BOTTAS STRIKES BACK
Aflaccid end to an often brilliant season was nevertheless a hugely important grand prix for winner Valtteri Bottas. His victory over Lewis Hamilton set him up perfectly for a stronger challenge in 2018.
Qualifying
Would it end, we wondered, with a whimper or a bang?
Half the answer to that question was delivered by Bottas’s resounding pole lap. He posted a 1m 36.231s, almost two-tenths faster than his team-mate, 2017 champion Hamilton.
Very few drivers ever gain that kind of advantage over Hamilton – F1’s all-time pole position record holder (72 and counting) – so for Bottas, at least, this season was still far from over.
He’d been nip-and-tuck with Lewis throughout the session, going fastest early on, and looking smooth and consistent throughout. But were we watching Bottas excellence or Hamilton failing to reach to the bottom of his talent well, now that the title was settled and his position as Britain’s most successful driver secured?
Lewis, for his part, reckoned he had no answer for Valtteri’s speed: “I realised I was in a fight and it was on a knife-edge between us throughout,” he said, “but Valtteri ultimately did a better job.”
Hamilton blew his shot with a poor final sector on his last run: he was 0.4s slower than Bottas, running wide on the exit of the final corner (Turn 21), as he had earlier in the session. He also lost out at the T8/T9 left-right, carrying more speed in than Bottas, but exiting with less. “I was later on the brakes,” he said, “but slower out of the corner.”
Bottas, meantime, looked delighted in his characteristically understated way. The intercom “Yes!” as he learned he’d secured his fourth F1 pole was probably the Finnish equivalent of a Sebastian Vettel “YEEEESSSSS-YESYes-yes-yes. Grazie Ragazzi”; a slight grin was also discernible during post-session interviews.
Two poles on the trot, then, for a driver whose speed relative to Hamilton has been called into question in the second half of this season.
“I was so gutted in Brazil after being on pole but missing the win,” he said. “But I kept the same approach here. It was a really clean lap. I managed to find time run-by-run in different corners, as the car was feeling better than it has felt all weekend. That allowed me to work on the details.”
Sebastian Vettel, as he has for so much of this year, led the resistance, winding his Ferrari up to third place, but he was still 0.3s adrift of Hamilton and therefore half-a-second off the absolute pace of Bottas.
He reckoned his SF70H would be stronger in race trim, where the power advantage enjoyed by Mercedes all year would be less apparent. Although, unlike in Brazil, where his front-row start allowed him to mug Bottas off the line and go on to win, here an all-silver front row – a 50th front-row lockout for Mercedes – would present a much sterner obstacle.
“I’m pretty happy with the car,” he said, “particularly in sector two, but we’re losing time on the straights. Overtaking is not impossible here, so it should be a fun race.”
A Daniel Ricciardo – Kimi Raikkonen – Max Verstappen mixture from P4 to P6 offered no surprises other than an advantage of more than three-tenths for Daniel over Max, stemming the flow of Verstappen’s recent performance advantage.
Not since the US GP has Ricciardo started ahead of his team-mate.
The Aussie reckoned hitting a sweet spot with tyre temperatures had been the key to his Ferrari-splitting success and team boss Christian Horner rated Ricciardo’s lap as “one of his best of the year”. Verstappen’s relatively lowly position, meanwhile, resulted from his failure to find a set-up sweet spot after experiments with 2018 suspension components during FP1.
“Sometimes you have to accept that you are not fast enough, learn from it, come back and try harder next time,” was his chastened summary.
Nico Hulkenberg was another to lay down a 2018 marker against a hungry younger team-mate, pinning down P7 while Carlos Sainz failed to get out of Q2. Sainz seemed mystified with his lack of pace, even as Hulk looked ahead with cautious optimism to holding on to at least seventh and securing sufficient points to allow Renault to leapfrog Toro Rosso for sixth place in the Constructors’ Championship chase.
Next up, the Force India duo, continuing their season-long squabble with Sergio Perez finding the scantest advantage over Esteban Ocon: just 23-hundredths of a second. Ocon believed his best run had been hampered by a pushy Bottas forcing his way past as they prepared for their final fliers and he had reason to be aggrieved: another tenth or so could have placed him P7.
“I’m just annoyed that I didn’t show the true pace of the car,” he said. Regardless, he continues to impress in his first full F1 season.
Felipe Massa – happily – closed out the Q3 runners and he clearly relished having shown the way to his much younger team-mate Lance Stroll throughout the weekend. As Stroll languished in P15, having just scraped through Q3, Massa could be satisfied with having shown himself still fleet and relevant even as he prepared to wave goodbye once again to Formula 1. “I’m so happy with what I achieved,” he said. “I’m leaving with my head held high.”
