Spanish Grand Prix report
Mercedes man is unstoppable in barcelona to extend title lead
For the first time this season the Lewis Hamilton-Mercedes machine ‘clicked’ seamlessly. Great news for them, as Hamilton extended his championship lead to 17 points over Sebastian Vettel. Somewhat troubling, however, for those left trailing in their wake…
Qualifying
Perhaps even more impressive than the outright pole position time set by Hamilton for the 2018 Spanish GP – 1m16.173s – was the year-on-year lap-time drop of almost three seconds from 2017.
Same driver, same team (Mercedes), but a dramatic performance gain in 12 months. Part of this was due to track resurfacing at the Circuit de Catalunya (demanded by Motogp), but far more was directly attributable to the relentless engineering march of F1’s technical armies, finding ever more downforce, grip and power from the available technologies.
Some of these gains are obvious from trackside view. The Ferraris for example, now exhibit almost shapeshifting acceleration out of low- and medium-speed corners. Their surging progress is accompanied by a sound quite different from the usual ascending pitch of an engine climbing through its rev range – it’s more like a sudden crackling burst of electrical energy.
This unique-to-ferrari attribute has not gone unnoticed by their rivals. There are unconfirmed suspicions that the Scuderia may have found a means of deploying the electrical energy of their MGU-H system through innovative battery use. As of Saturday in Barcelona, however, ‘suspicions’ is all they would remain.
Regardless, all teams had brought fruits of their ‘homework’ to Barcelona. Some were obvious and extensive, such as the new bodywork packages for Mclaren and Red Bull. Others were more subtle, such as Mercedes’ set-up revisions intended to enable the W09 to work more harmoniously with Pirelli’s latest generation of rubber.
And for all these efforts and energies, there was a ‘business as usual’ feel to qualifying, as the best drivers got on with making the best use of the best kit.
Hamilton proved convincingly that he’d located his recently itinerant mojo with a lap that owed everything to his unparalleled ability to lay it on the line when it really matters. Lewis had topped practice sessions two and three, although never by much and through Q1 and Q2, Vettel appeared to have established a slight advantage for Ferrari. But Hamilton’s pole time (his 74th) proved out of reach, although the resilient Valtteri Bottas ran him close, finishing just 0.046s slower, to secure an all-mercedes front row.
“I needed this pole,” said the championship leader. “I’ve not had one for a while [not since the Australian GP, in fact] but it’s very close. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow and the tyres seem to have the smallest working window – the working range is far narrower than last year. You can give it everything on an out lap and still not have enough temperature.”
Both Hamilton and Bottas set their times on supersofts, with Lewis’ sector two speed proving decisive between them. Bottas remained justifiably confident about his race prospects, despite having been pipped. “This is a brilliant result for tomorrow,” he said. “I feel really good at the moment in the car. Our race pace will be strong.”
Row two was all-red, Vettel ahead of Kimi Raikkonen, and Seb was sanguine at having his run of three consecutive poles broken – most likely because Ferrari’s times had been set with soft Pirellis, indicating the cars’ race pace might be a match for the Mercedes. “I was very happy with that lap,” he said. “The car was good – just a little bit of understeer – and maybe I could have used one more click on the front wing. But we expected Mercedes to be strong here. It should be an interesting race.”
No surprise to find Red Bull next up, this time with Max Verstappen ahead of Dan Ricciardo, two years on from his unforgettable race-winning debut with the team.
Their times were almost inseparable: just two-thousandths of a second keeping them apart, Verstappen on a 1m16.816s, Ricciardo on a 1m16.818s. Their pace demonstrated some of the peculiarities of tyre performance being experienced by teams here: Verstappen used supersofts, Ricciardo softs.
After their self-destructive antics in Baku, team boss Christian Horner might have hoped his charges were a little further apart…the tail of the sharp end brought a little more variety. Kevin Magnussen’s Haas bagged ‘bestof the-rest’ honours in P7, although the gulf to F1’s superteam trio was illustrated by his deficit of more than 0.8s to Ricciardo and of 1.5s to pole.
Fernando Alonso, in an honoursaving P8, described F1’s ‘big three’ as being “in another league”, although he was encouraged by the upgrades Mclaren had delivered for the MCL33, which allowed him to deliver his first Q3 qualifying performance of the year: “We had been P13 three times in a row and today we took the step forward we needed. The downside of this position is still the gap, but at least the positive note is that everything we brought for the car works as expected. This package is making me happy. Now we need to bring more things as quickly as possible.”
Compatriot Carlos Sainz dragged Renault into Q3, as team-mate Nico Hulkenberg languished in P16 after a fuel-pressure failure prevented him from progressing beyond Q1. That left Romain Grosjean to close out the top 10, thankful that he and 18 of his peers had escaped the misfortune of Brendon Hartley, whose massive FP3 shunt split his Toro Rosso in two and nixed him from qualifying. Hartley, happily, was unhurt.
Race
Two months ago the Formula 1 press corps left the Circuit de Catalunya after the first week of winter testing in subdued mood.
The weather had been unseasonably cold – The Beast From The East had even brought snow to the circuit – which rendered reading of the testing runes unusually tricky. But one thing seemed clear: the Mercedes W09 looked fast, sorted and fully capable of dominating.
