2012 Singapore Grand Prix

Did You Know?

• Bruno Senna and Pedro de la Rosa each received five-place grid penalties for unscheduled gearbox changes.
• Mark Webber originally finished tenth but had twenty seconds added to his time for cutting a corner to pass Kamui Kobayashi.
• Charles Pic had twenty seconds added to his race time for overtaking another car while red flags were shown in final free practice.

Report

Romain Grosjean returned to Lotus F1 for the Singapore race after serving a one-race ban for causing a serious collision in Belgium. Pirelli supplied the yellow-banded soft compound as the prime tyre and the red-banded supersoft as the option tyre, the same allocation as in 2011. Ma Qinghua again drove Narain Karthikeyan's car in first free practice, as he had at the Italian Grand Prix. The first practice session on Friday evening was held in damp conditions after earlier rain; Sebastian Vettel set the fastest time, five hundredths of a second ahead of Lewis Hamilton. The second session was dry, with Vettel fastest by three-tenths over Jenson Button; it was briefly interrupted when Bruno Senna clipped a barrier at turn 19 and spun. Vettel topped the third session on Saturday, three-tenths faster than Hamilton. The session ended two minutes early when Vitaly Petrov hit the wall at Turn 21, breaking his right-rear suspension; his Caterham stopped in the pitlane entrance, causing a red flag.