Hamilton seeks great escape as McLaren falter
THE measure of Lewis Hamilton’s challenge in today’s Bahrain Grand Prix is that nobody has won here after starting outside the top four – and he will line up ninth on the grid.
Nothing has gone the world champion’s way over the past few days. It was discovered on Friday evening that he required a new gearbox after suffering a hydraulic leak last month in Australia. A five-place grid penalty flowed from that.
And yesterday, under the light bulbs just after dusk, he was never really in convincing form. He qualified fourth behind the Ferraris of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen and the other Mercedes, of Valtteri Bottas. That adds up to ninth, with his capacity for escapology offering the only hope of glory. It was a poor day for British concerns. Not only was Britain’s top driver (right) off colour but so were the supposedly leading team, McLaren.
They managed only 13th and 14th fastest, and can no longer hide between tired excuses and a blather of jam-tomorrow aspirations. The words fail to mask a continuation of the longest period of underachievement in McLaren’s history.
And it was all the more embarrassing for them given the local audience. The Bahraini royal family are the team’s principal shareholders and the Crown Prince paid his customary visit to their paddock hospitality area minutes before taking his place in the tower to watch qualifying unfold.
What he saw was Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne two seconds off Vettel’s pacesetting time and 1.2sec behind Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bull, which, like the McLarens, is powered by Renault. Inflicting another cruel cut was the fact that the two Toro Rossos were also ahead of the McLarens. Yes, the same Toro Rossos powered by the Honda engines that McLaren ditched last season on the grounds they were not remotely up to the job.
‘It was a poor performance from us today,’ said Alonso. ‘We are definitely not happy with what happened. It was worse than our expectations.’
McLaren’s racing director Eric Boullier said he was ‘astonished’ by the non-performance. It sounded as if he had been ambushed by the failure rather than responsible for it. The Frenchman has been in the post since 2014 – a barren period of non-achievement stretching back to McLaren’s last win through Jenson Button in 2012.
While Boullier is the most likely candidate to pay the price for failure – he missed his scheduled press conference to take part in an ‘emergency debrief’ – questions must be asked about the role of Zak Brown, the enthusiastic American in his second season as executive director. The first is how he can possibly have his total focus on McLaren when, as well as other motor racing roles, he is non-executive chairman of a magazine group?
He has failed to bring in a title sponsor, having expressly said that this would be the yardstick by which he should be judged.
There was plenty of intrigue in the paddock yesterday generally, not least with Bernie Ecclestone turning up. The sport’s chairman emeritus arrived to say he was aghast at Liberty Media’s blueprint for the sport post-2020. Asked about the new owners’ plans to cut Ferrari’s annual special payment from £70million to £29m, he said: ‘I don’t see why they need to change things that worked perfectly well. They seem to muck about with anything that doesn’t need fixing.’ Back on track, Max Verstappen crashed out of qualifying at 140mph. It was his second mistake in two race weekends, following his spin during the race in Melbourne a fortnight ago.
The Dutchman was unharmed as his Red Bull hit the tyre barrier and an advertising hoarding fell over his car. He swore over the radio prodigiously enough for the TV producers to play a chorus of bleeps to mask his disappointed words.
He then took a lift back to the paddock on a scooter.