Singapore GP - 150 kilometers from the equator

Verstappen rules himself out, Russell with a plan and Sainz qualifying at the top

Ferrari led the pack in the first day practices, Leclerc leading Sainz and Red Bull coming 7th in practice and 11th on the qualifying grid. Will it be a Red Bull race car famous for slow starting and picking up pace through warmups and hitting a peak at the final race or is Verstappen cooling down?

The track changes were supposed to make the race a lot faster and create an overtaking opportunities as Pirelli’s Motorsport Director Mario Isola stated earlier, "We’ll wait to see if this change has an effect on strategies, because in theory at least it could create an overtaking opportunity – with passing notoriously difficult unless you have a much faster car.” I thought the same thing.

But in reality Verstappen was not happy during the qualifying round as he's positioned 11th and said "Yeah, we can forget about [coming back to win]. I don’t want to make it sound too dramatic, but it was a very tough weekend. Today in qualifying has definitely been [the worst in] a long, long time. You can’t pass. On other tracks, you can start last and win the race. Not here."

Earlier Mario Isola said, "the track doesn’t place particular stress on the tyres in terms of loading, but the rear tyres need to be carefully managed during the traction phase when exiting slow corners.

“Temperatures are usually consistently high, as Singapore is only about 150 kilometers from the equator. This increases the risk of overheating: not just for tyres but also everything else, including the mechanicals and of course the driver.”

Ferrari dominating two out of three, the biggest matter still remains as drivers complain about degradation. Lewis Hamilton hopes George Russell puts some pressure on Ferraris as Russell made it to the second position even after the Mercedes drivers made it through to Q2 despite having to go for their second runs on used tyres. Hamilton struggled with tyre warm up on his out-laps. With strategic hope based on an extra set of Medium tyres for the final race.

The tyres the teams got - the drivers were given two sets of the hard tyre (marked white), three sets of the medium tyre (marked yellow), and eight sets of the soft tyre (marked red), as well as the green intermediate tyre and the blue full wets, if required.

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