Perez wins, but faces investigation

The race was delayed by one hour and five minutes due to torrential rain falling in the build-up to the original 8pm start time, but the result was actually not confirmed at the chequered flag as Perez faces a post-race investigation for a safety car infringement.

That had been called into action twice, with three virtual safety car activations also taking place in the wet-to-dry thriller.

At the start, Leclerc and Perez made identical reactions from the front row but the Red Bull accelerated better as they raced away from the line and he swept past the Ferrari to comfortably seize the lead into Turn 1.

Behind, Carlos Sainz and Lewis Hamilton went side-by-side through Turn 1 and made light contact just ahead of the Turn 2 apex, which sent the Mercedes wide and down to third, the incident reviewed by the stewards by deemed not worthy of a full investigation.

The same thing happened for Max Verstappen cutting the first corner after he had bogged down badly leaving the line as his car nearly went into anti-stall mode and he fell from eighth to 12th.

Up front, Perez scampered clear of Leclerc – but only to the tune of around a second over the first phase of the race, with Sainz and Hamilton – complaining about his inters to Mercedes very early – soon distanced by over five seconds.

Perez set a series of fastest laps but could only pull out a lead of 1.4s before Leclerc began to home back in, reaching 0.8s behind the Red Bull at the end of lap eight of the scheduled 61.

But there the race was neutralised by a safety car period, extending the streak of every Singapore race featuring such an intervention.

It was called to cover the Alfa Romeo of Zhou Guanyu being recovered from the Turn 5 escape road, where he had parked up after Nicholas Latifi had drifted across his path and sent him into the wall.

This broke Zhou’s front-right wheel and put him out on the spot, while Latifi toured back to the pits with a puncture, where he too retired.

The race resumed at the start of lap 11 with none of the leaders having chosen to pit – the track as it did between FP3 and qualifying taking a long time to dry, hence Perez and Leclerc lapping quickest in the 2m00s bracket.

Perez aced the restart and immediately re-established his one-second gap to Leclerc, who also again quickly dropped Sainz and Hamilton – the pre-safety car scenes recreated as the two leaders were the only drivers to now lap in the 1m59s bracket.

They exchanged fastest…