The dust has settled on the 2019 edition of the Singapore Grand Prix and I’m once again reminded of how incredibly biased and one-sided a lot of fans’ views are. What happened to a balanced opinion? I suppose that’s why I want to talk about F1 – the only sport I follow – here; because I think that there needs to be some balanced analysis rather than simply “Fuck Hamilton – he’s so lucky” or “Vettel is shit and always has been”.
That said, this isn’t going to be some form of deep analysis wrapped up in professional packaging. I am, after all, just a bloke with a laptop who does this blogging thing for the fun of it.
Anyway, the big story from Singapore is how Vettel apparently “stole” Charles LeClerc’s victory. Admittedly, Vettel probably shouldn’t have been on the top step of the podium and yes, he leapfrogged both LeClerc and Hamilton through a Ferrari pit-stop strategy. I have even read some fan reactions that speak of Vettel using “underhanded tactics” to undercut his teammate and “steal” his win. Let’s clear that up first of all: it was the team that called Vettel in to the pits so if anything, it should be Ferrari themselves that LeClerc fanboys need to be unhappy with.
Vettel’s fortune should also take nothing away from his blistering out lap that enabled him to pass LeClerc at the pit exit. Nor should it make redundant the fact that he aced three safety car restarts and broke the DRS back to Charles every time. Granted, LeClerc dropped back on the last few laps after the team informed him that they would not be giving him any extra engine power but up until then, he had no answer to Seb’s control of the race.
Lastly, Vettel tore through the slower cars to get through to first place and was extremely commited when it came to dispatching the Toro Rosso of Pierre Gasly. The latter was a risky move for sure and it should be said that a collision was incredibly close. Should it have actually occured, then anything that Vettel had achieved up until that point would have been nullified and we would be adding the incident to Vettel’s growing collection of on-track errors.
All of this praise for Vettel said I do believe that this is a blip in the overall scheme of things. For one, it remains to be seen whether this win will be a turning point for Vettel or whether he will continue to spin out and collide with other cars in a fashion that certainly doesn’t suit a four-time world champion of the sport. Secondly, there is no doubt that Charles LeClerc is in his ascendecy right now and will only continue to get stronger and faster. Would a more mature Charles have fallen for the way that Vettel mixed it up at the third safety car restart and bolted earlier than he had on the previous two restarts? Doubtful.
Seb is also closer to the end of his career than the beginning and so his speed is naturally going to tail off. I believe that he also has a much narrower operating window than some of the other big talents currently on the grid. When everything is spot-on for him, then he is pretty much unstoppable (as we saw in 2013) but he clearly isn’t as flexible as the likes of Hamilton.
There was plenty of other action away from the hot Ferrari-on-Ferrari tussle. Mercedes, for example, were not the force to be reckoned with on the streets of Singapore. Hamilton didn’t look to have any answer to LeClerc despite hanging on to the red car for the first stint. The team pitted teammate Bottas and used him as a rolling roadblock in order to hold up the Red Bull of Albon…by instructing Valtteri to drive three seconds a lap slower.
It isn’t really what we – as fans – want to see in the sport and it brings to mind the bad old days when Ferrari would employ Eddie Irvine as Michael Schumacher’s lieutenant and simply use their second driver to block other cars.
Elsewhere, it was the return of the Torpedo as Daniil Kvyat took Kimi Raikkonen out of the race with a very optimistic lunge up the inside. He came from an incredibly long way back and collided with the inside of the Iceman’s Alfa Romeo as the Finnish driver was turning into the left-hander, completely unaware that the car behind would be trying something so extreme. Daniil laid all of the blame at Kimi’s door and was quoted as saying, “He just…suicided himself. He tried to kill me as well.” How eloquent and measured! The overhead footage told a different story – to me at least. Kvyat looked like a man who would not have been able to stop his car in time whether there was somebody else there or not. As has been said countless times over the years, you cannot simply expect another car to disappear.
Another clash, ending the race for Williams’ George Russell, surprised nobody considering that it involved one of the two Haas drivers. Romain Grosjean was recently re-signed for another season at the American outfit – despite the fact that his performance there has been pretty damn poor after a decent first year with the team – and the Frenchman marked the occasion by causing a clumsy, completely avoidable collision that put another driver into the wall and out of the race. It was an incredibly optimistic move that was never going to happen but instead of backing out of his around-the-outside attempt on Russell, Romain forged on and pushed him into the wall instead.
I like Grosjean as a person but how this guy keeps on getting re-signed when the likes of Ocon and Hulkenberg are denied seats in Formula 1 is a mind-boggling mystery.
That’s all I have for Singapore 2019. Next stop: Russia.
Unfiltered Opinion 