Singapore GP data: How Daniel Ricciardo denied Lando Norris a maiden Grand Chelem

Lando Norris dominated the Singapore GP race from start to finish as the McLaren driver crushed Max Verstappen who, despite giving his all in the Red Bull, could do nothing against the British driver who had the Grand Chelem within his grasp before Daniel Ricciardo stole the fastest lap from him.

Lando Norris broke his curse of defending a pole position at the end of lap 1 and did it in style. The McLaren driver never let go of the lead of the race, not even after making his mandatory pit stop.

His start was particularly good. He had a very good traction at the start to maintain P1 without even needing to defend the position when braking into Turn 1.

Max Verstappen did have to stick his elbows out to defend his position from Lewis Hamilton who found a great initial grip thanks to the advantage of the soft tyre over the medium tyre and had to brake earlier to cover the outside racing line to keep his P2.

From then on, the race was a monologue of Norris. The Briton quickly opened a gap of over a second to prevent Max Verstappen from attacking him with DRS. In turn, Hamilton could not match Verstappen’s lap times and quickly dropped out of the fight for victory as his soft tyre experienced higher degradation than the medium.

Norris cooked up his third victory during the first stint of the race. At the beginning he pushed just enough to open a safety gap and from lap 10 he started to control the pace of the race from the lead, linearly increasing the gap to Max Verstappen. The Dutch driver was not even able to set lap times half a second slower than the McLaren driver!

McLaren’s idea, seeing the clear advantage over Red Bull, was logical: extend the stint as much as possible and wait for Verstappen to pit to avoid an untimely Safety Car to snatch P1. And so they did.

However, the hearts of Norris’ and McLaren fans stopped for a moment when the British driver said over the radio on lap 29 that he had suffered damage to his front wing. after touching the wall when he went wide at Turn 14 and lost almost three seconds of delta time to Max Verstappen.

Red Bull immediately then pitted Verstappen, who with a pit stop of 3.0 seconds, came out of the pits just behind Charles Leclerc. who blocked him during the first two sectors of his out-lap.

This meant that the undercut effect was severely reduced and practically the 3.81s that Verstappen regained from Norris was only due to the McLaren driver’s mistake, which by just a few centimetres did not end in total tragedy for him.

At the end of the first stint, the gap between Norris and Verstappen was 20.690s. The McLaren driver was almost nine tenths per lap faster than the Red Bull driver on average. An absolutely devastating difference.

But it wasn’t just the huge difference in pace evident on track that caused this huge gap between the two drivers in the first 31 laps. McLaren’s medium tyre wear was also better than that of Red Bull.

Applying linear regression – although tyre behaviour is not always linear – we can make a mathematical approximation after correcting the laps by fuel consumption and determine that Norris’ medium tyres degraded +0.029s per lap while Verstappen’s tyres gave a time loss of +0.074s after each lap.

In the second stint, Norris and McLaren’s sole focus was on keeping the car on the tarmac and fighting for the bonus point of the fastest lap. As we can see, Norris performed the push-cool-push technique by doing a ‘push’ lap and leaving a lap for tyre cooling and battery recharging.

Norris went, in my opinion, even too much to the limit, touching the wall on the outside of the entry at Turn 10 in his attempt to achieve the fastest lap that could also serve to give him the first Grand Chelem of his Formula 1 career – pole position, fastest lap and all laps of the race led.

A perhaps unnecessary risk, as he almost lost the victory if he had pushed just a bit harder. But this also shows the incredible greatness and quality of the drivers we have on the grid.

And here is perhaps McLaren’s only mistake in the whole race in terms of strategy. Looking for perfection in the decisions of the Papaya team in this race, perhaps they should have tried to make a pitstop to fit the soft tyre and thus ensure the fastest lap and the Grand Chelem of Norris at the Marina Bay street circuit.

As we can see in the graph below, the gap between Norris and Verstappen on lap 55 was over 29 seconds after several attempts of Norris trying to set the fastest lap time, and in fact, he provisionally achieved it on lap 49 with a time of 1:34.925.

The pit lane time lost in Singapore is approximately 28 seconds, which would have given enough for McLaren and Norris to have a one-second margin and a free stop to put on the soft tyre and secure 100% of that fastest lap and the Grand Chelem.

The only risk of executing this move was to make a bad pitstop which would have put Max Verstappen in the lead of the race with just seven laps to go.

Would he have had time in that scenario to overtake Verstappen on his lap? Surely yes, but on a circuit where track position is key it’s never a risk you want to take.

Another option, which in hindsight seems logical, is to have tried to open that gap of around 30 seconds to ensure the free pit stop at the end of the race instead of doing the push-cool-push with the hard tyre.

In other words, to have opened the gap progressively as happened in the first stint from lap 10 onwards and to stop on the penultimate lap.

Curiously, for many it went unnoticed – even for me, I must admit – but before Daniel Ricciardo, it was Kevin Magnussen who stopped for the soft tyre on lap 52 and achieved a lap time of 1:34.754 which was immediately deleted for surpassing track limits at Turn 2.

It was then that Ricciardo, who was running in P18 – virtually last after Magnussen’s retirement – made a pit stop to give Red Bull one last service by stealing the fastest lap from Norris on the final lap of the race with a 1:34.486.

A lap with which he will surely bid farewell to Formula 1 and denied a eight-point difference between Lando Norris and Max Verstappen after this Singapore GP. The gap between the two is now 52 points, the smallest since the Chinese GP.

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