Vettel only has himself to blame for title blow

"Your guess is as good as mine," was Lewis Hamilton's downbeat response, a few hours after qualifying fifth, when asked how he intended to limit the damage Sebastian Vettel would inflict on him in the Singapore Grand Prix.

But there is a flip side to the damage limitation coin, which Ferrari learned to its cost in the race.

In a few moments, the combination of Vettel's so-so start in wet conditions, team-mate Kimi Raikkonen's spectacularly good one and Max Verstappen's decent launch set the top three on a collision course.

Ferrari inflicted enormous damage, but it did so on itself - and with devastating consequences.

Regardless of the verdict of the stewards, who deemed no driver was "wholly or predominantly to blame for the incident", Vettel only had himself to blame for a missed opportunity that, if it doesn't cost him the world championship, has certainly reduced the percentage chance of him winning it. This was Ferrari's worst-case scenario, a nadir from which it may not recover in 2017.

It took around six seconds for Ferrari's day of destiny to turn into one of disaster. Vettel was a little slow off the line from pole, then appeared to suffer a dab of wheelspin in the second phase of the start.

Vettel was vulnerable, and he knew it. Around three-and-a-half seconds after the lights went out, he glanced to his left and made his decision. He invoked the Michael Schumacher start chop, a technique he has deployed well in the past, to cover Verstappen. Bad decision.

The trouble is, if do that you are often asking the driver alongside you on the straight to accommodate you. And it was impossible for Verstappen to accommodate Vettel.

This was partly down to Raikkonen struggling on a track where he normally goes well and being well off his team-mate's qualifying pace, leaving him fourth on the grid behind the Red Bulls instead of alongside Vettel on the front row.

Raikkonen's rapid start had catapulted him between Verstappen and the pitwall and, for a few seconds, looked like it would give him the race lead.

But Vettel's move led to the moment when Verstappen was doomed. Around five seconds after the start, he had a wall then a Ferrari on his left, and a horse prancing towards him from the right. Stuck in the middle, out of options.

"I'm happy that not only I retired, but all three of us, so we all have a bit of pain" Max Verstappen

The result was Raikkonen, tagged by Verstappen's front-left wheel, pitched into a spin and torpedoing his team-mate. Vettel did make it through the first corner, but with a hole in his sidepod and fluid streaming from his car.

Hamilton, who had made a great start to charge up the right-hand side - critically, jumping Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull - wisely kept to the left on the exit of Turn 3 to keep away from the fluid and watched Vettel spin into the wall moments later.

Verstappen had survived the initial contact with Raikkonen and was explaining to the team that he had damage when the rudderless Finnish torpedo hit him amidships and pushed him into Fernando Alonso's McLaren.

Alonso had made a great start and was making his way round the outside of Verstappen, and while he survived for longer than Vettel the damage he sustained eventually put him out.

The stewards took no action against Vettel, who was the subject of the investigation. The verdict stated that Vettel "moved to the left-hand side of the track; car #33 and car #7 then collided". This is true, but critical to the lack of punishment is the causal link between the first statement and the second is implied, rather than emphatically stated.

The stewards knew exactly what happened and how the last car to be hit had created the situation, but opted to use the fact that the initial contact was between Raikkonen and Verstappen as a way out.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the stewards doing that from a practical point of view. Vettel and Ferrari had been punished in the heaviest way possible already, and as a rule F1 does well to minimise penalties for racing accidents even when, as in this case, Vettel was the trigger. Why? Because Raikkonen and Verstappen were driving in a straight line, and he wasn't.

Crucially, this was on a straight and well before the braking zone. If you make a move on a straight requiring another driver to move over, brake or vanish completely to avoid a collision, you are at fault. It doesn't matter how many car widths there are, it is playing with fire. This was Vettel's crucial miscalculation.

The whole Ferrari team did its best to avoid the media, and Vettel explained what happened in the most prosaic terms possible.

"I had an average start and then went to the left trying to fend off Max and the next thing I get a bump on the side and see Kimi's car," was his summary. At least he was emphatic in confirming that his move was aimed at defending against the Red Bull.

Raikkonen took a similar approach, while Verstappen was quick to pile in and blame Vettel.

"I tried to back out of it because I could see it coming, but the rear tyres are wider than the front so I couldn't back out of it anymore," said Verstappen, who couldn't reverse the front of his Red Bull out of the closing Ferrari vice.

"I was in the middle without doing anything wrong, I was just trying to have a clean start.

"I'm happy that not only I retired, but all three of us, so we all have a bit of pain. If I make a mistake myself and go off, that's a different story.

"I could see Kimi had a great start so I tried not to defend that as it's a long race but after 200 metres everything was done."

Verstappen is right that he could see it coming, and if you watch his onboard replay there is a moment where you can feel his helplessness. It might tally with the tedious narrative of Verstappen as an impetuous young lunatic, but short of vanishing into the ether he could do nothing to prevent this.

Hamilton, meanwhile, will have been delighted with what he saw playing out in front of him. Already excited by what he described as "his conditions" thanks to the pre-race rain that split the field between intermediate and wet rubber, he made a great start to tuck in behind Vettel into second place.

