Hamilton shocked at scale of Mercedes Singapore revival

Lewis Hamilton has expressed his surprise at the scale of Mercedes' turnaround at the Singapore Grand Prix following a troubled practice.

Throughout the three practice sessions at Marina Bay, the W15 struggled for balance with understeer and traction issues plaguing Hamilton and George Russell.

However, in Q2, the car rapidly improved, with Hamilton becoming the first driver to break the 1:30 barrier as he eventually took third on the grid, just 0.087s behind Max Verstappen in second as Lando Norris grabbed pole.

The sister Mercedes of Russell was fourth for an all-Mercedes second row, as Hamilton kept up his impressive qualifying record of never being outside the top five in Singapore. 

This was despite Hamilton conceding that qualifying has been "a disaster" for him all-season. 

"Qualifying has been a disaster for me all year long, and I've been working and working and working trying to get myself back up there - and all of a sudden, the car came alive in qualifying for the first time in a long time," he told media including RacingNews365.

"Through the weekend so far, we were looking, well, I was looking particularly very poor.

"I mean, this morning and all of yesterday, we were 1.2 seconds off [Norris], so we arrived with a car that was massively understeery, and we just couldn't dial anything in, no matter what we did. Nothing changed. 

"We made changes overnight, came here today, pretty much the same thing, and I was definitely shocked to see that we were still 1.2 seconds behind Lando again. 

"We just kept our heads down, made some more changes and got into qualifying and it was like night and day, there was such a big difference. It was such a nightmare the past day and a half.

"The car was all of a sudden alive, and I was able to go where I wanted to go. It was looking really strong throughout qualifying and I think obviously with the crash in Q3 it made it difficult for all of us to put that final lap together.