Could the team have realistically achieved more than third and 10th positions on Sunday evening?
"The deployment of the Safety Car just ahead of the first pitstops inevitably hurts the regular two-stopping teams more than the others, but we feel that we dealt with the situation well. We asked both Lewis and Heikki to adopt a fuel-saving strategy in order to minimise the risk of needing to refuel under the Safety Car, and then we 'stacked' both cars and dealt with them efficiently once the pitlane was opened.

"It was unfortunate that Heikki was forced to queue, because it meant he would be fighting among the traffic for the remainder of the race. He was also affected by brake problems towards the end of the race and was therefore forced to slow his pace.

"With Lewis, the fact is that when you’re fighting for a world championship, you’re necessarily more risk-averse than those teams who feel more comfortable pushing for a strong result. And while we take nothing away from the efforts of Renault and Williams, our evening’s work was tinted by the knowledge that neither Ferrari driver looked like scoring strongly. We’d have looked pretty silly if we’d thrown Lewis’s points finish away by telling him to push like mad. The reality is that we played the numbers game perfectly on Sunday evening and were beaten by two cars which, for one reason or another, were able to exploit different variables than ourselves."

Would you say Lewis was disadvantaged by the arrival of that first Safety Car?
"The current Safety Car deployment rule can cause some drivers to be disadvantaged relative to some of their rivals, yes. To that extent, it's a bit of a lottery, but it’s one of those variables that tends to even-out over the course of a season: sometimes you benefit from the Safety Car's deployment, other times you don’t.

"What made the situation a bit more unfortunate for Lewis in Singapore was the time taken for the stop-go penalties to be applied to those drivers who had refuelled under the Safety Car. Nico was able to get the hammer down out in front while the stewards were coming to their decision - which effectively neutered his eventual stop-go penalty.

"With hindsight, I guess we could have brought Lewis in for fuel and tyres at the same time as Williams brought Nico in. And had we done so, Lewis would very possibly have won the race. But, in truth, you can’t second-guess things like that, and we brought Lewis in as soon as the rules allowed, in good faith. Also, to be fair to the stewards, they had a lot to think about at the time."

The team brought a large number of improvements to the car for this race; what have you got planned for the final three fly-aways?
"Ordinarily, the Singapore weekend would have been our last big upgrade package of the season. But we’ve now got an upgrade package focused on Brazil and will be looking to see whether we can pull any of those improvements forwards. There will still be little bits and pieces brought to the car for the two Asian races [Japan and China] but the package of upgrades won’t be as big as the one we brought to Singapore."

E.A. © CAPSIS International