Singapore retirement won't cost Vettel an engine

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Sebastian Vettel's retirement at the start of the Singapore Grand Prix last weekend did not do significant damage to his Ferrari engine.

The team has determined that the unit was unaffected by the collision that took place in the run down to turn 1 at Marina Bay Street Circuit. Autosport magazine reports that as a result, Ferrari's technical team is happy for it to stay in rotation for future races.

The news will be a relief to Vettel. The engine was the third in his total season allocation of four engines. If he uses more than that, he'll start to amass starting grid penalties that could be a deciding blow to his title bid hopes.

Vettel's race on Sunday ended just seconds after the lights went out. He was involved in a three-way accident with his team mate Kimi Raikkonen and Red Bull's Max Verstappen.

The two Ferraris were on either side of Verstappen into the first corner. Raikkonen collided with the Dutch driver, and the impact twisted him around into the side of Vettel's car. Vettel suffered sidepod and cooler damage, but was able to get through the turn.

Stewards decide no penalties warranted over first corner crash

However the car then spun on its own fluids heading down the next straight. Vettel attempted to reverse down the track, but was finally ordered by the team to retire.

Vettel's main rival Lewis Hamilton went on to win the race. The Mercedes driver now as a 28 point margin over him in the world championship, with just six races remaining.

So far this season, Vettel has used three ICEs (internal combustion engines), MGU-Hs, MGU-Ks, energy stores and control electronics. In addition, he's used four turbochargers.

A fifth turbocharger would incur a 10-place grid penalty.

Ferrari is looking to introduce a new engine specification for the final races of the season, possibly as early as Malaysia. If so, it will have to adhere to the new regulation limiting oil burn to 0.9 litres per 100km.

The regulation came into effect for the Italian Grand Prix. Mercedes introduced its new engine spec the race before, in Belgium. That meant it was able to keep to the old oil burn limit of 1.2 litres of oil per 100km.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.