Verstappen/Ocon clash hands Hamilton win
While Max had road rage, lewis helped Merc to reach the heights
Newly-crowned world champion Lewis Hamilton tied up the constructors’ championship for Mercedes with a hard-fought victory in the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos. Hamilton started from pole position but this occasionally ill-tempered race was anything but a lights-to-flag affair. Hampered by his car’s appetite for rear tyres and nursing an engine issue, Hamilton lost the lead to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen mid-race only to regain it when Verstappen tangled with a backmarker.
Kimi Raikkonen claimed third for Ferrari as his team-mate Sebastian Vettel faded from contention with a minor engine problem, but was harried to the flag by the second Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo. In a race largely dictated by tyre management, Vettel and Hamilton’s team-mate Valtteri Bottas both had to make extra pitstops and finished well adrift of the leading pack.
Qualifying
The warm and sunny Saturday morning flattered to deceive as dark clouds rolled in ahead of qualifying hour. Forecasts differed as to the precise moment rain would arrive, but most agreed that its arrival was inevitable.
An initial shower came and went during Q1, adding another layer of difficulty on top of the usual Interlagos challenge of putting together a trafficfree lap on what is one of Formula 1’s shortest circuits. Renault’s Carlos Sainz was the big-name casualty of the first session, missing the cut for Q2 by a 0.005s.
Sainz shouldered the blame for not putting a lap together – he made a mistake at the final corner on his first run and lost time passing Pierre Gasly’s Toro Rosso on his second – but pointed out that if the car had more performance, the three tenths he shipped while disposing of Gasly wouldn’t have been an issue. GPS data indicating a lack of straight-line performance suggested that the engine, once again, was at the root of Renault’s woes.
Gasly’s team-mate Brendon Hartley locked up on his best run and was eliminated in Q1, as were the Mclaren duo of Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne, the latter of whom was slowest of all. Perhaps they too were hampered by a lack of shove from their Renault power units, but the bizarre timing of Mclaren’s announcement of a 2019 Indy 500 campaign – in the immediate aftermath of qualifying – was redolent of an organisation not fully focused on the task in hand.
While Lance Stroll’s Williams team-mate Sergey Sirotkin escaped the drop, a bizarre on-track incident with Hamilton notwithstanding (Hamilton initially described Sirotkin as “disrespectful” for passing him while they were both on out-laps, then recanted his accusation the following morning), Stroll missed the cut for Q1, splitting the two Mclarens.
While Stroll and Vandoorne would start 19th and 20th, though, Sainz, Hartley and Alonso would all gain a position courtesy of Esteban Ocon’s Racing Point Force India picking up a grid penalty for a replacement gearbox.
Q2 was where Ferrari rolled the dice immediately, instructing both drivers to abort their first runs on the supersoft rubber and come in for soft tyres. Since further, heavier rain was imminent, this initially seemed like a ridiculous gamble – especially when Vettel had the misfortune to be called in for a random weighbridge check. He would later escape serious sanction for roaring away in a fit of pique, wrecking the scrutineers’ apparatus in the process.
Vettel and Raikkonen duly posted laps fast enough for them to progress to Q3, guaranteeing that they would start on the theoretically more durable soft compound. Ferrari’s principal rivals, Mercedes and Red Bull, declined to take the risk, sending Hamilton, Bottas, Ricciardo and Verstappen out on supersofts to ‘bank’ fast laps in anticipation of the rain to come. It duly arrived, clearing at the end of the session, but when the remainder of the frontrunners went out on the soft rubber they failed to improve on their earlier times, thereby committing them to starting on the faster but more fragile supersofts.
Kevin Magnussen was the fastest of the Q2 runners to be eliminated, bumped at the last moment by Sauber’s Charles Leclerc, who had looked set for the drop when Magnussen pushed him down to 11th just before the rain set in. Leclerc, acting against suggestions from his team as well as his own instincts, embarked on a final all-ornothing lap that delivered the goods in style, earning him a Q3 slot.
The Racing Point Force Indias of Sergio Perez and Ocon were 12th and 13th, just over a tenth short of Q3, and Ocon’s new gearbox was to cost him five more grid spots. That meant 14th and 15th-fastest runners Nico Hulkenberg and Sirotkin shuffled a place forward in the final reckoning.
After the breathlessness of Q2, the rain abated and Q3 proved to be a relatively muted affair as Hamilton claimed his 82nd career pole. Hamilton topped the timesheets after his first run in Q3, a 1m07.301s he set immediately after Raikkonen and then Vettel briefly headed the field. Vettel, along with everyone but Hamilton and Marcus Ericsson, then failed to improve on his second run – in which he was a tenth of a second up on his initial effort before locking up at Turn 8.
Hamilton then emphasised his searing one-lap pace with a 1m07.281s, another new lap record. Vettel lined up second ahead of Bottas and Raikkonen, while Verstappen was the fastest of the Red Bulls in fifth. Ricciardo’s sixth place was academic since he was carrying a grid penalty for a new turbocharger, the legacy of fire-extinguisher foam jetted up his car’s exhaust by a marshal when he stopped in Mexico.
Ericsson was curiously nonplussed to have outqualified Leclerc as the two Saubers edged Romain Grosjean’s Haas out of the ‘best of the rest’ slot, claiming seventh and eighth. Gasly propped up the top 10, but it was a solid achievement for the Honda-powered Toro Rosso. Honda’s former partners, Mclaren, almost needed binoculars to see the logos on Gasly’s engine cover from their lowly grid positions.
