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But Perez, who began the night third in the championship behind Verstappen and Leclerc, led from the first corner to the chequered flag, which was raised when the two-hour time limit was reached, two laps before the full complement of 61 laps had been completed.
There wasn’t complete certainly about the result in the immediate aftermath with stewards having said in the closing stages of the race that they would investigate the Mexican driver for a safety car infringement.
Perez, however, had been urged by his team in the final laps to increase his lead over Leclerc and provide a buffer for any time penalty, and he ended up 7.5 seconds ahead.
Ricciardo, meanwhile, benefited from a safety car deployment called when Alpha Tauri’s Yuki Tsunoda crashed to jump up the standings with a timely mid-race pit stop.
The 33-year-old had already worked his way up to 10th but surged into the top six as fortune favoured McLaren.
“I’m certainly in a position where I would honestly take it any way I could,” he said.
“I do think we owned a big chunk [of the result], but I’m not going to apologise for fortune in a race situation because I feel like things as well haven’t always worked out for us this year.”
Ricciardo is out of contract at the end of the season and without a seat so far for 2023 after having his three-year deal cut short by McLaren, which has replaced him with 21-year-old Australian rookie Oscar Piastri.
But there was some welcome positivity in Singapore as he rose from 14th to 11th in the drivers’ standings and made a major contribution to McLaren’s effort to snatch fourth place in the constructors’ championship from Alpine, whose two cars both retired on Sunday night.
“In the year that it’s been with the on-track and off-track stuff, you really just take all the little positives that you can,” he said.
“I’ve had top fives before, you know, so it’s not like I’m going to spray champagne tonight. But [it is good] just knowing that I’m going to walk back into team hospitality and everyone’s going to have a smile, there’s going to be hugs and high-fives.”
Verstappen remains way out in front of the drivers’ championship, 104 points clear of Leclerc, with five more races on the calendar to wrap up the title, the first of them in Japan next Sunday.
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Originally published at Sydney News HQ
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