I think the team did a good job at minimizing the damage in Singapore.
It was clear quite early that tire temp. control was going to be a key to performance here (even more so than usual).
I think all of the top teams knew what they had to do to get the tires switched on for quali (which wasn't the case in the first half of the year) but only Ferrari managed it perfectly. Both Max and Alex appeared to have their out laps compromised (albeit to a much lesser extent than the Mercedes) in Q3. To me it seems that the Ferrari puts the most energy into its tires and Mercedes the least, with RB in between.
I think many people underestimate the impact of set-up in F1. Because there are so many other factors contributing to the performance of an F1 car (the design level of the car, the ability to get the tires in their optimal working range, the driver's skill, traffic, etc.). However, at-circuit set-up changes have an extremely large impact on both the performance of the car for any given circuit condition (i.e. what percentage of the design optimum have you extracted from a mechanical perspective) and the driver's ability to deliver on that potential.To put it simply:
Vehicle Performance = Design level * extracted performance for a given condition * driver's ability to extract said performance
and
Actual Weekend Performance = Vehicle Performance * strategy * control * driver mentality, etc. * lady luck
I find it interesting (but inevitable) that people blame performance solely on one thing (driver, engine, new part X or Y), as it is always a result of multiple factors. Premier teams and their members, tend to get everything more or less correct and therefore fans tend to associate overall performance with performance of the car design, engine design or driver (and sometimes strategy), but it is not the case. For anyone who wants help understanding this I would suggest following or watching lower level series (Super Formula, Indy, F2, etc.), where everyone has more or less the same package and performance is spread by over a second from P1 to P Last and orders shuffling from weekend to weekend.
In the end some fans are upset because they were led to believe that this would be a winnable race (which it might have been had the correct set-up been applied, though that looks a bit of a stretch). I heard somewhere there is an equation for happiness and have yet to find a case where it is untrue, it goes something like this:
happiness = reality - expectation
I would suggest keeping that in mind while watching.
