Singapore "one of my best performances in F1" - Perez

Perez used what was in effect a one-stop strategy to move from 17th on the grid to eighth at the flag, after running two long stints on the soft tyres.

Force India pulled off a strategical coup when Perez changed tyres under the safety car at the end of the first lap and lost only one place in the queue, dropping him from 12th to 13th as only Esteban Gutierrez passed him for position.

“I think today has been one of my best performances in F1, to secure eighth place with 36 laps [on the softs],” he said, his four points putting Force India narrowly ahead of Williams in the standings.

“We effectively did a one-stop if you consider that we stopped on lap one. It was a very long race.

"We didn’t think we were going to manage it in the end, but I was very pleased that we managed to cross the line and secure those points that put us ahead of Williams.

“There are six more races, hopefully we can keep doing this for the rest of the year. There are big races coming up for us, so what we have to do is maximise our potential out there.”

Perez admitted that staying out on his second set of softs for such a long stint was a challenge: “It was effectively a gamble, because if we’d stopped, we were going to come behind a lot of people, so it was important to be ahead of them.”

However, despite the strategy paying off with eighth place, the Mexican still wasn’t sure if it was the right call, given that he lost time behind countryman Gutierrez.

“Looking back probably it wasn’t the right thing to do. That compromised our race quite a lot, being behind Esteban for a long period of the race, that probably wasn’t the best we could do.”