How Ferrari went from favourite to nowhere

Where did the speed go? That was the question Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari would not, or could not, answer after a chastening, emphatic defeat in the Singapore Grand Prix at a track where it was expected to set the pace.

Until qualifying started, everything was going more or less to plan. Vettel had half a second in hand over Lewis Hamilton in free practice three, but from the moment Q1 started Ferrari was a step behind Mercedes and under serious pressure from the Red Bull of Max Verstappen.

The caveat was an incident that was superficially only a footnote to the weekend but that can't help but have contributed to what happened.

On his practice two qualifying simulation, Vettel slapped the wall at the exit of the Turn 21 left-hander, and when he returned to the garage the combination of a coolant leak and minor suspension damage kept him out of the second half of the session. Both on Friday and after the race Vettel was adamant this didn't have a significant impact on his weekend.

"Not at all, I've done enough laps around here," he said when asked how costly that lost track time was.

"It's never great if you miss out, but Friday and Saturday morning we [Ferrari] were first in practice, so I don't think that made a big difference. Late on in the season, you know enough about tyres and you can read from other people, so we got all the information.

"The fact we made it to the end with the most laps on the [ultrasoft] tyre you least expect to go that far shows we didn't have any problems with the tyres."

But longevity wasn't the fundamental problem - pace was. Ferrari was at its strongest in the daylight-to-dusk third practice, when track conditions were very different to those at the business end of the weekend. Vettel wasn't on track in Friday practice from 2045 to 2130 - given qualifying started at 2100, that surely has significance.

"When Vettel hit the wall the other day, that's not us lucking in. I take a lot of pride in not putting myself in those positions" Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton, meanwhile, has recently demonstrated relentless pace and avoided such errors as he has taken a vice-like grip on the world championship. In harness with a Mercedes team that appears to have got on top of the diva-like tendencies of its car, he's been at his irresistible best. He certainly doesn't see it as good fortune that the mistakes are coming from the red corner, and along with his Mercedes team had no doubt that Vettel's lost track time was a factor.

"When Vettel hit the wall the other day, damaged the car and lost running on the track, that's not us lucking in," said Hamilton. "I take a lot of pride in not putting myself in those positions.

"I know my team is relying on me just as his team is relying on him. There's a lot of pressure on us drivers - it's only small percentages that you get wrong and they have bigger ramifications."

In qualifying, both Ferrari drivers struggled with tyre temperatures. While Hamilton delivered a spectacular lap, Vettel and team-mate Kimi Raikkonen both looked troubled - the increasingly lively rear as the lap went on suggested the rears were too hot at the start of the lap.

Vettel refused to go into detail after qualifying third, but did say "maybe preparing the lap for qualifying..." as an unresolved thought.

In the end, while Vettel gained 1.477 seconds from FP3 to Q3, Hamilton found 2.543s and earned a pole position that allowed him to control the race from the start with a lap that was both brilliantly driven and, from a tyre perspective, perfectly prepared.

Ferrari, wrongfooted by the pace, then squandered Vettel's brilliant pass on Max Verstappen on the opening lap in a futile attempt to undercut Hamilton that was always set to fail thanks to Sergio Perez's heavily upgraded Racing Point Force India being sat in no-man's land between the battle at the front and the midfield. Inevitably, Vettel was delayed behind Perez.

You can understand why Ferrari felt the need to force the issue, but given the move cost Vettel a place and didn't come close to pulling off the undercut, decisions made in the first part of the race ultimately handed Hamilton a three-point bonus in the title chase. Things had looked far more promising for Vettel before the call to pit.

After an explosive first lap, the early stages were a slow bicycle race, with Hamilton leading into the first corner and Vettel nosing ahead of Verstappen on the outside line. Verstappen held firm, but Vettel knew getting ahead had the potential to transform his race.

A good exit from the Turn 5 right-hander leading onto the back straight allowed Vettel to pull to the right of Verstappen on the run to the kink that follows.

Verstappen gave no quarter but left enough space on the inside for Vettel, with the pair still arguing over the position heading into the left-hander at the end of the straight.

Vettel, with the slightest hint of an inside front lock-up, committed around the outside and swooped into second place. This was clean, ferocious battling of the highest order from both, and Vettel's reward was to complete one of the overtaking moves of the season.

"I had a very good start, I tried in Turn 1 but Max was covering the inside and from there I tried to line things up for the next corner, which was successful," said Vettel. "I got a bit of a tow from Lewis down the straight so that worked well."

This was moments before the safety car was deployed thanks to Perez cackhandedly slapping team-mate Esteban Ocon into the wall at Turn 3 while also trying to keep Romain Grosjean's Haas behind him on the inside line.

With the top three set, and Valtteri Bottas leading the battle of the de facto number twos for fourth ahead of Raikkonen and Daniel Ricciardo, the race restarted at the end of lap four. Not that there was much difference between the pace under the safety car and the early laps of that stint as the top six circulated gingerly on hypersofts that needed to last long enough to ensure they could one-stop.

Hamilton's 1m36.015s pole lap was a distant memory as he plodded round, for good reasons, in the 1m46-1m48s bracket from laps five to 11. He then picked up the pace on lap 12, dropping first into the 1m45s then the heady heights of the 1m44s on lap 14 - when Ferrari made its fateful call to pit Vettel.

