RICCIARDO’S REDEMPTION

Dan slayed the demons of his bitter 2016 win-thatgot-away with an immaculately judged victory. Elsewhere, there wasn’t much to smile about…

Passing on Monaco’s streets has never been more difficult, and yet the principality’s mystique remains undimmed. Formula 1’s drivers adore the challenge of skimming the barriers for lap after lap, hate the one-stop strategy the narrow streets dictate. So it was unsurprising to hear some of them declaim the 2018 Monaco Grand Prix as “boring”. For Daniel Ricciardo, though, it was anything but.

QUALIFYING

Judged on lap times alone, the difference in ability between Ricciardo and Max Verstappen around Monaco in their pace-setting Red Bulls was infinitesimal. After final practice, their PBS were a mere thousandth of a second apart: 1m 11.786s for Ricciardo; 1m 11.787s for Verstappen.

But the gulf in their attitude and mentality is, apparently, vast.

As Dan sat at the top of the timesheets again in the last minutes of FP3, Verstappen tried something special. All aggression to Ricciardo’s athleticism, he hit the inside guardrail exiting the Swimming Pool, skipped wide and clattered the barrier. The shunt wiped off the right-front corner of his RB14 and swiped the rear hard enough for a gearbox change to be required. Result: no Verstappen in qualifying when the team had been eyeing a front-row lockout. The shunt was his sixth in six race weekends, and for all his gifts Max is still making a lot of mistakes.

His team-mate, by contrast, oozed confidence: early in Q2 he set a new circuit record: 1m 11.353s. And there was more to come. He scorched around Monte Carlo’s storied streets in 1m 10.810s for pole – the only man to break into the ‘10s’.

The tussle between Mercedes and Ferrari for next-best placings was close. Neither chassis is short-circuit optimised, but the Ferrari’s inherently grippier nature swung the fight Vettel’s way. He’d start P2 with 1m 11.039s, despite going too deep into Rascasse on his best lap.

Lewis Hamilton made it three teams in the first three places, after coaxing his grip-light W09 into a Ferrari-splitting position, while last year’s pole man Kimi Räikkönen in P4 and Valtteri Bottas in P5 kept the top three rows looking familiar. Valtteri, like Lewis, lamented a lack of outright grip, which had prompted Merc into an (unsuccessful) experiment with ultrasofts in Q2, hoping to run longer into the race and gain track position at the expense of those running the fast-but-fragile hypersofts. But the difference in pace was simply too big.

Alongside Bottas, with one of the laps of the session, was Esteban Ocon, who took advantage of Verstappen’s absence to post a stellar P6 with Force India team-mate Sergio Perez in P9.

Splitting them were Fernando Alonso in P7 and Carlos Sainz, P8 – the two Spaniards again exerting mutual attraction. And closing out the top 10 was Pierre Gasly. Who’d have guessed he’d be second fastest Red Bull driver at Monaco…?

RACE

“Thank God that’s over,” said a jaded Lewis Hamilton after finishing third. “I think that was the most boring race I’ve ever participated in.”

A tad harsh? Certainly there had been little to entertain a racer like Hamilton, who ran low on grip with increasingly degraded ultrasoft Pirellis for the last 66 laps. And watching the top five – Daniel Ricciardo, Sebastian Vettel, Hamilton, Kimi Räikkönen, Valtteri Bottas – circulate for just under two hours at somewhat less than full racing speed didn’t make for obvious spectacle.

In the cockpit of car number three, however – Ricciardo’s Red Bull which led from pole to chequer – brilliance was being played out. The nature of Ricciardo’s triumph is one that will be recalled by all students of F1 history: he didn’t give up, even in a car crippled by the loss of MGU-K electrical power (worth around 160bhp) from lap 18 and using only six (of eight) gears. That compromised

performance left Dan lapping almost laughably slowly – routinely more than eight seconds off his own pole pace – but still able to hold the lead from Vettel and a tyre-troubled Hamilton.

Seb’s P2 represented the best result that could have been hoped for against faster opposition and, graciously, he admitted as much, recognising that his former team and team-mate had pulled one out of the bag.

Behind the lead trio matters remained static, yet interesting. Räikkönen finished barely a second behind Lewis, though never looked like passing, while Bottas – a mere 0.7s behind Kimi at the flag – at one stage looked a likely winner.

Around lap 40, after his lap 17 stop for supersofts, Valtteri appeared to be easily capable of an untroubled run to the flag, on a slightly harder compound than the quartet ahead. Each of those four were suffering with degrading ultrasofts by this stage, with almost half the race still to run. In the event, Ricciardo’s ‘win-at-the-slowestpossible-speed’ approach helped prolong the life of the struggling purple-walled rubber.

Behind Bottas, Ocon delivered on Force India’s qualifying promise, maintaining his P6 qualifying position. And Gasly, P7, was a contender for driver of the day, after gaining three places from his starting slot and fending off the urgent late attentions of a hungry Nico Hülkenberg. Here was an example of a smart strategy working out. Gasly ran a remarkable 37 laps on hypers, before closing out the race on supersofts, yet still had enough pace to fend off the hypersoft Hulk.

Sainz closed out the points finishers unlapped but 43 seconds distant from Verstappen, ahead; his attempt to run 62 laps on a single set of ultrasofts proved futile. “Scoring just a point feels very, very bitter,” Sainz lamented.

Ricciardo aside, his sentiments echoed loud around the streets of Monte Carlo.

“THE NATURE OF RICCIARDO’S TRIUMPH IS ONE THAT WILL BE RECALLED BY ALL STUDENTS OF F1 HISTORY: HE DIDN’T GIVE UP, EVEN IN A CAR CRIPPLED BY THE LOSS OF MGU-K ELECTRICAL POWER