, you said it already. No? Lando. To clarify, well, in qualifying you always try to leave gaps of six, seven seconds at least because you want no disturbance. Normally in Q3 you don’t see a car — unless you’re on a different programme. But I think around here, it’s quite clear what you want to do. So you leave quite big gaps, everyone. But then, of course, sometimes it happens on a street circuit that people are bored, make mistakes. So, yeah, when you get a car two, three seconds in front of you… I mean, you need every kind of clean air that you can have on a lap, especially because you’re fully on the limit with braking and everything.
“And I lost a bit of downforce with that, so I went straight on. No. I think it’s quite clear, you know, that’s something that is not nice when it happens to someone. I think in general, we are always quite good at that — all the drivers. We try to stay out of the way. I mean, sometimes of course it’s always a bit more complicated in certain scenarios. So every scenario is a bit different. But in this case, in Q3 with only 10 cars on the track, I think it could have been avoided.”
Piastri: “Yes. I mean, I think my first lap of Q3 felt reasonable. It certainly didn’t feel four tenths off bad. So I just don’t think we had the pace tonight, which is a little bit of a surprise for us. It has been very tight through all of practice, but I think we were relatively confident going in. So, yeah, some things to look at and see where we’re lacking. But we’ve not had the easiest last couple of weekends. So it’s not a huge surprise in some ways because of how it’s gone recently, but I do think we felt after practice we had a better chance. Anytime on a street circuit you don’t do laps is frustrating, and I did feel like through Q1 I was playing catch-up a little bit. But ultimately, it didn’t really affect much.
“It was obviously frustrating to have a yellow flag thrown for someone getting out of the way. There’s been a lot of adjustments on the yellow flags and stuff like that, but I think there’s still some tweaking to do there, because Alex did the best job he could to get out of my way, and it ended up costing me a lap anyway. So, some things to look at there. I hope so, but it’s very tough to overtake around here. You need a fair bit of extra pace to get past someone. So we’ll see if we’ve got that tomorrow. But the long running has been kind of tough for everyone with red flags, and no one’s really done that much. So I wouldn’t say we’ve got more confidence than we had going into qualifying for the race, but we’ll see what’s possible.”
Norris: “Just in my driving, just didn’t put it all together, its just small margins. I think as a team, the cars not in the right place, we’re not quick enough especially to do a 1m29.1s [like polesitter Russell] is just out of our league at the minute, just like we were to others last year, and at times this year. The tables have turned, and I think also everyone seems to be struggling a lot with the front tyres this weekend. We know that’s a weakness of our car at times, and also my worst nightmare, understeer. Like we’ve seen in Vegas and things, whenever people struggle to get the front tyres in, Mercedes normally rides to the top, like they’ve done this weekend. I think when we put things together and we understand that Mercedes are very quick, which is unusual, but they’ve not been this quick for a long time.
“We’ve put it down to more the track conditions and the new tarmac pieces are high grip, very understeery and we just couldn’t get the front of the car to work this weekend. We’re still struggling, hopefully less of an issue tomorrow. We’ll see, we’re just not quick enough and I just didn’t do the best job. I’m sure in Singapore every driver will say a little bit more. It’s never easy to push it to the limits here. I had a small wall hit out of the last chicane. It cost me six hundredths or something to get two positions higher, maybe. Do I think there was a tenth in it? For sure. But if I could do it easily or if I knew why, I probably would have done it. I feel where there’s more lap time out of it. On the medium tyres this weekend, I’ve always felt very comfortable. The mediums have often had more front end, which just suits me. I can get more lap time out of it. It feels more reminiscent of last year, the feelings I want from the car.
“I put the soft on and I struggle again. Still lingering feelings of the car just not performing – I can’t say in the right way because we’ve been very quick all season. Those issues and the issues I’ve had this year, which is the front of the car, seem to have arose again this weekend. When you have the lead around here, it is always very easy. I mean I found it last year, different role for me tomorrow. I’ll try and make up some big places and yeah, with the car which is not as quick and all these things, we are running high fuel again, yeah on the backfoot a little bit, but it is a new day, so optimistic that we can try and get some positions. They always complain. They complain about everything. That’s Red Bull. I don’t even know. I was like three second ahead. I can’t work it out.”
Leclerc: “We never found the solution, unfortunately. Kind of tried to find consistency in that car through the whole weekend and there was no way out. At the end in Q3 I just said ‘OK, let’s try something a little bit stupid with the front wing’, try to rotate the car, anyway its unpredictable with understeer, will still be unpredictable with oversteer but at least I prefer that. Managed to do a good lap on the scrubbed [tyres], then put the new [tyre on] and the feeling was completely different. It is very surprising, very surprising, whether it’s Baku or Singapore, these are two of my favourite tracks.
“This season I’ve been performing particularly well and as a team we’ve performed particularly well and these last two weekends have been off pace. It’s not a nice feeling that when you put a really good lap in, you are P6, P7, when you do a small mistake in Q1, you are out in Q1, and this is a kind of situation we’re in at the moment and it’s not something that I enjoy, but it’s a situation where anyway I need to give my best and try to bring back the team to the top but it is not easy.”
Hamilton: “The car’s been feeling good generally, most of the weekend. Ultimately disappointed with that result. So Q1, the car was feeling good, tyres were feeling good. And then when we get into the next session, Q2 run one was fairly decent, but we are the last in the queue often and then waiting in the queue and losing a lot of temperature in the tyres and every time we do that, then we’re just falling further and further back. And it happens every weekend. It’s generally been solid, yeah, as I said, I wish I was higher up. I really felt that I could be higher up today. It happens every weekend. I’ll be on my ties ready to capatilise on any opportunity. We didn’t get to do any long run, we didn’t get to do any high fuel, maybe in FP1, otherwise no.”