He was turned around in 2.7s and sent back out on ultrasofts, emerging seven seconds behind Perez's Force India. The Mexican's pace had just dropped by around a second per lap, which in itself wasn't a problem in terms of Vettel's attempt to undercut Hamilton because he wasn't quick enough on his out-lap anyway.

But with Hamilton coming in a lap later and being sent out on soft-compound Pirellis, another problem was now on Ferrari's radar - Verstappen.

The Red Bull is often a good protector of its tyres and temporary leader Verstappen set a good pace while Vettel floundered behind Perez. This cost Vettel around three seconds on lap 16, and a lap later Red Bull pulled Verstappen in for softs.

He appeared to have a comfortable enough margin to emerge clearly ahead with a normal stop. But the engine problems, related to engine mapping that struggled to cope with the unusually humid conditions that made the car prone to cutting out when not on full throttle, that he had suffered all weekend were always going to make the stop difficult.

Verstappen lost about a second to inadvertently selecting second as his car dropped off the jacks then a stutter once in the fast lane of the pits. This meant he emerged from the pits side by side with Vettel heading into the Turn 3 hairpin.

Vettel attempted to go the long way round but thought better of it, for Verstappen rightly wasn't in the mood to give him a millimetre more space than he had to.

At the end of lap 18, Hamilton had a lead of 4.8s over Verstappen, with Vettel nearly three seconds further back and concerned about the fact he was on ultrasofts with two faster cars ahead on softs.

"There is no chance, we're again too late," he said over the radio. "These tyres will not make it to the end." They did of course, thanks to good management, but the battle up front was effectively over and the finishing order set.

"Overall we were not fast enough," said Vettel. "We didn't have the pace in the race. But also I think we tried to be aggressive in the beginning and obviously it didn't work out.

"After that I had a different race from the other guys, on a different tyre, and I wasn't very convinced that we could make it to the end, but pitting wasn't an option because you lose too much time in the pitstop. So we just focused on making it home."

Things were a little more lively in the battle for fourth, fifth and sixth, as while Bottas had pitted for softs from fourth on lap 16, Raikkonen and Ricciardo ran longer. Raikkonen pitted from the lead at the end of lap 22, while Ricciardo went five laps longer in the hope of fluking a virtual safety car that never came.

Once he pitted, the trio ran in the same order. While they did converge later in the race, nobody was able to mount a serious attack and not one of the three had quite the same pace as their team-mates.

Back at the front, Hamilton wasn't out of the woods yet. The gap between him and Verstappen hovered around the five-second mark until lap 36. That time round, Verstappen closed the gap by 1.7s to just 3.4s, and he was still closing when a perfect storm that could have cost Hamilton the race formed thanks to the appearance of duelling backmarkers.

Williams driver Sergey Sirotkin was battling to keep the Haas of Grosjean behind him as they disputed 14th place. Hamilton, having just cleared Pierre Gasly's Toro Rosso, entered the back straight behind Grosjean and Sirotkin, with the Haas driver attacking into the Turn 7 left-hander.

With Sirotkin defending, that gave Hamilton a track full of cars ahead, so he had to sit behind there and in the right-hander that followed while the two continued their dispute.

Vettel didn't drive badly by any means. Ferrari has to shoulder the lion's share of the responsibility for failing to get the car working

This allowed Verstappen to latch onto the back of him through the twisty section at the far end of the circuit, before Hamilton got ahead of the duo with his lead still intact after avoiding putting his car in a position that might leave him vulnerable to being passed through impatience to clear the traffic.

In common with the other frontrunners, there were further occasions when backmarkers subsequently allowed Verstappen to close the gap a little, but he never got as close as that again.

"It definitely got a little bit interesting with some of the backmarkers, which was incredibly difficult because you already felt the draft from the cars when you were five or six seconds behind and the car was starting to slide a bit more," said Hamilton.

"You can't see the blue flags, they are very dark blue and in the smallest holes [in the fence], until the light panels come on. It made it very tough. It was Max's only opportunity into Turn 10, I had to go massively defensive and even then I was racing the backmarker, they weren't lifting off as I got alongside them. It was tricky, but after that it was OK. It gets your hair standing up for a second, then it's back to business."

With Hamilton able to keep his fronts warm enough by not backing off too much, he started to edge away from Verstappen. Occasionally, Verstappen closed to within three seconds, but in the final half-dozen laps Hamilton opened up a winning margin of 8.961s. This was a classy, convincing win for a virtuoso champion at the top of his game. As, indeed, was runner-up Verstappen's performance.

Vettel didn't drive badly by any means. Despite his Friday crash, a Ferrari team that has looked shaky in recent races has to shoulder the lion's share of the responsibility for failing to get the car working during the weekend as well as it was able to do so frequently earlier in the season.

But it should be noted that just because last year's car flew in Singapore doesn't mean the 2018 version was always destined to - it's now a far more even performer across the season and, given the engine has been so crucial to Ferrari's pace, a circuit where only 39% of the lap time is spent on full throttle was perhaps always destined to be challenging.

After the race, Vettel put a brave face on it but had the air of a man who knows that, while not mathematically beaten, he is now an outsider in a championship chase he was once bossing.

"I will always defend the team," said Vettel when asked how the weekend got away from him and Ferrari. But his haunted, disengaged demeanour after the race suggested that, behind closed doors, he will surely have been on the attack.