Max Verstappen will look to win the Singapore Grand Prix at the seventh time of asking this weekend as he hopes to extend his winning streak and put an end to his run of bad luck on the streets of the city-state.
The Dutch driver heads into Sunday’s race having won each of the last ten Grands Prix, beating Sebastian Vettel’s record outright with a hard-fought victory in front of the Tifosi at Monza last time out. However, his luck in Singapore threatens to end this historic streak.
The tone was set for Verstappen’s relationship with Singapore during his rookie season back in 2015. The Dutchman qualified in P8 but stalled on the grid when the lights went out and was pushed back to the pit lane, where he restarted his race a lap down.
Verstappen’s second outing at the track wasn’t much more encouraging. In his debut season for Red Bull, he qualified in P4, two-tenths down on team-mate Daniel Ricciardo, before dropping two positions in the race while his team-mate remained on the gearbox of race-winner Nico Rosberg.
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While his first two Singapore GP outings were underwhelming, 2017 produced one of the most iconic crashes in modern F1 history. With the track still damp, Verstappen was sandwiched by the two Ferraris of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen at the race start, taking all three drivers out of the race in a memorable opening-lap clash.
The two-time world champion did manage to avenge that incident in 2018, finishing best of the rest behind the unstoppable Lewis Hamilton and over 30 seconds ahead of nearest challenger Vettel, but victory in Singapore still eluded him.
Verstappen made it back-to-back Singapore GP podiums in 2019, capitalising on a poor strategy call from Mercedes to jump Hamilton in the battle for P3 after the Brit was left out to run long on old, soft-compound tyres. Unfortunately for Max, the two Ferrari drivers were unstoppable that night as Vettel rounded off a one-two finish for the Scuderia.
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The COVID-19 pandemic meant that Singapore was absent from both the 2020 and 2021 calendars, but it was an unhappy return for Verstappen when it returned last year. The Dutchman’s weekend got off to the worst possible start with an error on the team’s behalf leaving him down in P8 for the race start.
After a dreadful launch, Verstappen was running out of the points while his team-mate led the way. After making his way back into the top five he made a costly error, locking up into the breaking zone at the end of the Raffles Boulevard.
With six unsuccessful attempts to win the Singapore GP behind him, Verstappen has an exceptional chance to end that hoodoo on Sunday, given the immense form he has demonstrated by winning ten Grands Prix on the spin.
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