The good times may have come back to Maranello thanks to Charles༺ Leclerc’s back-to-back victories from pole at Spa and Monza, but upon arrival in Singapore, it seemed Ferrari would be brought back down to earthꦑ as normal service for 2019 resumed.

High downforce layouts appeared to be th෴e Achilles’ heel for the Ferrari SF90 car, seen most starkly in Hungary when both Leclerc and teammate Sebastian Vettel finished a minute down on race winner Lewis Hamilton. The smart money was on a Mercedes-Red Bull battle playing out under the lights at Marina Bay.

But that was before Ferra💝ri sprung a surprise in qualifying on Saturday night, taking pole position through Leclerc and only narrowly missing out on a front row lock-out, delivering the kind of display most will have wished came much earli♓er in the year for the sake of the championship.

Following two weeks of narrative about his days as Ferrari’s number one being well and truly over, Vettel looked on-course to rekindle some of his old Singapore spark when he sat on provisional pole after the opening qualifying runs. His effort of 1m36.437s put him three-tenths clear of both Leclerc and Verstappen, with the Mercedes pair lying a se🌄cond back as both were caught in traffic during their preparations. It was a huge gap to try and make up.

Keen to avoid the kind꧋ of traffic struggles that had spoiled qualifying at Monza, Vettel opted to go it alone at the head of the pack on both of his Q3 runs to ensure there was clear track ahead. The tactic worked well both times, but on his second run, a 🔜scruffy lap followed. “Already in Sector 1 I had lost a bit then was playing catch-up,” Vettel said. “I was trying to take more and more risks throughout the lap which didn’t pay off, and then the last lap obviously didn’t come together.”

Vettಞel opted to abort his lap and divꦿe into the pits, opening the door for Leclerc and Hamilton to overhaul him at the head of the field.

Leclerc crossed the🅺 line to go two-tenths up on his teammate with his final effort, leaving it late to continue his streak of qualifying victories over Vettel to an eighth race weekend. At a track Vettel had previously made his own in F1, winning on four occasions, it was no easy feat.

“There were quite a lot of mistakes,” Leclerc said after the session. “I lost the car quite a few times and I’ve seen myself in the wall at least twice or three times in the lap, but it felt am💧azing, the car was great.

“Friday was a very difficult day for me and to come here in qualifying and do the pole position feels absolute♐ly amazing.”

Leclerc had lost some track time on Friday due to a gearbox issue, and finished off the pace in FP2, saying at the end of the day he didn’t have a huge amount of confidence in the car🌜 – something crucial to success around a street circuit like Singapore. Perhaps the erro❀rs indicated he was still lacking something – but nevertheless, it was still enough to give him a fifth pole of the year.

Ferrari’s resurgence came as a big surprise to Hamilton, who recovered from his slow first effort in Q3 to split the red cars in P♏2, 0.191s down on Leclerc’s time.

“All of a sudden they’ve brought an upgrade here, and it seems to have w🍨orked,” said Hamilton. “Of course we were not expecting to have such a strong performance from them and to have that deficit to them. But they did a great job and I’m grateful that was able to split them – only just.

“We were definitely lacking pace today, it was definitely a🀅 struggle out there to battle with them and be up there.”

The Ferrari upgrade has offered 🌄a long-overdue step, meaning that even with a couple of errors, Leclerc still had enough time in hand to take pole.

“It seemsꦇ that it’s working,” Leclerc said of the upgrade. “I think data-wise it was working yesterday for the engineers too. I think, from Hungary to now, we’ve understood also the car better in a way that we know the balance we need to achiev♛e in order to have the best performance and I think that has also showed in the results on track.

“I think it’s a combination of knowing where the balance needs to be anꦯd the improvements that we’ve made on the car.”

Vettel said the car felt like it “didn’t have such a great balance” in Hungary: “I think some corners were very good, other corners we lost a lot. It seems like this weekend we’re not losing in those corn🐠ers that we were losing in Hungary. I think it’s mostly adding performance to the car and in the right place, so we were able to trim the balance, so that we could extract more performanceꦚ.”

Mercedes chief Toto Wolff offered a similar response to the defeats in Spa and Monza, saying it came as another reminder to the team that it cannot let up in its push at the fron꧋t.

“Overall, their package is powerful,” Wolff said. “We have to take ourselves by the nose and say ‘did we do everything right?’ and certainly the answer is not completely. It’s all about finding the sweet spot of the tyres. I think when it matteဣred we probably weren’t in the best place.

“I think you always need to have Ferrari o𒆙n the radar. They’ve had some pretty good races at the beginning of the season, and then it somehow fell apart and a strong run most recently.

“When we came i🍸nto this wee🅷kend I heard so many times ‘well you are the favourites and it’s going to be between you and Red Bull and Ferrari is going to be nowhere because their car only goes fast on the straight’, and I always said try to be cautious about these things - and here we go.

“It’s maybe a bit of an extravagant track, and a little bit of an outlie൩r and maybe they were൩ lucky - but I don’t think so.

“I think Ferrari is a force to be reꦉckoned with always.”

As surprising as Saturday’s result may have been, it was a timely reminder to Mercedes tha💎t Ferrari remains strong, and that the success at Spa and Monza was more than a flash-i🌞n-the-pan.

The challenge for Leclerc and Vettel wil🧸l be delivering when it matters on Sunday if they 🦩want to really fan the flames toward Mercedes.