RAMPANT RICCIARDO

RED BULL MAN TRIUMPHANT... …AS VET T EL SUFFER SIN CHINA

T

he Shanghai crowd cheered with delight as the victorious Daniel Ricciardo held his soggy race boot aloft and took great joy in swigging the sweet taste of his racewinning champagne.

In contrast, the two Finns either side of him, Valtteri Bottas and Kimi Raikkonen, looked glum. They reached for their champagne bottles and downed their sorrows before spraying the fizz, ruing another opportunity missed.

Last Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix was a genuine three-way fight between Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull, but it was an opportunist strategic decision that gave Ricciardo the advantage.

He handed his ‘shoey’ to his number one mechanic, Chris Gent, who also savoured the spoils. His appearance on the podium was an acknowledgement of the brilliant work the Red Bull mechanics had made the previous day.

Ricciardo had suffered an engine failure in Saturday morning practice and his crew managed to fit a new power unit in under two hours with just a minute of qualifying left to spare. It was the difference between starting sixth or from the back of the grid.

If Ricciardo was appreciative of the hard work of his mechanics, on Sunday he had his strategists to thank in helping him score the race win. When a safety car made a surprise appearance at a little over half distance (after debris littered the track thanks to the two Toro Rossos hitting each other) Red Bull pulled both their drivers into the pits and fitted them with fresh soft rubber, in contrast to Mercedes and Ferrari, which left their drivers on worn mediums.

The time lost pitting behind the safety car was negligible and the two Red Bulls suddenly had the pace to attack their rivals. Ricciardo got ahead of his team-mate Max Verstappen after the Dutchman had another on-track encounter with Lewis Hamilton.

Following on from the contact the pair made in Bahrain, Verstappen attempted to attack the Mercedes driver around the outside of the highspeed Turn 7, ran wide and ultimately lost the place to his team-mate.

Ricciardo then fought his way past Raikkonen, Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel and race leader Bottas to secure the win. He did so with his trademark, late-braking, clean racing moves and powered ahead of the opposition, 11 laps from the flag.

Behind him, Verstappen clattered into Vettel at the hairpin, which forced them both to spin and the Dutchman was slapped with a 10-second time penalty. Max was fifth at the flag, while with a hobbled Ferrari, Vettel took eighth – behind Mclaren’s Fernando Alonso.

A number of drivers left the Shanghai International Circuit on Sunday night cursing their bad luck or lack of form. In contrast, Riccardo couldn’t hide his delight at the result. He was asked after the race what his reaction would have been if someone had told him in winter testing he would win a race before Mercedes this year. His response: “Holy testicle Tuesday!”

Qualifying

Throughout Friday practice, the longrun pace of the Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull was so close that it was almost impossible to tell who had the advantage. But one thing was clear, the qualifying simulations of the two Ferraris were clearly faster, so it was no surprise they locked out of the front-row of the grid on Saturday.

But the Mercedes drivers were further off the pace than they expected, the lower temperatures during qualifying seemingly working against their car’s ability to bring the tyres up to the correct operating temperatures.

In qualifying, Raikkonen had been consistently quick and he lit up the timing screens on his final run in Q3. By setting purple times in both the first and second sectors, pole looked assured. But his team-mate Vettel aced the final few corners of the Shanghai lap to snatch pole position away from the Finn. It was likened to a tennis champion, who when faced with a break point, volleys back to serve the winner.

Behind the Ferraris and Mercedes (Bottas ahead of Hamilton) came the two Red Bulls of Verstappen and Ricciardo. For the latter, it was touch and go whether he would make qualifying at all.

During Saturday morning’s FP3 session he felt the engine in the back of his Red Bull tighten and it spewed its contents along the back straight. Dejectedly, Ricciardo stepped out of his broken machine before he could make it back to the pits. What followed was a superb repair job by his mechanics to install a new power unit in time for qualifying. The job would usually take three hours, but they managed it in two. With just four minutes and 40 seconds of Q1 remaining, his Red Bull fired-up and he took to the track to commence his one and only flying lap with a minute on the clock.

“Daniel was pretty calm,” said his race engineer Simon Rennie. “I’d told him to mentally prepare for the possibility that he might only get one shot at it. Ideally I’d have liked to give him at least three laps, five if possible – but as the clock counted down that looked unlikely. He was ready though: he was very calm and prepared to deliver when it mattered. That said, he was obviously quite keen to get on with

it because he had a massive drift coming out of the garage.”

