Lewis Hamilton says the lap that earned him a surprise pole position for Formula 1’s Singapore Grand Prix was magic. He admitted he doesn’t really know where it came from.
“I was thinking there’s no way I can find half a second,” he said. “In that last session it was about pulling all those bits in practice and trying to put it into a perfect puzzle – 99.9% of the time it doesn’t go right.
But that lap, I didn’t have wheelspin, I didn’t have a snap anywhere, the car was just underneath me and I managed to maximise it at pretty much every corner.
“I can’t remember one where I thoughts I could do more. The second lap I tried to go that little bit more, brake half a metre later, it was too much, the car wasn’t going to have it. I feel I got everything possible in that first lap.”
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff hailed Lewis’s effort as “the most amazing lap I’ve ever seen” and said it was “stardust”, with Bottas 0.687s slower in fourth.
“I want to say thank you to Brackley and Brixworth,” Wolff told Channel 4. “They’ve done such an amazing job to make us competitive in Singapore. Who would have thought that?
“It’s the first time we’ve really conquered it [the Singapore circuit] in the last years in that way. I’m over the moon. Whatever the race result we’ve made a step forward in understanding what the car needs and that makes me happy.”