Race
It comes to something when the highlight of an F1 race is the sight of David Coulthard conducting podium interviews in a deerstalker-style double baseball cap.
But so it was after the 2017 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, a race which, alas, had all the fizzle of an expired firework.
Bottas’ win, from pole, ahead of Hamilton, was impressive and confident; the warm glow of victory will doubtless keep him toasty during any return trips to Finland this winter.
His smooth efficiency did little, though, for the ‘spirit of racing’ F1’s owners Liberty Media are so keen to promote. Hamilton, who tailed Bottas throughout, apart from some betweenstops laps in the lead, nailed the problem with his analysis of the impossibility of one F1 car passing another of comparable performance anywhere in the too-noodly third sector of Yas Marina Circuit.
“They’re really going to have to change the layout here,” he said. “You need an advantage of something like 1.4s a lap to pass, so basically you’re relying on the guy in front to make a big mistake if you’re going to get past. And even then the run-offs here are so big, you can get back on track maybe without losing the advantage.”
Hamilton’s not the most outspoken soul, so his words as a four-time world champion carry more weight than they might from another driver. Yas Island’s owners and Liberty should take heed, for after the excruciating tension of the race here last year, when Nico Rosberg secured his title only after being wrung through a Hamilton mangle, this one was… altogether less dramatic.
As Lewis noted, once both Mercedes had made clean starts and completed their single pitstops (from ultrasofts to supersofts) without drama, it would have taken a major Bottas error for the lead to change hands.
None came, apart from a brief lock- up by Valtteri at Turn 5 on lap 49. Suddenly, Hamilton, who’d been around 1.5s behind Bottas, was on his tail and threatening through the T8/T9 section. Bottas didn’t flinch, though, and with commendable sisu set the race’s fastest lap just three tours later.
And that was that, as far as the victory squabble was concerned, although its importance to the Bottas psyche as a foundation upon which he can build a stronger 2018 should not be undervalued. He appeared suitably moved when he spoke of the emotional highs and lows of a season’s racing as team-mate to F1’s best – indication, perhaps, that even what might appear to be a straightforward and controlled victory is rarely any such thing.
“People say we Finns don’t show emotion, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have any,” he admitted. “I can’t always show it too much, but I’ve certainly felt it. This has been an incredible season for me – incredible how much I have learned from Lewis and from working with this team. It’s really important for me to end the year like this.”
Inevitably there were suggestions that Hamilton hadn’t reached far into his box of tricks in pursuit of victory, although to his credit he swatted away any suggestion that he had somehow allowed Bottas to win.
“I gave it everything today,” he said, “big congratulations to Valtteri. He did a great job this weekend, as he has all year. He came into a new team, which means a new challenge, new people and new ways of working. He has done an exceptional job and to finish on a high like this is also exceptional.”
The difference of tone in relations between Mercedes team-mates this year to last is so marked as to be incomparable. It’s undoubtedly one of the reasons behind the ever-greater command evident in Hamilton’s driving throughout 2017 – even if this day was Valtteri’s.
Ferrari was once again left chasing silver shadows under desert floodlights: Abu Dhabi confirmed that while the Scuderia made a huge off-season leap to challenge Mercedes and their once-way ward W08 for much of the season, the Vettel-sf70h combo was ultimately second-best, at best.
“I hate to say it, but Lewis was the better man,” Vettel said. “While we generally set out what we tried to achieve, we can’t be happy because our package wasn’t quick enough.”
Half-a-second away from pole and a tenth off fastest lap were evidence of the “little details” that determined the difference in performance between red and silver this year. Vettel gave it his all, only to come up short. Again.
Raikkonen’s fourth was a predictable result, as was Verstappen’s P5, in the wake of his practice and qualifying troubles. Throughout he was given a wild ride through the just-about-flat Turns 2 and 3; a lesser driver would have handled the challenge less deftly. (Stroll was one such, finding himself simply unable to manage the balance of his FW40 through this tricky section and having to lift off as a consequence.)
Still, Max enjoyed better fortune than Ricciardo, who became the first of only two retirements on lap 20, when hydraulic failure curtailed a likely run to fourth place.
Among the happiest top-10 results was Hulkenberg’s sixth. His points were enough to vault Renault above Toro Rosso in the constructors’ table and send an additional eight million dollars into the team’s accounts. Tidy – and welcome after the pitstop fumble for team-mate Sainz that left him without a secure front-left and condemned him to a DNF.
Perez and Ocon remained conjoined for seventh and eighth; Fernando Alonso was an entertaining ninth.
And exiting stage left with a point in his final GP – number 269 – Massa, still standing tall, in his own diminutive way, after 16 memorable F1 years.