Race
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff predicted after qualifying that Ferrari’s soft-tyre gambit would give Vettel and Raikkonen a significant advantage in the race, enabling them to run longer before stopping and then enjoy fresher rubber in the closing stages. Mercedes’ W09 has a welldocumented tendency to overheat its rear tyres, a characteristic that hobbled Hamilton in the previous two rounds.
“We’ve modified things for this weekend,” Wolff said. “And we’ve been happy so far with what we’ve seen, but nevertheless the tyre overheating is going to be the biggest struggle, keeping those tyres alive, not making them blister. With the mentioned disadvantage of the supersoft versus the soft, we are on the back foot a little bit.”
In the end, Wolff was both right and wrong. The Mercedes drivers did struggle to keep their tyres in good shape, but it was the Red Bulls that proved to be the greatest threat – having seemed unlikely to do so throughout qualifying.
Away from the lights, Hamilton hooked up crisply and converted pole position into the race lead as Bottas pulled alongside Vettel, taking the outside line at the entry of the Senna Esses and claiming the second apex assertively, leaving Vettel under immediate attack from Verstappen, who had outmanoeuvred Raikkonen at Turn 1.
By the fourth lap Verstappen was through, slicing up the inside at Turn 1 even as Vettel put the squeeze on him. Vettel then ran wide at Turn 4, enabling Raikkonen to cut through on the inside and break clear.
Ricciardo was also getting a move on from his P11 start, and by the sixth lap had dispatched the ‘Class B’ frontrunners – Leclerc, Grosjean, Gasly, Ericsson and Magnussen – to occupy sixth behind Vettel. While the Mercedes drivers were struggling to manage their supersofts, the Red Bulls crept up ominously as the Ferraris maintained a watching brief. That the silver cars were in trouble was emphasised when Verstappen passed Bottas without a serious defence at Turn 1 on the 10th lap, and eight tours later Bottas and Hamilton dived into the pits for medium rubber on consecutive laps – much earlier than expected.
Hamilton emerged in eighth place, ahead of Bottas, and with a seemingly
arduous 52-lap stretch on the mediums to the chequered flag. And as the race wore on it became apparent that Ferrari’s supposed advantage in starting on the soft rubber would remain in the realm of myth. Vettel and Raikkonen pitted for mediums on laps 28 and 32, and all the while the Red Bulls circulated happily on their supersofts, reporting no problems at all.
While Raikkonen emerged from his stop behind Vettel, as is customary at Ferrari, when Vettel failed to close within striking distance of Bottas, he was ordered to let Raikkonen past. “This is critical for the race for both of you,” senior engineer Jock Clear told him. Vettel duly moved over and slipped ever backwards, hampered by a reported engine sensor problem.
Verstappen made his supersofts last until lap 36, Ricciardo until lap 41, and as the Red Bulls emerged on soft tyres it was obvious that they were tooled up for a strong run to the flag. Verstappen came out of the pits behind Hamilton but made short work of him, getting a better exit from the final corner at the end of lap 39 and simply driving past on the main straight. If such a display of superior Renault v Mercedes grunt appears unprecedented in the V6 hybrid era, the explanation was soon forthcoming: Hamilton’s engine had experienced a serious and worrying temperature spike that forced him to turn the wick down.
As Verstappen began to break clear in the race lead, Raikkonen usurped Bottas for third and Ricciardo pounced on Vettel for fifth. But Verstappen had barely had time to get comfortable when he crossed swords with his old karting and Formula 3 nemesis Ocon at Turn 2, pitching them both into a spin. Ocon, running an alternate strategy and recently switched to supersoft rubber, was flying and attempted to unlap himself, going around the outside at Turn 1. Verstappen seemingly chose to make the move difficult, and staked his claim to the racing line at the switchback Turn 2 even as Ocon moved up on what was now the inside.
The clash turned what had been a 2.4s lead over Hamilton into a 5.2s deficit and provoked a furious and unseemly exchange in the FIA garage after the race as Verstappen shoved Ocon off the weighbridge. The stewards took a dim view of the entire encounter, handing Ocon a stop-go penalty in the race for causing a collision and Verstappen a two-day ‘public service’ order for causing a fracas.
Verstappen’s floor was damaged in the incident so both he and Hamilton were condemned to hobble to the finish as Raikkonen crossed the line in close attendance, with Ricciardo on his tail. Late stops left Bottas and Vettel running around 20s down on the leading group at the chequered flag.
Leclerc took ‘Class B’ honours in seventh after passing his team-mate on the opening lap and breaking clear of the Haas entries of Grosjean and Magnussen, and Perez claimed the final point thanks to making his supersofts last almost as long as Ricciardo, gaining track position as other midfielders pitted ahead.
Afterwards Hamilton seemed even more jubilant than he had after securing the drivers’ title last time out with a comparatively lowly fourth place in Mexico.
“Since I was a kid I’ve had a crazy desire to win and that remains the same no matter where you start on the grid,” he said. “The Mexico race was difficult but we still finished fourth and I won the world title, but there was a real mixture of emotions, plus we hadn’t won the constructors’ championship.
“Today, to be able to do that, to see everyone’s excitement, to know we’re going to go back to the factory and see all those people who have worked for this, who have helped and really made it happen – this is the height. I’ve never experienced the height that I’ve experienced here and I know when I get back to the factory it’s going to be a higher energy level than I’ve ever felt before.
“So I’ve got to get some sleep tonight otherwise I might not be able to hold my emotions in.”