Vettel rewarded with season-best result after risky strategy call
Sebastian Vettel earned his best result of the season with a second-place result in Singapore and the German also led a lap for the first time in 2014.
With Nico Rosberg missing from the grid, Vettel got ahead of teammate Daniel Ricciardo at the start and briefly got into the lead when Lewis Hamilton made his final pit stop, before the Mercedes man blasted back past on new tires.
"The start obviously was good for me," said Vettel. "Quite weird to stop with no car ahead, but not being on the first row. But it helped, obviously, because I had no car in front and I could get side-by-side and get straight into second place. After that I think we had a good race.
"Not ideal, in terms of timing with the safety car. Obviously, before that we lost a position to Fernando (Alonso) because we stopped too late - but we decided to go on the primes and we were hoping for no safety car to come out, which came out, so not ideal.
"But after that, obviously after the restart, we knew it was difficult with 27 seconds to make up on older tires than everyone behind - it's probably impossible. So, obviously to get the best result we knew we have to get to the end. I wasn't very confident that we can do it, simply because of the wear we had the sets before. Obviously for one lap I was in the lead."
Regarding Hamilton's passing move he said: "I wasn't quite sure what he was doing. I thought that I give him all the space to pass me on the inside for the next corner but it seemed like he couldn't wait to get back in the lead. It was quite tight but I saw him, obviously, so I had to back off and let him through.
"There was no point fighting him at that stage because I didn't have the tires to match him. Nevertheless, to finish P2 obviously was the best we could do. We had the oldest set of tires in the last stint, so it was quite tricky managing those to the finish line with not much tread left. Obviously a very good result for the team."
