Mercedes’ German driver Nico Rosberg yesterday led from pole to flag to win the Singapore Grand Prix and celebrate his 200th Formula One race by retaking the championship lead from teammate Lewis Hamilton.
After a chaotic start that brought out a safety car on the opening lap when Force India driver Nico Hulkenberg crashed, Rosberg stayed clear of a late charging Daniel Ricciardo in a Red Bull at the Marina Bay Street Circuit as Hamilton completed the podium in third place.
The result lifts Rosberg on to 273 points with six rounds remaining, eight clear of Hamilton with Ricciardo a distant third in the title race.
Photo: AP
EXOTIC ADDITION
In Saturday’s final practice on the Singapore circuit, drivers were startled when a large monitor lizard wandered onto track.
“There’s a giant lizard on the track,” exclaimed Red Bull driver Max Verstappen.
Photo: AP
“You came face to face with Godzilla,” the 18-year-old’s engineer told him over the pit-to-car radio after the startled Dutchman alerted the team to the reptile’s presence.
The incident triggered a Twitter flurry and plenty of amusement.
“New friend in FP3,” commented McLaren driver Fernando Alonso on Instagram to accompany a picture of the animal on the asphalt.
Drivers are used to groundhogs and foxes making track incursions at Canada’s Gilles Villeneuve circuit in Montreal, while stray dogs proved a danger when the sport raced at India’s Buddh circuit near New Delhi.
Deer have appeared on track in Austria in the past, snakes in Malaysia and a cat ran out in front of cars in Azerbaijan’s debut race this year in Baku.
There have also been a number of human incursions, including one at last year’s Singapore race when a lone intruder ambled across the floodlit track midway through the race and then strolled by the metal fences as cars came past.
“I had to look again as I wasn’t sure if I had a problem with my eyesight and that I actually saw somebody crossing the track,” Ferrari’s race winner Sebastian Vettel told reporters at the time.
A 27-year-old British national was later sentenced to six weeks in jail for breaching the security fences.
NO DICTATORSHIP
In related news, Formula One cannot be run like a dictatorship, even if many people in the sport are used to that, the new chairman appointed to work with commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone said.
Chase Carey, who took on the role as part of Liberty Media’s takeover of the sport this month, also said that Formula One’s US expansion should ultimately look at big cities like Los Angeles, New York or Miami.
The primary concern, however, was building long-term value and investing in the future.
“Realistically what I am doing in the next few months is probably more listening to what people have to say,” he told the official formula1.com Web site before yesterday’s Singapore Grand Prix.
“You cannot make everybody happy all the time, but you’ve got to understand what everybody wants and then find a path,” he said. “That is not a task for a committee, as committees tend to become bureaucratic, but there also can’t be a dictatorship, even if probably here they are used to it.”
Carey, former executive vice-chairman of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, said he would be working for Formula One and not Liberty.
Carey said he was too old to be an apprentice to Ecclestone, but “hopefully by working together we can figure out how to get the best out of the sport," he said.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier