Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso vie with Nico Rosberg to be the star of the race, but as for Lewis Hamilton this weekend...
Monday 19 September 2016 10:06, UK
In the end, it was another race led from start to finish for Nico Rosberg, who converted his majestic qualifying lap on Saturday into a third straight victory since the summer break.
Eight points clear now in the title race, having been 19 behind before Spa, it's looks very much like the pendulum is swinging back towards the German.
It seemed like all he had to do was avoid the poor starts that have plagued Mercedes this season and it would have been smooth sailing, and in the end it was just that, despite the very close margin of victory.
"I've known Nico since 2013 and that is the best Nico Rosberg I have ever seen throughout the weekend since then," said Mercedes chief Toto Wolff. "We have the tendency of saying that Lewis has an awesome pace, and this is what we have seen with Nico this weekend - he was just blindingly fast.
"He was six tenths quicker than P2 in qualifying - something we are not used to seeing at all here - and in the same way he drove the race.
"He had a great start, controlled the pace and, on the contrary, Lewis didn't have a clean weekend. He was lacking laps to find the right set-up and he couldn't really choose the direction and from then on it went backwards."
Rating out of ten: 9.5
Daniel Ricciardo came within a whisker of winning the Singapore GP after a superb charge in his final stint to close a deficit of nearly 30 seconds to Rosberg.
A brilliant lap in qualifying saw the Australian split the two Mercedes cars in Q3, having managed to make the top 10 shootout using the harder and slower supersoft tyres in Q2 - something even Mercedes didn't attempt.
That opened up different strategy options for Red Bull in the race, but did make it nigh-on impossible for Ricciardo to challenge Rosberg for the lead at the start.
He defended well from Lewis Hamilton at the restart to maintain second spot, losing only the bare minimum in time to Rosberg ahead.
Had the race been just one lap longer, Ricciardo may well have ended up doing a 'shoey' and drinking champagne from what would have been a very hot and sweaty race boot. Maybe for his health, finishing second was better then, but this was a strong performance which underlined why Ricciardo is regarded as one of F1's top drivers.
Rating out of ten: 9
Singapore has been a grand prix of immense highs and desperate lows for Lewis Hamilton, and while third place isn't a disaster, he'll be more likely to add the 2016 edition to the latter column.
Mechanical glitches once again blighted his preparation but looking at the weekend as a whole, this was the sloppiest the world champion has been in a long, long time.
Usually a driver so in tune with a circuit, his lack of Friday running and unhappiness with the set-up meant he was, by his standards, all over the place in qualifying. He seemed to be back to his usual self come race day, but the ease in which he was passed by Kimi Raikkonen after running wide, was shockingly uncharacteristic.
"I feel like I did everything I could," Hamilton told Sky F1. "A very trying weekend, these ones come along sometimes and you just have to take it on the chin."
Rating out of ten: 6
Kimi Raikkonen's race was hampered by poor strategy decisions from Ferrari and he could and perhaps should have been on the Singapore podium.
The Finn was left out too long on the ultrasoft tyres during his first stint and his pace had dropped off dramatically by the time he was pitted. That made the undercut even more effective for Raikkonen's rivals.
Raikkonen battled back to get ahead of Hamilton and into third, but when the Mercedes driver made his final stop, the Finn was still on track. With a powerful undercut in Singapore, and overtaking difficult on the streets of Marina Bay, leaving him out with an advantage of around 30 seconds to defend in the final laps may have been the better option.
Strategy aside, it can be described as a solid rather than spectacular weekend for Raikkonen.
Rating out of ten: 7.5
Voted driver of the day by the watching F1 fans and justifiably so. After a weekend of setup problems, followed by an unusual rocker problem in qualifying, Sebastian Vettel bounced back on Sunday with a superb drive from the back of the grid to fifth.
The Safety Car came too early to assist the German in the race, with his progression through the field coming through pure pace and race craft on a track where overtaking is notoriously difficult.
Given Red Bull had the legs on Ferrari in qualifying, beating Max Verstappen to the chequered flag underlined how superb a performance it was from Vettel.
Rating out of ten: 9.5
Hindered by a poor start for the third race in a row, Max Verstappen was again forced to battle back towards the front in his Red Bull in Singapore.
He has a remarkable knack of finding ways to overtake drivers on a street circuit renowned for being virtually impossible to pass people on, and that served him well as he climbed back up to finish behind the two Ferraris in sixth.
While Verstappen may be slightly disappointed with that after starting fourth on the grid, in truth the young Dutchman was very lucky to avoid any contact with Nico Hulkenberg at the start, which would have brought an end to his race straight away.
Rating out of ten: 6
McLaren had signalled an intention to compete far higher up the grid for the final stretch of the season, and Fernando Alonso certainly kick-started that ambition in the right way in Singapore.
He may have spent most of the race in fifth, but in the end he could do very little about the power of Verstappen and Vettel, and seventh is a highly creditable finish considering the calibre of the teams in front of him at the chequered flag.
Aside from the regular bouts of frustration, there has been very little from Alonso this season to suggest he wouldn't still be able to challenge at the front if he was sat in a competitive car.
Rating out of ten: 9
Having seen his team-mate manage to crash before he'd even made it anywhere near Turn One, the pressure was on Sergio Perez to deliver some points for Force India in their continuing battle with Williams for fourth in the Constructors' Championship.
And the Mexican managed just that as he drove from 18th on the grid - having been relegated from 10th after qualifying by the stewards - to eighth at the end.
Running on what was effectively a one-stop strategy following a very early pit stop under the Safety Car, Perez showed impressive tyre management and underlined again why his team will be so desperate to keep him around in 2017.
