George Russell goes into the Singapore weekend with a horrible confluence of circumstances. Forced by his PU failure in Sepang to take an engine from outside the pool, he will therefore be starting at or near the back in Singapore, a circuit where overtaking is immensely difficult.
Not only that, but because the Mercedes ADUO-updated PU is not available yet, the fresh motor he’s taking here is of the current – soon to be outmoded – spec. So if he wants to get the benefit of the ADUO motor from whenever it’s available (probably from the very next race, at Austin), he’s in for another grid penalty too.
That’s just George’s lot. Nothing much he can do about it, other than enjoy the performance of a competitive car around a track at which he has historically shone and see where that takes him. There’s an almost zero chance of him emulating the trick of team-mate Kimi Antonelli at Monza in winning from the back, but a fresh-engined Mercedes should have the performance to get through the lower part of the field relatively quickly.
A lap time advantage of 1.5sec is reckoned to be what you need here to overtake, which should get you past the Cadillacs, Williams and Haas cars without too much drama. It gets more difficult after that and further progress will probably have to be done on strategy and tyre age offsets.
Alonso had his best race of the season at Sepang
Aston Martin
Normally, the Aston Martin would be included in those cars which would be easy passes, but on the evidence of Sepang that may no longer be the case. You may recall that its first upgrade of the year was in Hungary and it found the car something in excess of 1.5sec per lap, allowing Alonso through to Q2 for the first time. But since then until Sepang last weekend, that progress wasn’t so obvious and it was generally forgotten about. But it shouldn’t have been.