The Top 10 saw Visa Cash App RB’s Isack Hadjar make the cut alongwith Haas’ Oliver Bearman and Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso. The Frenchman wasn’t pleased with eighth in the end since he made a mistake on his final attempt, as he felt Top 5 was possible with the pace in the car.
The Brit was pleased after the step up from Friday to Saturday to make it inside the Top 10, while the same was for the Spaniard. Alonso, though is not too optimistic of points considering he is starting on the wrong side of the grid. Their teammates ended up getting knocked out in Q2 and Q1.
Lance Stroll missed out in Q1 after not being able to get a clean run, while Esteban Ocon had multiple issues with the seat belt and yellow flag which cost him. The Frenchman thought he had pace to be in Q2 at least. Liam Lawson, meanwhile, was happy to get through the session cleanly.
After double crashes, the Kiwi thanked his mechanics for sorting the car and helping him to qualify, even if he missed out on a Top 10 finish. For the likes of Sauber and Alpine, it was a 50-50 result. In fact, Nico Hulkenberg was happy to finally get close to Q3 in 11th after recent troubles.
Gabriel Bortoleto was caught out by the yellow flag to be knocked out in Q1, while Pierre Gasly couldn’t do much after the sensor shutdown his car which also caught out Franco Colapinto. As for the Williams F1 pair of Alexander Albon and Carlos Sainz, the Q2 result eventually didn’t matter after double disqualification due to DRS issue. Team boss James Vowles noted of immediate investigation.
Hadjar: “I don’t if you guys watched the TV, but I didn’t finish my lap. I made a mistake in Turn 8, I lost the car and that was it. [I could have finished in] Top 5. Absolutely nothing, it is Singapore. Starting P8, I am on the dirty side as well, yeah, our race pace, I have no clue, haven’t done a single long run, so yeah the target is to finish P8. I don’t think so, apart from Turn 1 and Lap 1, there could be no incidents, I think everyone can keep it on track, it is not a qualifying session, it is a race. I mean I hope not, but I think it is going to be smooth race.”
Bearman: “Yeah, definitely happy, yesterday I was not the fastest, I think I was building up to this track which is definitely a tough one, it is the first time that I had to learn the street track in a while because you do all the other in F2 but this one you don’t. It was definitely a tough one, today having slept on it, coming back, I felt like I was a bit more on it, straight from the lap in FP3, the corners which I couldn’t figure it out was clicking, which is normally the case for myself. And yeah, the quali just went well, I had a clean session, every lap I was improving and I felt good.
“When the car feels good underneath you, it is easy to get lap time out of it because it is predictable and very good underneath. It is a good feeling considering where I started, like confidence level and stuff, I think we did a good job. I am already in points, we don’t have to have such a crazy race, of course looking forward, very aware that people can undercut, strategy is quite important here, you can’t really overtake on track, I think it is all about covering the basics and I hope we can make the difference tomorrow.”
Alonso: “Yes, FP3 was concerning and also Q1 we were 14th and 16th I think, so definitely not the places we want to be. We recovered a little bit in Q2 and Q3 to be in the top 10, but it’s not the best starting position. Tomorrow on the wrong side of the grid as well, so it’s going to be tough to score points. Yes, we changed things. I think on the set-up we made the car slower, it happens sometimes. And the others, they make the car faster, so the combination is just a few positions away. Yes, I think so. Nothing we can do, it’s not that we decide. When you start P10, actually, you probably prefer to start P11.
“That guarantees you maybe points for tomorrow. I think it’s going to be difficult, but we are not fast enough to be in the points. There are the top four teams, and the fifth clear top team is Visa Cash App and then here Haas are clearly in front of us, and maybe Williams as well. We put a lap together today, but if you put the two cars together, I think we are maybe the eighth-fastest team or something like that. If we score points, it’s welcome, but maybe we don’t deserve it.”
Hulkenberg: “I’m quite happy with today’s qualifying. My laps were tidy and showed good progression throughout. Starting from P11 isn’t a bad place, and we’ve got an extra set of soft tyres for tomorrow. With everyone going into the race a bit less prepared after yesterday’s red flags, when nobody was really able to perform proper long runs, there might be some surprises. As always, strategy will depend on how things unfold, but we’ll be pushing hard to make the most of it.”
Gasly: “There is not much to say today as we did not manage to complete our final push lap with the stoppage on track at Turn 11. We had a suspected oil protection cut, which the team will investigate and understand. It is frustrating for all of us that we did not have the chance to finish the lap. It would have been tough to progress but probably close as it always is in Q1. It is a difficult one for all of us at the moment but we just have to push through it and move on to tomorrow. We will give it our best as we always do and see if we can give ourselves a chance in the race.”
James Vowles: “During FIA scrutineering after Qualifying, the rear wings on both our cars failed DRS slot gap checks. As a result, Alex and Carlos have been disqualified from Qualifying for tomorrow’s Singapore Grand Prix. This is bitterly disappointing for the team and we are urgently investigating how this happened. At no point were we seeking a performance advantage and the rear wings had passed our own checks earlier in the day, but there is only one measurement that matters and we fully accept the FIA ruling. We have a car capable of scoring points here this weekend and will do everything we can to fight from the back of the grid tomorrow, and will immediately review our processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Here’s FIA note: https://www.fia.com/system/files/decision-document/2025_singapore_grand_prix_-_infringement_-_car_23_-_technical_regulations_drs.pdf
Here’s how F1 Singapore GP qualifying panned out
