Jenson Button of McLaren at Turn 19. Button finished fourth in the Singapore GP and is now lying fifth in the drivers’ championship. Said Button: “At the start, I thought I’d take it easy on the rear tyres, because we saw earlier in the weekend how quickly they were going away, and I think doing that helped me towards the end of my first stint when I was pulling in Lewis. On the Prime tyre, I had a similar issue with rear-end stability, so not being able to challenge a Red Bull car that had 30 extra laps on its tyres showed us that they were very quick around here today. But it’s a circuit where we knew they’d be competitive, and probably one that was going to be difficult for us, so I go to Japan pretty happy.” (Photo 6 © Les Tan/Red Sports)
Button easing into Turn 23 before hitting the final straight. “We’ve got a good upgrade for Suzuka: we’ll have something that we tried to put on the car this weekend but couldn’t – for reliability reasons. Coupled with our planned-for-Suzuka upgrade, it should hopefully be a bit of a double-whammy. My championship hopes were dented a little bit by Mark (Webber) finishing ahead of me, but the points gap to the front is just a race victory away. It shows there’s still everything to play for – one bad race can cost you a lot of points,” added Button. (Photo 7 © Les Tan/Red Sports)
Nico Rosberg driving his Mercedes GP to a 5th-place finish. Said Rosberg: “It was extremely tough out there but we achieved the best possible result for us today. Our aim for the last few races is to finish as the best behind the top three teams and today we were able to profit as two of them had issues with Felipe in qualifying yesterday and Lewis in the race today. So fifth place is good for us and it’s very satisfying for the team. I could push Jenson a little at some points which was good to see.” (Photo 8 © Les Tan/Red Sports)
Rubens Barrichello in his Williams. He lost a few places at the start and eventually finished 6th. “It was a good race and a good collection of points today. It was a pity to drop places off the line, but while my brakes were hot, the lap times were good and I was catching Kubica, but with the interruptions of the Safety Cars I kept losing brake performance, so it was difficult to make any more headway than we managed,” said Barrichello. (Photo 9 © Les Tan/Red Sports)
Robert Kubica drove his Renault to a 7th-place finish in the Singapore GP. “The last few laps were definitely the most exciting part of the race. The engineers spotted a right-rear puncture on the data – it must have been some debris that cut the tyre, because I didn’t touch the wall and couldn’t feel anything in the cockpit. That stop dropped me from sixth to 13th position,” said Kubica. “I had much fresher tyres than the cars in front in those last laps, but it’s still not easy to pass in Singapore, so it was good fun picking them off one by one. In the end, I got back to seventh place, which meant we only lost one position compared to our maximum this afternoon. Ultimately, if somebody had said that I would finish seventh today, and make one more pit stop than the cars around me, then I’d definitely have taken it.” (Photo 10 © Les Tan/Red Sports)
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