Lewis Hamilton baffled by struggles in Singapore

Nico Rosberg will start his 200th Formula One race in Singapore on Sunday with every chance of moving to the top of the championship standings after securing pole position.

Lewis Hamilton trailed Daniil Kvyat’s pacesetting Red Bull by more than three tenths of a second after Friday practice here in 2015, and Mercedes went backwards on the Saturday as it failed to get the super-soft tyre into the correct working temperature range.

Verstappen’s teammate, Daniel Ricciardo, put on an impressive drive and will start second – but still finished 0.531s behind Rosberg.

Hamilton will start third on the grid, also behind Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo, and with the Marina Bay Street Circuit proving to be notoriously hard for overtaking, the Briton’s two-point lead may not survive Sunday’s race.

Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen qualified fifth but teammate Sebastian Vettel starts last after his auto had an anti-roll bar failure in the Q1 session.

Rosberg said he felt pressured to try and beat the Red Bull team cars with an on-form Ricciardo clocking fast times.

“It has not been my weekend so far”, said the reigning world champion.

“Nico did a great job in releasing the full potential of the auto”.

“We made improvements through qualifying”.

“We have created a good opportunity by starting on the front row, and our race pace has been good (in practice)”.

“We will see tomorrow, it’s a long race. I think the auto was good enough to put it on the first four”, he quipped. “I haven’t been able to string them (laps) together”. He was in better spirits during the final practice as he laughed over the team radio about nearly hitting a large monitor lizard that scuttled across the circuit.

Force India’s Nico Hulkenberg and Sergio Perez qualified eighth and 10th, separated by McLaren’s Fernando Alonso.

He paid credit to his team for being able to diagnose and overcome the problems that saw the team perform relatively poorly in qualifying here a year ago.

Kimi Raikkonen was fifth fastest in his Ferrari and will be joined on the third row of the grid by Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz Jr.

“Of course there’s still the race but previous year we were nowhere in qualifying, so it really shows the quality of the team to understand something like that and turn it around in such a way”.