With Vettel out of the way a few moments later, the whole complexion of the race had changed. As he led Ricciardo around under the safety car, he knew it was a two-horse race.

"I saw this commotion happening," said Hamilton. "I was alongside Daniel, I had a great Turn 1 and came out behind Sebastian.

"And then I came out of Turn 3 and I was just excited to race Sebastian. I was like 'it's on, I'm ready'. But then he had a problem with the car and he lost control. Then I was in the lead."

But this was a Red Bull that was, on paper, seriously fast. Hamilton did an immaculate job of the restart, crossing the line already 1.2 seconds clear. By the end of the first racing lap, he was 3.5s ahead.

In the ensuing five laps of racing, before Daniil Kvyat locked up into Turn 7 at the end of the back straight, ran wide and piled into the barrier to trigger a second safety car, Hamilton was an average of 0.322s faster than Ricciardo. Both were on intermediates, so it was a straight fight. Probably just Hamilton's virtuosity in the wet, right?

Ricciardo capitalised on the second safety car to make a stop for fresh intermediates. This unnerved Hamilton, who enquired about the wisdom of Mercedes not doing the same. What's more, the strategy move didn't even cost Ricciardo a position because a lap later the two cars that had got ahead of him - Renault's Nico Hulkenberg and Force India's Sergio Perez - also pitted. Surely now, Ricciardo would pile on the pressure? But no.

With the advantage of tyres with 11 fewer laps on them, Ricciardo's deficit was even bigger. From the lap 15 restart through to the start of lap 28, at the end of which Ricciardo pitted to take on slick ultra-softs, Hamilton's average advantage was 0.556s per lap. This built up a gap of 10s, with the Mercedes man pitting a lap later than the Red Bull and emerging with a lead that settled at just under nine seconds.

Now, with the track basically dry and onto the tyres on which Ricciardo had been seven tenths a lap faster in Friday practice, was surely the time? But again, no.

Aside from a moment after the restart when Hamilton dropped 2.5s thanks to some instructions from the team not to take too much out of the tyres plus thoughts of potentially bunch people up to stop anyone pitting and capitalising on clear air using fresh rubber, all was well.

Ricciardo did seem to be a little closer to the pace of Hamilton, but the reality is that the Mercedes driver had it all under control. At no point in this race, even with a tyre advantage on intermediates and through a range of conditions, did Ricciardo look like a credible threat. So where did Red Bull's pace go?

This was destined to be a Hamilton victory from the moment Vettel thought going left was a good idea

Part of the answer is simple. Under the first safety car, Red Bull detected a gearbox problem that it anticipated would prevent Ricciardo making the end of the race. The result was a conservative approach to downshifts, less engine braking, and a little more lift-and-coast to avoid overdoing it on the brakes. That certainly cost Ricciardo a few tenths per lap, but that doesn't explain everything.

So let's rewind to where we started, with Hamilton talking about his expectations on Saturday night (technically, thanks to the time-shifted nature of the Singapore night race it was a few minutes into Sunday morning), when victory seemed an impossibility.

"Watching the onboard footage, their car has a different level of grip to ours," said Hamilton of Vettel. "Whether that's downforce, I think it's more mechanically than overall downforce. It's exactly the same [problem] we've had for years here."

And yet, come race day, the Mercedes was strong. Potentially strong enough even to give Ferrari something to think about had either of its cars lasted.

In some ways, this isn't a surprise as qualifying tends to extend gaps between cars compared to those over a long run. But even so, it was clear things were better for Hamilton. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff pointed to the track conditions as one explanation.

"Tyre temperatures," he surmised when asked to explain the difference in performance. "We were running always in a zone where we had the tyre temperatures under control and yesterday it was hotter. In order to extract it on one lap, you need to run them higher. The track was green, the grip was less than in qualifying yesterday and it was cooler and less push [understeer]."

The track temperature was certainly a little lower in the race, around eight degrees lower than Saturday's peak, and that clearly helped. Significant, too, perhaps was the fact that Mercedes struggled with the balance of the car on ultra-softs during practice combined with the fact Hamilton set a prodigiously fast pace on soft-compound Pirellis in free practice two. That, perhaps, hinted at the underlying potential of the Mercedes.

So it was a combination of factors that did the job for Hamilton. First, the accident at the start that wiped out three of the four drivers who outqualified him. Second, the fact he gained track position over Ricciardo at the start. Third, the gearbox problem that held his pursuer back a little.

But there is a fourth factor, namely Hamilton's virtuoso performance. He didn't put a foot wrong in the race, and was on a different level to team-mate Valtteri Bottas, who finished an unspectacular third.

As Hamilton alluded to after the race, his hero Ayrton Senna's crash while leading by a country mile in Monaco in 1988 was a reminder of what can go wrong when you seemingly have the race won. That sharpness meant that even without Ricciardo's problem, this was surely destined to be a Hamilton victory from the moment Vettel thought going left was a good idea.

The reward was a victory snatched from the jaws of likely defeat and the biggest championship lead of the season.

And all thanks to a title rival who, in the course of six fateful seconds, turned a winning arsenal on himself and shot himself in the foot.