Ferrari suffered a major setback in Q3 at the Singapore GP with Carlos Sainz hitting the wall before setting a lap time and Charles Leclerc finishing qualifying in the same way, but with an undamaged car.

Mercedes and a surprising Nico Hülkenberg in his Haas were the biggest winners of this situation.

F1 data analysis: Singapore Grand Prix qualifying

During Friday and Saturday’s FP3 session, Ferrari looked like the only team capable of fighting against McLaren on the streets of the Marina Bay street circuit.

Nothing could be further from the truth. During qualifying the Italian team performed below the expected level.

After a few glimmers of hope at the end of Q2 with Leclerc just over a tenth of a second off Lando Norris’s lap time, Q3 was a nightmare for Ferrari.

Leclerc started his first flying lap a few seconds before team-mate Sainz put his SF-24 into the wall as he was also about to start his first try with a rookie mistake at the exit of Turn 18.

Analysis and data: Singapore Grand Prix qualifying

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This situation led to the red flag being deployed. The teams kept their cars in the garage until the last moments of Q3 so as not to be disadvantaged by the important track evolution of this circuit if they went out too early.

But obviously, this made the last try critical and no mistakes would be forgiven. And Leclerc made a serious mistake.

Right at the start of his last flying lap of qualifying, he exceeded the track limits as he went wide at the exit of Turn 2.

A situation that caused him to lose more than two tenths of a second from his Q2 lap and also invalidated his lap time, causing him to finish P9 just ahead of the ‘crashed’ Sainz.

Nobody noticed this mistake when Leclerc stopped the clock just behind Nico Hülkenberg’s Haas.

The German driver gave another masterclass in qualifying and surprised everyone by finishing ahead of Leclerc’s Ferrari by just four thousandths of a second.

Obviously, without Sainz’s accident, Ferrari would have had to put both their cars in the fight against Max Verstappen and the two Mercedes drivers.

The butterfly effect of his team-mate’s accident hurt Leclerc enormously. Other drivers like Oscar Piastri were also compromised, but without such a negative impact.

With his Q2 lap time, Leclerc could have comfortably finished P3 behind Verstappen, but the mistake at Turn 2 was fatal and the deletion of the lap for track limits even more so.

Without the deletion, Leclerc would have been P7 ahead of Fernando Alonso and behind Hülkenberg.

Despite this, we should not take any credit away from Haas and Hülkenberg.

If yesterday we thought that VCARB was going to be the big surprise of the weekend, after qualifying we can say that the big surprise has been the American team placing as the outstanding fifth team on the grid and just over half a second slower than McLaren.

Haas’ strong point in qualifying was its speed in the medium and high-speed corners while maintaining a low downforce level and a good balance for the low-speed corners.

We can see this in the data for Sector 2 and Sector 3.

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