Ricciardo made no mistakes and his mechanics high-fived each other in the garage, knowing just what a race against time it had been.

Race

As the two Ferraris sprinted away from the line, Vettel squeezed his team-mate Raikkonen to fend off any attack. That caused the Finn to brake early allowing Bottas to nip into second around the outside, as the pack swarmed into the first few corners. Verstappen needed to maximise his advantage of starting on the ultrasoft tyre and also out-braked Raikkonen into Turn 6.

Hamilton, who struggled all weekend with the balance of his Mercedes, was fifth at the end of the first lap, ahead of Ricciardo, the two Renaults and the two Haas machines. And the top runners stayed in that formation (Vettel leading Bottas and Verstappen) until the first stops for fresh rubber, with teams favouring a one-stop to the more durable medium compound tyre.

Unsurprisingly, Red Bull was the first of the frontrunners to pit on lap 17, as it had started on the ultrasoft. Conscious that Ricciardo could have the pace to undercut Hamilton for fourth, Mercedes radioed Hamilton into the pits, and he resumed still between the Red Bulls. But now Max was quick, setting the fastest lap of the race, and second-placed Bottas was forced to pit one lap later to stay ahead of the flying Dutchman.

The lead Ferrari of Vettel should have also pitted, but he waited one more lap and when the German emerged from the pits – Bottas had taken the place ahead of him. Having been beaten in that strategic play, Ferrari decided to leave Raikkonen out and as he slowed through degrading tyre wear, he eventually backed Bottas up into Vettel’s path.

“But…” said Bottas after the race, “when I was closing on Kimi, I knew what Ferrari were planning, but he was struggling so much [with his tyres] that it didn’t work,” and as a result, Vettel was unable to seize back the lead.

Once out of the way, Raikkonen pitted on lap 27 and fell to sixth place, but the race was about to take a decisive turn.

Heading into the hairpin, Pierre Gasly crashed into the back of his team-mate Brendon Hartley, sending shards of Toro Rosso carbonfibre onto the racing line. The team had asked their drivers to swap positions at T14 and Gasly assumed it would be under braking for the hairpin, rather than on the exit of the corner.

The debris called for the deployment of the safety car. The leaders: Vettel and Bottas had already passed the pitlane entrance, but coming out of Turn 14, Red Bull called both their drivers in, for another double-stacking pitstop. It was that speedy strategic decision that won Red Bull the Chinese Grand Prix.

“With Daniel we decided to go more aggressive and try a two-stop race anyway because he was sixth and had the most to gain,” said RBR team boss Christian Horner. “The guys had already done a phenomenal job in doing a double stack at the first stop and when the safety car came out we said, ‘right, let’s do it again.’ Max was further up the road than Daniel, but we got them both in, turned around and none of the leading pack elected to do that. We were on the better tyre for the last 23 laps compared to the guys who had done about 13 laps on theirs. That enabled us at the restart to get into them pretty quickly.”

At this stage it was Verstappen who had the best shot for the win, but when he came up to try and overtake Hamilton – around the outside of Turn 7 – he quickly found he’d run out of road and lost a place to his team-mate in the process. There was further frustration when he hit Vettel while trying another pass late in the race.

There were no such dramas for Ricciardo. On lap 37 he passed Raikkonen on the back straight, he outbraked Hamilton into Turn 14 on lap 40. Two laps later he passed Vettel for second and finally, made the move for the lead up the inside of Bottas at Turn 6 on lap 45. It was a thoroughly deserved and superbly executed win; a perfect example of maximising opportunity.

“I don’t seem to win boring races,” he said. “A week ago in Bahrain my head was down after [retiring]. Yesterday I didn’t think I was going to get out in qualifying, now to be here… this sport is crazy. It’s frustrating that so many variables are involved in F1. Sometimes I question why I chose this sport because there’s so many things out of your control and it does get you down a lot – but when you have a day like this it’s worth 50 of those bad ones.”

Saturday’s engine change will come back to haunt Ricciardo later in the year, when he gets an inevitable grid penalty. For the moment, that champagne tastes sweet. Next up is Baku, a race he won last year after crashing in qualifying.

Right now, a similar result doesn’t seem that implausible…