George Russell led the F1 Singapore Grand Prix from start to finish to score his second win of 2025 in dominant fashion. The Mercedes driver started from pole and built a comfortable gap to the field behind him, controlling the action from the front to take his first win on the streets of Singapore in a largely uneventful 62-lap race.
“We don’t really know where this performance came from but we are really happy,” said Russell after winning by 5.430 seconds. “I was a bit nervous at the beginning [of the race], when I saw Max [Vertsappen of Red Bull, in second] on the soft tire, but that first stint was great for us and I extended the gap.”
Meanwhile, Verstappen continued to show that he’s not fully out of the title fight, starting on the front row and following in Russell’s tire tracks for the entire race, although he never mounted a real challenge to the leader. Instead, he expertly defended against a charging Lando Norris in the McLaren, who harried him in the final stages of the race.
“We just opted to try something different because normally, once you get past Turn 1, you just stay there,” he said about starting on the soft tire. “We tried and it didn’t really work out.
“And, unfortunately, the whole race was a little more difficult than I hoped for a lot of different reasons, so there’s a few things we need to understand,” he continued. “I think second was the maximum result.”
The race continued the often spicy championship battle between the McLaren teammates, who clashed in Turn 3 when Norris got his elbows up at the start and banged wheels with Oscar Piastri, pushing his teammate wide and dangerously close to the wall.
Norris gained three points in the driver’s standings, but Piastri definitely did not appreciate his teammate’s aggressiveness at the start, saying on the radio: “So, are we just cool with Lando just barging me out of the way?”
In the end, the team seemed fine with the incident and left the drivers to sort it out on the track, where Norris crossed the line one spot ahead of his teammate.
Asked about the Turn 3 incident with Piastri, Norris said: “It was slippery – it was still wet in a lot of places – but it’s racing. I put it on the inside and I had a small correction but nothing more than that. It was good racing.”
While Norris tried to hunt down Verstappen for second and gain more points, he couldn’t make it stick because “Max didn’t make any mistakes.”
The win also helped Russell gain a few points in the standings and allowed Mercedes to tighten its grip on second overall in the constructors’ standings.
While he stayed fourth in the driver’s title fight, Russell now lies 36 behind Verstappen for third. Piastri leads the drivers’ standings by 22 over Norris, 336-314. Verstappen sits third, with 273, Russell fourth, at 237, while Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc rounds out the top-five, with 127.
In the constructors’ standings, McLaren’s third and fourth in the race sealed the 2025 title for the team, with six races to go in the season, marking a second-consecutive championship for the Woking outfit. It marks McLaren’s 10th team championship, second only to Ferrari’s 16.
“I want to thank the team for their incredible work,” said team principal Andrea Stella. “We are definitely working very hard to continue this streak of wins into the future with the big changes in the technical regulations. We understand that it will be difficult, but we are all-in.”
Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull continue to battle for the title of best of the rest, with Mercedes now ahead of Ferrari by 27 points, 325-298, after moving into second spot following the last race in Azerbaijan. Red Bull crept four points closer to Ferrari on the strength of Verstappen’s second, with the gap now just 10 points.
Canadian team Aston Martin saw one driver in the points, with Fernando Alonso initially crossing the line eighth. Lewis Hamilton later got a five-second post-race penalty, dropping him to eighth, with Alonso now seventh. Canadian driver Lance Stroll ended the night race in 13th, one lap behind winner Russell.
