Rosberg ‘showed the true potential of the car’ - Hamilton

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Lewis Hamilton says team-mate Nico Rosberg showed the full potential of the Mercedes as the championship leader qualified third for the Singapore Grand Prix.

Rosberg was fastest in both FP2 and FP3, but was still hugely impressive in taking pole position by over half a second from Daniel Ricciardo. With Hamilton ending qualifying over 0.7s slower than his team-mate, the triple world champion said he failed to put a complete lap together having similarly struggled in final practice earlier on Saturday.

REPORT: Impressive Rosberg beats Ricciardo to Singapore pole

”It was not really a frustrating session, it has just not been my weekend so far,” Hamilton said. “I have not really got many good laps out there and I was not able to string them together. That was the case today.

"Nico did a good job, obviously showed the true potential of the car and hopefully tomorrow I will try and at least get one step up and get the 1-2 for the team."

And Hamilton says he is unsure how competitive he will be in race trim having been hit by reliability problems in FP2 which limited him to just ten laps.

"I've not really looked at the long runs to be honest and obviously I didn't get to do the long runs yesterday so I'm not quite sure. I think Nico did some running but our cars are set-up a little bit different. I don't think we're in a bad position but I'll find out tomorrow for the first time."

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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.