For most of Sunday night, Max Verstappen and Gianpiero Lambiase could barely talk to each other. The radio that had carried their voices through a decade of races kept cutting out, and they were left with the pit board and questions in code. It hardly mattered. Verstappen led every lap at Marina Bay, and when it was over, GP was standing beside him on the podium at a track they had never won at together, with only a handful of races left as a pair.

His 250th Grand Prix. His 50th pole. His first win in Singapore, at the tenth attempt. And 33 points, the most anyone can take from a Sprint weekend, a haul nobody had managed at any of the season’s other five. Thirty-three. He knows that number well.

When Verstappen got his own Formula 1 cockpit in 2015, the number he wanted was 3. It was taken, so the 17-year-old doubled it. Thirty-three served him well. He won his first Grand Prix with it, and his first world title, before swapping it for the number 1 for four seasons. When Lando Norris claimed the 1 as champion this year, Verstappen finally took the number he had wanted from the start.

His first season in Car 3 has not been simple. Early in the year the Red Bull was, in his words, “sometimes a bit scary to drive.” The team’s first win of 2026 only came last weekend, in a storm at Sepang, and nobody yet knew what the car could do on a dry Sunday. Singapore answered that, and then some: Sprint pole, Sprint win, Grand Prix pole, Grand Prix win.

It was also the one race he had never won. Before this weekend, Marina Bay and the brand-new Madrid round were the only Grands Prix on the calendar missing from his list. He had come here nine times. This was the tenth, and the first from pole, after he had already topped Sprint Qualifying, the wet Sprint and qualifying.

The start was the danger. His launches had been poor for weeks, and on Saturday he had called the last one “horrendous.” Once again something felt wrong before he released the clutch. Charles Leclerc got the better getaway and drew alongside, and Verstappen had to hold him off into Turn 1. “I was only here to win,” he said later, “so I had to do everything I could.”

Even then it wasn’t over. For the first few laps a deployment problem left him short of power at the end of the straights, and Leclerc almost got him into Turn 7. Once that cleared, the race opened up in front of him. “I think it was one of the first times that I’ve driven in clean air here in Singapore,” he said. He led every lap and made his only stop, for mediums, on lap 33 of all laps. Nobody troubled him again.

The radio was the one thing that would not behave. It had been unreliable all season, and on Sunday it was at its worst. Lambiase could barely hear him, so Red Bull fell back on the pit board and GP was reduced to asking questions in code. Verstappen could not resist a joke afterwards. “Maybe he was happy that it was not working!” Most of the time, he said, GP “seemed to know what I wanted to ask him” anyway.

They have been doing this for a decade. Lambiase has been in Verstappen’s ear since May 2016, when Daniil Kvyat was sent back to Toro Rosso and an 18-year-old took his seat, and they won that first race together in Spain. Lambiase had come to Red Bull with one ambition. “It was always my dream to race engineer a driver to a world title,” he has said. He has now done it four times.

That partnership now has an end date. GP is leaving to become McLaren’s chief racing officer, by 2028 at the latest, and Red Bull has already chosen his successor. So when the team sent him up to collect the constructors’ trophy on Sunday night, Verstappen knew what it meant.

The voice in Car 3

GP

Lambiase in the Red Bull garage at Zandvoort. Photo: Mark Thompson / Getty Images. Courtesy of Red Bull Racing

Gianpiero LambiaseRace engineer to Max Verstappen · Head of Racing, Red Bull

Born in Bedford in 1980 to Italian parents, GP studied mechanical engineering at University College London and started in Formula 1 with Jordan in 2005. He stayed with the Silverstone team as it became Midland, Spyker and Force India, working his way up from data engineer to race engineer, before joining Red Bull at the end of 2014. He is famously direct on the radio, a style Verstappen has often praised.

4Drivers’ titles together

11Seasons on Max’s radio

10Seasons at Jordan and Force India

1. 2005Joins Jordan as a data engineer, his first job in Formula 1
2. 2009Performance engineer to Giancarlo Fisichella, who takes Force India’s first pole and podium at Spa
3. 2010–14Race engineer to Vitantonio Liuzzi, Paul di Resta and Sergio Pérez
4. 2015Moves to Red Bull to engineer Daniil Kvyat
5. 2016Verstappen takes Kvyat’s seat, and they win their first race together in Spain
6. 2021–24Four drivers’ championships in a row
7. 2025Becomes Red Bull’s head of racing, and stays on Verstappen’s radio
8. 2026Wins in Singapore together at last, and collects the constructors’ trophy
9. By 2028Joins McLaren as chief racing officer

Tom Hart, Verstappen’s performance engineer, takes over on the radio in Austin, São Paulo and Las Vegas, with GP still at the track as head of racing. Hart takes the job full time from 2027.

