TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Lewis Hamilton said he had been dreaming of his victory in Singapore, which resulted in him replacing Nico Rosberg at the top of the Formula One world championship table, as reported by The Guardian.
Rosberg was 22 points ahead of Hamilton but failed to finish and fell three points behind. Sebastian Vettel was second, his best result of the season, ahead of his team-mate Daniel Ricciardo and Fernando Alonso.
Hamilton said: “I was dreaming about this last night but you never think it’s going to happen. Thanks to my team, knowing we have a car we can fight with and the way it felt on track, it’s incredible. I was looking for that clean weekend and this has been it. It has not been perfect as Nico didn’t finish, so there are things we can still work on. I absolutely want it to be decided in a battle between us on the track and not technical problems.
“Nico not being there [at the start of the race] was a massive weight off my mind. I’m not thinking about momentum because I know from experience it could all easily be snatched away any day.”
A disappointed Rosberg said: “It was the toughest day for me this year. Even worse than Silverstone [where he also retired]. None of the steering wheel functions worked – so I had no DRS, and so on. The gears were all over the place. My brake balance was totally in the wrong place. Everything was all over the place.
“We saw early on that changing the [steering] wheel wasn’t going to solve it. From a team perspective unreliability is our weakness and we need to get to the bottom of it and try and improve on that.”
Niki Lauda, Mercedes’ nonexecutive chairman, agreed. “We need to get the cars reliable,” he said. “This is what we are here for. We need to work harder on this.”
With Red Bull taking the other two podium places with Vettel and Ricciardo, the team principal Christian Horner has not yet conceded the title. “They both mathematically have a chance in the championship but it is a long-shot,” he said. “It is down to them racing each other on the track. It would be wrong to interfere with that given the situation we are in. We let them race as you saw.”
With double points available in the last race in Abu Dhabi, Red Bull have a chance, but it looks far-fetched. “The Mercedes men have a massive advantage,” Horner said. “We will take it one race at a time. They [Ricciardo and Vettel] have both taken a chunk of points out of Nico. Daniel, OK, conceded three points to Seb. Is that going to make a difference in the end? It is impossible to say with a crystal ball at this stage, it doesn’t make sense to interfere with team orders.”
THE GUARDIAN | PAUL W