The first four races of 2018 haven’t quite turned out like that, however. Fluctuating fortunes and a Ferrari SF71-H that was fundamentally fleet – perhaps even the fastest car on the grid – have brought entertainment to the season, surprising results and the prospect of a three-team tussle for the title.
Then came the Spanish GP and the ghost of winter testing spirited itself
back into the season’s narrative. This one was never in doubt for Mercedes, even if practice had shown a bit of nip-and-tuck between them and Ferrari. Once Hamilton had secured pole, with Bottas alongside, a Mercedes victory seemed inevitable, even if their qualifying margin over Ferrari was slight.
Their cause would be helped by uncharacteristically cool May temperatures at a venue that’s often scorchio. And modified Pirelli casings – shaved by 0.4mm across the range to prevent heat build-up and blistering – further aided their endeavours. A characteristic of Mercedes’ chassis in recent seasons has been rear-tyre sensitivity to heat and set-up; here, the atmospheric chill and more sympathetic rubber could only be to its advantage.
That should take nothing away from the sheer control of this 1-2 result, however. Hamilton was commanding throughout, managing a caution period, track debris and a later virtual safety car with what appeared consummate ease: in the first quarter he pulled out a seven-second lead over Vettel and by the chequer he was more than 20 seconds up on Bottas. Indeed, the fight for second was where the interest lay in this race as Lewis simply got on with executing the optimal softmedium single-stop strategy.
Vettel, always combative, looked to interfere with the Mercedes party immediately, and succeeded in getting ahead of Bottas through the first two corners and staying there. His pass would leave Bottas with a long afternoon’s work ahead, but before any strategy plays could be brought into effect, a much more urgent happening had to be managed.
Exiting the fast and long Turn 3 on lap one, Grosjean lost control of his Haas and, rather than letting the car run wide out of the track, he kept his foot in as the rear looped round and lit up his tyres, causing the Haas to spear back across the onrushing pack. Grosjean blamed the initial loss of control on dirty air from the car of his team-mate Magnussen, ahead. Far less explicable was his right-foot reaction, which might have caused a truly catastrophic multi-car shunt. As it was Grosjean tagged an innocent Hulkenberg before his damaged Haas was his by Pierre Gasly’s Toro Rosso. Three cars eliminated, a 23g impact recorded for Grosjean and cold fury from Nico: “I don’t know what happened. I was just crashed into. He came back into the track, took the back end off my car off and that’s the end of my afternoon. Generally he likes spinning a lot during the weekend. Lap one is not the time to do it.” Grosjean was later slapped with a three-place grid drop for Monaco and two penalty points.
It was lap seven before racing started again and despite extensive radio chatter about debris on the circuit, happily there would be no cut tyres or punctures. At the restart, Hamilton continued where he’d left off, building an immediate two-second gap to Vettel and setting ‘purple’ lap times. Soon he was seven seconds ahead and with Vettel coming under pressure from a bottled-up Bottas, Ferrari blinked, bringing Seb in on lap 17 for a strategic two-stop gamble. He exited on mediums, releasing Bottas who immediately began lapping 0.6s faster. Mercedes could see that Vettel had emerged behind Magnussen and urged their man to push, clearly hoping to ‘do’ Vettel at the stops. Bottas was called in for mediums on lap 19, having pushed as requested, but a slow, three-second stop put him back on track almost parallel with Vettel, who was about to execute a ballsy pass on Magnussen into T1. Bottas should have been a second ahead of this squabble but instead was left with no room to fight as Vettel took P2 once again. Their positions might have remained like that, had Ferrari not chosen to pit Vettel for a second set of mediums on lap 41, under a virtual safety car triggered by the stricken Force India of Esteban Ocon (engine).
Vettel had complained that his tyres were fading and his team played safe, believing that Bottas would likely have to pit for a second set himself. Here though was where cool air and harmonious rubber allowed Merc to commit Bottas to completing the race on a set of mediums which would have covered a mammoth 47 laps by race end. Ferrari and Vettel had no answer for that kind of strategic flexibility. Mercedes had toyed with them.
Vettel’s second stop brought a singlestopping Verstappen into play and he’d finish third – his first podium of the year – on softs, then mediums, despite clipping Lance Stroll soon after the virtual safety car restart and swiping the endplate from his front wing.
Vettel wound up fourth and sanguine: “We couldn’t make the tyres last. For us [two stops] was clearly the right thing to do. If you look from the outside, it is easy but inside the car we were going through the tyres too quick so we were not able to stay out for another 23 laps. I was not able to attack”.
Team-mate Raikkonen had retired on lap 25 with “power failure” lifting Ricciardo to fifth. Ricciardo struggled throughout with tyre warming and even spun, post-virtual safety car, although he did manage to set fastest lap – a new record of 1m18.441s.
Magnussen, Sainz, Alonso, Sergio Perez (Force India) and Charles Leclerc (Sauber) closed out the top 10, in a fiveteam flourish that brought a little welcome variety to an otherwise monumentally predictable race.
‘Ricciardo set the fastest lap’ Consolation for Dan, below