The other Red Bull had its own small redemption. Isack Hadjar, whose weekend had been wrecked by reliability problems, started from the pit lane after a power unit change, worked his way through on the soft tyre and took the final point from Pierre Gasly late on. “We clearly have the pace,” he said. “Max showed that, and a big congrats to him, as I know he’s wanted that one.” For team principal Laurent Mekies, perfection was no reason to relax. “Even on a weekend where we achieved two poles and two wins,” he said, “there are still areas we want to improve.”

Ferrari had both cars right behind him, and a plan. With so little known about the tyres, they split their strategies: Leclerc started on softs and Lewis Hamilton on mediums, so that one of them would be in the right place whatever the race did. Hamilton’s mediums never came alive. “Unfortunately, the medium didn’t perform as well as the soft,” he said, and he was in for softs on lap 19.

Then came the second Virtual Safety Car, on lap 39, when Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin stopped at Turn 15. Ferrari called both cars in from second and third. Leclerc took the cheap stop for fresh softs. Hamilton missed the pit entry, and then chose to stay out and hold track position on the softs he had fitted on lap 19.

For a while it looked as if it might work. Leclerc came past on lap 46, and Hamilton did not fight him. “Lewis didn’t make my life difficult,” Leclerc said, “because it was very clear that as a team, we couldn’t lose too much time.” With ten laps to go, Hamilton was still third. Then his tyres gave up. Kimi Antonelli and Norris swapped places with him over two laps until both were through, and on the final lap Oscar Piastri followed. Sixth, and seven points lost.

Afterwards he felt unwell and was checked by the FIA medical team, who excused him from his media duties, Ferrari said. His words came instead in a statement, and they did not hide behind anyone.

Leclerc’s second place was his 55th podium for Ferrari, level with Rubens Barrichello and Sebastian Vettel. Only Michael Schumacher has more. “I gave it all,” he said, “and I don’t regret anything.”

Antonelli’s night was a run of small battles. By the end his brakes were barely working. At the restart after the VSC, “when I went to brake, nothing happened,” he said. He gave up track position to pit for softs under that VSC, then arrived just as Norris and Hamilton were fighting and passed them both. Third. When Jenson Button told him in his post-race interview that he could clinch the title at the next race, in Austin, he sounded genuinely surprised. “Can I really?” His lead is now 102 points.

Mercedes treated the weekend as an experiment, Antonelli on the new upgrade and George Russell on the old specification. “It is no doubt a little trickier to get in the right set-up window, but it clearly has goodness,” said Toto Wolff. Russell, starting 19th, fought his way up to ninth before he got stuck behind Nico Hülkenberg, and the VSC ended just as he entered the pit lane. “That type of luck sums up my season unfortunately!”

The McLarens lined up side by side on the third row a day after their collision in the Sprint, and this time they kept it clean. Norris got onto the marbles fighting Hamilton and lost a place to Antonelli, but finished fourth. Piastri recovered from a slow puncture to take fifth from Hamilton on the last lap. There was even a small moment of repair after Saturday’s collision. With the podium out of reach, Norris offered to back Hamilton up into his teammate’s path. He did not need to. “It was a fun way to finish the race,” Piastri said.

Liam Lawson was the best of the rest in seventh for Racing Bulls. Hülkenberg held off Russell for eighth, in what Audi’s Allan McNish called “one of the best races I have seen Nico drive.” Arvid Lindblad was squeezed at Turn 1 and never recovered, finishing 15th. Gabriel Bortoleto’s Audi stopped early with a gearbox problem and caught fire after it had been pushed back towards the garage, and Franco Colapinto, Stroll and Alexander Albon also retired, Albon so late that he was still classified 18th.

Formula 1 now has a week off before Austin, where Antonelli can become world champion. The win lifts Verstappen to fourth in the championship, eight points behind Hamilton, and he says there is nothing left for him to fight for this year. “For me personally, I don’t care if I’m second, third or fourth,” he said. “I just want to have fun till the end.” In Austin, one more win would give him five at the Circuit of the Americas, level with Hamilton’s record.

He came into Formula 1 as a 17-year-old who could not have the number he wanted, so he made 33 his own instead. Eleven years later, the 3 is finally on his car. But on Sunday night in Singapore, with GP beside him on the podium, the number that mattered was still 33.