Lewis Hamilton says he is pleased Mercedes was able to capitalise on Ferrari's misfortune in recent races, despite being unable to challenge for victory at the Malaysian Grand Prix.
The Briton benefited from a chaotic start in Singapore -- which wiped out chief title rival Sebastian Vettel -- to claim an unlikely win from fifth and surge into a 28-point championship lead. Vettel had looked on course to bounce back in Malaysia as Mercedes started the weekend on the back-foot, but engine trouble in qualifying forced the German to start from the back of the Sepang grid.
Pole-sitter Hamilton was handed a further boost when Kimi Raikkonen, who was set to share the front-row with Hamilton, retired with a turbo failure before race got underway. Despite losing the lead to Red Bull's Max Verstappen, second-place enabled the Mercedes driver to extend his advantage over Vettel to 34 points, with the German charging through to finish fourth.
"My thought process is that I'm really happy with my performance, personally my performance and how I executed the race I feel really happy with it," Hamilton said. "There are definitely positives in terms of the results we got, but if those guys hadn't taken each other [in Singapore] out I think we could have still won the race because we had good pace in the wet with the characteristics of our car.
"But being here, this is a more fortunate weekend with Ferrari having the issues they had and we just happened to get the setup just OK for qualifying. That was partly really good work by engineers, but it was also a bit lucky for us because it could also have been a miss. So to come away with a first and second is very strong, particularly on a circuit where we shouldn't have had those results.
"Honestly I feel positive," he added. "I'm happy with my qualifying and happy with what I was able to get out the car, but also happy with the analysis we had and that the team is now really pumped up to analyse and see what we can rectify with the current package we have."
Hamilton said he was not surprised to see title rival Vettel recover through the field and revealed Mercedes was lacking around 1s in the race compared to its rivals.
"I didn't approach the race thinking 'he's last, I'm going to get a free race'," Hamilton explained. "They showed me on the simulations that he was going to finish fifth or fourth, so we already knew that and it wasn't a surprise to see where he was. We also knew from his long run pace that he had around 0.8s to 1.0s, which is rare.
"Most races it's 0.1s or 0.2s faster for race pace, but 0.8s up we knew was going to happen. Obviously Kimi [Raikkonen] going out was a big advantage for the Red Bulls and for us because they would have had more pace and I would have been maybe third. But that's the best I could really do."