Max Verstappen completed a clean sweep of the Singapore Grand Prix weekend on Sunday, converting pole into a 7.335s victory over Charles Leclerc after winning Saturday's rain-hit sprint. Kimi Antonelli finished third and now leads the championship by 102 points with six rounds left. He can win the title at the next round in Austin.
The win was Verstappen's 73rd in Formula 1, and it came on his 250th Grand Prix start. It was also his first victory at Marina Bay. After going winless through the first 15 rounds of 2026, he has now won back-to-back Grands Prix, and Red Bull have closed to within seven points of McLaren for third in the constructors' championship.
"It's taken a while, but I think this race was very good," Verstappen said.
Verstappen untouchable
Leclerc launched well from second, but Verstappen moved across to cover the inside and kept the lead into Turn 1. The Ferrari stayed within DRS range for the opening laps, then the gap stretched. By lap 15 it was 2.6s, and by the time Verstappen made his only stop, for mediums on lap 33, nobody was close enough to threaten him.
The grid was split roughly evenly between softs and mediums, with a one-stop strategy expected for a hot, humid 62 laps. Verstappen started on softs and was quick on both compounds. At one point Red Bull told him that managing the gap was the best help he could give the team. The win was never in doubt.
Leclerc took second with a two-stop strategy, using the second virtual safety car for a cheap stop and setting the race's fastest lap on his final set. He passed team-mate Lewis Hamilton for second on lap 46 and finished more than 17 seconds clear of Antonelli.
Hamilton's costly call
Hamilton's afternoon unravelled in the final laps. He started third on mediums, was the first of the front-runners to pit, on lap 19, and ran in a podium position for most of the race. When Lance Stroll's Aston Martin stopped at Turn 15 with a clutch problem and brought out the second VSC, Ferrari called both drivers in. Leclerc pitted. Hamilton stayed out.
On old tyres, he was a sitting duck. Antonelli passed him into Turn 16, Lando Norris followed, and Oscar Piastri took fifth with a move into the same corner. Hamilton finished sixth and apologised to the team over the radio.
"A painful lesson today, but I take full responsibility for the decisions I made," Hamilton said in a statement. He was unwell after the race and excused from media duties. "Not every call will work out and I can accept getting it wrong, but I'm sorry for the team for the points we lost today."
Team principal Fred Vasseur was blunter. "We were P2, P3 on track, we called two of our guys to pit behind the VSC, one of our guys said: 'No, I prefer to stay on track,' or he missed pit entry. Don't blame the team."
Antonelli's track-limits escape
Antonelli's third place was not as tidy as it looks. He had laps deleted for track limits twice at Turn 2 and once at the final corner, which brought out the black-and-white warning flag. "Track limits, track limits, track limits," race engineer Peter Bonington told him on the radio.
A further offence came on his out-lap at Turn 7 during the VSC restart, which would ordinarily have brought a five-second penalty. Mercedes contested it, and the stewards rescinded the violation. Antonelli explained that when he hit the brakes, "nothing happened" and he "almost went into the wall". He said he had been fighting hot brakes and a long pedal for much of the race, and a sensor fault had left the team without brake-temperature data. He also reported fluid around his feet from heat soak, though Mercedes said it was not a concern.
I'm Alex Da Costa, a systems engineer with more than ten years of experience designing and maintaining data-heavy infrastructure. I've been watching Formula 1 since the 2005 season â Alonso's first championship, the year Schumacher's seven-title era finally cracked â and it's been an obsession ever since. Pit Lane F1 is what happens when that IT background meets a lifelong F1 habit. I started this site because the big outlets cover the headline result but rarely the data underneath: why a pit-stop window mattered, how a circuit's lap-record history actually compares, what every driver has done at every venue. So I built it. Race recaps for every Grand Prix since 1950, head-to-head career comparisons, telemetry replays for 2024 onward, and per-circuit deep dives â all from open data sources, fact-checked against multiple references, and written in plain language. The site is run independently. No team, driver, or commercial partner influences what gets published. If you spot a factual error or want to suggest a feature, the contact page is the fastest way to reach me.
