Mercedes dominance derailed by Red Bull driver
MONTREAL — And that is why they run the races.
The 45th Canadian Grand Prix Sunday was handicapped to be a runaway for Mercedes Petronas, winner of all six Formula One races this season, and that’s exactly the way it unfolded during the seventh, on Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
And then, in the shadow of the Montreal Casino, the brakes of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes cashed their chips, the product of Hamilton’s aggressive lengthy chase of teammate Nico Rosberg.
As the laps ground on, Rosberg’s car struggled with diminishing power and overheating brakes of its own. Somehow, the German kept a hungry pack behind him, the objects in his mirror definitely closer than they appeared.
Finally, having stalked Rosberg for about 20 laps, Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo muscled up beside the Silver Arrow down the Casino Straight and blew past before the Turn 13-14 chicane with just more than two laps to go.
That move should have been the climax to a remarkable afternoon of racing. But this being Montreal, we weren’t done yet.
Williams’s Felipe Massa earned a lifetime Quebec driver’s permit when he violently plowed into the back of Sahara Force India’s Sergio Perez on the final lap, getting a little help when the latter cut across the racing line.
The high-speed crash sent both into the barrier behind the Senna Corner of Turns 1-2; Massa almost took in a literal sense the padded wall advertising Fly Emirates.
Both walked away from the wreck but the automotive carnage brought out the yellow, bringing Ricciardo casually home for his maiden Formula One victory, coming in his 57th career Grand Prix.
Massa and Perez were checked out in the on-site medical centre, then transferred to Sacré-Coeur Hospital for precautionary measures and their subsequent release.
Ricciardo, a 23-year-old Australian, had run in Montreal the past two years, finishing 14th and 15th for Toro Rosso. Sunday’s third career podium obviously is his greatest, and it might be a couple of weeks before they pry the grin off his face given his champagne celebration and beaming news conference that followed.
It will be one hour, 39 minutes, 12.830 seconds that Ricciardo will never forget, winning his first Grand Prix at an average speed of 184.613 km/h.
Rosberg hung on to finish second with his brilliant drive, 4.236 seconds back, with Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel, the winner here last year, placing third, 5.247 seconds off the pace.
Vettel was blessed just to make it to the finish, Massa and Perez having scrapped on either side of him charging into the final lap.
Fourteen of 22 starters were classified at the finish.
Ricciardo had been running in a small pack in the final laps, trying to get around Perez for a shot at Rosberg. But the latter hung tough and offered no overtaking possibility until Ricciardo finally squeezed around him and had a go at the Mercedes, blowing by the latter to a roar from the appreciative crowd.
“It still is a bit surreal, I think, and just really cool,” the winner said. “It’s not that we were leading the whole race. It’s not like I had time to understand that I was going to win. That’s why it’s taking a while to comprehend in my head.”
With Hamilton’s surprising unreliability, this being his second DNF this season, Rosberg increased his fourpoint drivers’ championship lead coming in to 22 points. But Mercedes saw its constructors’ lead over Red Bull shaved, from 141 points prerace to 119.
The Mercedes lads were hoping to make F1 history by running 1-2 for the sixth consecutive race, that trick never before achieved by a team.
Mercedes announced their power problems as “high-voltage control electronics failure.” That, and failing brakes on a Montreal circuit that’s famous for eating them alive, would prove to be a lethal combination.
After a so-close call in the race’s first corner — one more coat of paint on the branding of their Pirelli supersofts and they’re banging tires — pole-sitter Rosberg remained in front of Hamilton without huge difficulty.
That’s not to say there wasn’t knuckleheadedness very early on. The Marussia-Ferrari duo of Max Chilton and Jules Bianchi combined for not even one lap, collecting each other in an oil-dripping, carbon-fibre-shredding collision in Turn 4.
The good news was, Marussia were able to employ the crafty zero pit-stop strategy and make it off the island, before the traffic, onto a sunny downtown terrasse.
Bianchi surely saw Chilton as they crawled from their smoking wrecks, however, their tires not as warm as their tempers.
Race stewards didn’t agree with Chilton’s version of the facts, penalizing him three grid spots for the Austrian Grand Prix in two weeks.
There’s another decade of this fun to come, with the Canadian Grand Prix on Saturday having been renewed for 10 more years.