Rating out of ten: 8
Another driver who finished in a lower position than he started, but Daniil Kvyat still has every right to be pleased with his evening's work.
Having been denied a grandstand finish between Ricciardo and Rosberg, the highlight of an unusually quiet Singapore Grand Prix was undoubtedly the battle between the Russian and Verstappen from lap 19.
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Kvyat was inevitably going to be passed by the Dutchman in the more powerful car - as he was later in the race - but you could almost see the pleasure emanating through his visor as he held off for so long the man who took his seat at Red Bull.
A ninth-place finish represents world championship points for the first time since Silverstone, so perhaps all is not lost for Kvyat just yet at Toro Rosso.
Rating out of ten: 8
The Russian GP feels like an eternity ago, but Kevin Magnussen finally added to Renault's points tally in Singapore.
Having gone out in Q1, along with team-mate Jolyon Palmer, it underlined just where Renault's pace was in Singapore. Therefore finishing in the points was a remarkable achievement for Magnussen.
Rating out of ten: 8.5
A case of so close yet so far once again for Esteban Gutierrez. For the fourth time this season, the Mexican finished in 11th, just one spot outside of the points and he is yet to get off the mark on his F1 comeback.
He did out-qualify team-mate Romain Grosjean for the second race in a row (although the Frenchman did crash out of Q2), but with decisions being made over 2017 seats, Gutierrez needs to turn the 11th places into points soon.
Rating out of ten: 7.5
The last throes of Felipe Massa's F1 career are becoming consistently underwhelming. The Brazilian hasn't out-qualified team-mate Valtteri Bottas since Baku and lost out on an opportunity to score points this weekend due to a three-stop strategy which never fell into place.
"Coming out behind Gutierrez after that final stop cost us because we might have been able to get onto the back of that Perez train at the end, on a better tyre, but that's racing," rued Rob Smedley, his long-time collaborator.
As a result of Massa finishing out of the points and Bottas not finishing at all, Williams have once again fallen behind Force India in the Constructors' Championship.
Rating out of ten: 5
World championship points may still be alluding Felipe Nasr and Sauber this season, but the Brazilian will have been very happy with his evening's work in Singapore as he drove from 16th on the grid to 13th at the chequered flag - he's only finished higher once this season.
"It was a challenging race," he said. "At the start, we were a bit unlucky, as one car crashed into the barriers on the side of the grid I started from. I lost two positions because of this incident. Finishing the race in P13 was a good recovery."
Rating out of ten: 7.5
The normally-phlegmatic Carlos Sainz was in "angry" mood after Sunday's race and with good reason. All the good work done to claim sixth on the grid with the lap of qualifying was wiped out at the start when he collided, to nobody's fault, with Nico Hulkenberg.
To add insult to literal car injury, Sainz was then shown a black and orange flag by the stewards, triggering a pit-stop which returned him into traffic. Just to cap off his misfortune, Sainz's Toro Rosso car then suffered an intermittent ERS failure and persistent understeer due to the damage accrued at the start.
"Days like today are very frustrating - nothing went right and when you have these kind of opportunities - starting P6 at a circuit like Singapore - you need to make sure you take them and today we didn't," he rued.
Rating out of ten: 7
The future is looking increasingly bleak for Jolyon Palmer after being out-performed by his team-mate Magnussen in Singapore.
It appears the pair are fighting for, at most, one spot at Renault next season, and Palmer could only labour into 15th while his team-mate was securing a seventh world championship point of 2016.
A mixture of bad luck and reliability issues have hindered the Brit's debut season in F1, but he's going to need better displays than this in his final six races to have any chance of securing a seat for next year.
Rating out of ten: 5
Manor's lack of downforce was evident for all to see in Singapore and it looked like 2015 all over again with their two cars cut adrift at the back of the pack. Therefore beating a Sauber to the line can be seen as an achievement for Pascal Wehrlein, who continues to impress onlookers in the paddock.
The German also out-qualified fellow Mercedes junior Esteban Ocon in the sister Manor car by over six tenths of a second.
Rating out of ten: 7
Having blitzed his way into Q2 and out-qualified his Sauber team-mate by more than a second, Marcus Ericsson would have been hoping for far better than his eventual 17th in Singapore, a position made even worse by the fact Felipe Nasr finished four places ahead of him.
"It is obviously a disappointing result after starting the race from P14," he said. "After the restart, I had a decent pace and was able to attack. Then we took a gamble on the strategy-side and went to three stops, which in the end did not work out."
Rating out of ten: 6
Esteban Ocon's race consisted of a series of best-forgotten moments which amounted to an ugly two-lap deficit to the leaders in the final standings. 3-0 down to Wehrlein in qualifying, Ocon's race came a cropper on the opening laps when he was adjudged to have overtaken Nasr behind the Safety Car, triggering a penalty which was followed by a pit-stop that the team described as "an unmitigated disaster".
Off the track, the youngster did at least get to celebrate his 20th birthday this weekend. It was an occasion, not incidentally, that he celebrated with the bosses of Manor, his present employers, Renault, his potential future employers, and Mercedes, his 'parent' employers. It's a knot which is going to take some untangling to determine his 2017 whereabouts.
Rating out of ten: 5
Did not finish: Romain Grosjean, Nico Hulkenberg, Valtteri Bottas, Jenson Button
Don't miss the F1 Report for all the reaction and analysis from the Singapore GP. F1 technical expert Craig Scarborough joins Natalie Pinkham and Marc Priestley in the studio at 8:30pm on Wednesday on Sky Sports F1.
