Championship leader Lewis Hamilton won a wet Japanese Grand Prix from Mercedes team mate Nico Rosberg on Sunday in a chaotic finish after the race was red-flagged.
The Briton ducked superbly inside his fierce rival on the 29th lap of a race halted after an accident involving Marussia’s Jules Bianchi to win at Suzuka for the first time.
He increased his advantage over German Rosberg to 10 points with four rounds left this season.
Reigning world champion Sebastian Vettel finished third for Red Bull.
Typhoon rains had been forecast for Sunday’s race and it began behind the safety car but the drivers were called back to the pits minutes later.
The safety car came out again after 44 laps and the race was suspended two laps later as with the rain getting heavier and the light rapidly deteriorating.
There was no traditional spraying of champagne on the podium with news already having filtered through of Bianchi’s crash. The Frenchman was taken to hospital by ambulance.
The early halt was little surprise after German Adrian Sutil smashed his Sauber into a wall, Bianchi then involved in a collision with a recovery vehicle, prompting the safety car and medical car to appear and the race to be stopped seven laps early.
Hamilton, the 2008 world champion, produced one of the overtaking moves of the season when he daringly passed Rosberg on the outside of turn one and stormed away to claim his eighth victory of 2014 and the 30th victory of his career.
Vettel, the four-time defending title holder, who announced on Saturday he will leave Red Bull at the end of the season, made the podium for the second race in a row — but only his fourth of the year — ahead of Australian team-mate Daniel Ricciardo