MERCEDES WRAPS IT UP IN JAPAN
BOTTAS FLIES THE FLAG AS SILVER ARROWS LIFT THE CONSTRUCTORS’ CROWN
1.Ferrari meltdown hands constructors’ title to Mercedes
On a race weekend that faced an existential threat from one of the most severe typhoons to hit Japan in many years, victory for Valtteri Bottas and third place for Lewis Hamilton sealed Mercedes’ sixth consecutive constructors’ championship as Ferrari fell apart from a position of strength yet again.
The Japanese Grand Prix represented Ferrari’s season in a microcosm: just when the red cars seemed to have it in the bag, the blunders began.
Bottas set the pace for Mercedes during Friday practice and might even have started from pole position if circumstances had fallen differently. Saturday’s sessions were cancelled as the track battened down the hatches in the face of the oncoming storm, qualifying was provisionally postponed until Sunday morning, and the grid would be decided by the results of the second practice session if the weather prevented qualifying from taking place.
Sunday dawned bright and sunny (if still very windy), qualifying went ahead as planned, and Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc annexed the front row ahead of Bottas and Hamilton.
That was as good as it got for Ferrari. Vettel fluffed the start, dropping the clutch perhaps half a second too early and having to stamp on the brakes as the lights finally went out, and Bottas shot past into a lead he would only temporarily give up during his pitstops.
Hamilton couldn’t find space to pass Vettel on the inside as the Ferraris belatedly got going, so he had to tuck in behind as Red Bull’s Max Verstappen went by both him and Leclerc on the outside into Turn 1. Shorn of front-end downforce in his team-mate’s wake, Leclerc slid wide at
Turn 2 and tapped Verstappen into a spin, in effect eliminating them both.
The second Ferrari continued with its leftfront endplate askew, and Leclerc initially ignored an order to pit for a new nose, but a diktat then came down from the FIA when a chunk broke off and destroyed one of Hamilton’s mirrors a lap later.
Leclerc charged back from the tail of the field to finish sixth on the road, but was penalised later for the collision and for not coming in immediately to replace the damaged wing. FIA race director Michael Masi declared himself “more than slightly annoyed from a safety perspective”.
To the consternation of many, not least the Mercedes pitwall, Vettel escaped sanction for pre-empting the start because his initial movement was “within acceptable tolerances”. That enabled him to finish a distant, if slightly fortunate, second ahead of Hamilton, whose attempt to complete the race with just one pitstop didn’t pan out.
With its usual logic, Mercedes ran its drivers on different strategies but tyre degradation proved much more severe than expected, perhaps because the track was ‘green’ after Saturday’s rain.
Hamilton lost time as his soft-compound tyres gave up in the final laps of his first stint and, although he briefly led when Bottas and Vettel made second stops, he had to come in again with 11 laps to run. He crossed the line third, tucked under Vettel’s rear wing, with the victorious Bottas a speck in the distance.
Hamilton wasn’t happy with the strategy and complained that he should have been given hard rather than medium tyres at his first stop. In mitigation, of the six drivers who did that, four ended up making another stop anyway.
“Congratulations, guys,” Lewis muttered as team boss Toto Wolff thanked him for his part in securing the constructors’ title.