Carlos Sainz surprised Hamilton at the start of the Singapore GP, where the Briton lost his chances of victory from the start. The Spaniard started better, and was left with the gap in the first chicane, where he almost touched a seven-time champion who had to go through the loopholes and who protested on the radio.
Despite his annoyance in the heat of the battle, the Mercedes man did not want to make firewood before the media and defined it as a simple incident: “It’s okay, it’s racing.”
And he explained his message on the radio, where he directly pointed out that the Ferrari driver had pushed him off the track: “The only reason I mentioned it was because I didn’t want anyone to think that I had simply left the track, because there is a bollard on the right side that you have to go around if you go out, but they had forced me to open up.
After those first corners, Lewis Hamilton stayed behind Sainz, apparently with more pace but unable to pass him, while Sergio Pérez and Charles Leclerc escaped ahead. The #44 believes he had the pace to have been with the leaders, but the fact that the asphalt was wet did not help him overtake a Sainz whom he defined as slow.
“I had a rough start to the race, and then I got stuck behind Carlos. I don’t know why he was so slow. But obviously I wasn’t fast enough to pass him in those conditions, and I just got stuck behind him.” .
“I think I could do similar times to the ones in front, but because I was stuck behind him I couldn’t. I think if I had been third I would have stayed with the guys in front.”
The touch with Sainz was not the only moment of Hamilton’s complaints on the radio at Marina Bay. After the pitstop to fit dry tyres, the Englishman mentioned to his engineer something about the compounds he was running, reminding him that they had already talked about it. When asked to explain, he questioned the team’s strategy: “Because I had laps around the grid on the used soft with few laps, but then they put me on a new soft and it was terrible.”
“It took several laps for it to get up to temperature. And for some reason we can’t get our tires working as fast as the others, both in the wet and on slicks. So we don’t really understand why.”