‘Whomst has awakened the ancient one?’
They were the words, albeit in meme form, of Daniel Ricciardo’s long-suffering engineer Tom Stallard after the Aussie’s lightning finish to the Mexico City Grand Prix.
In a race that featured little overtaking and less tension, a glimpse of original-spec Ricciardo bossing his way through the field was welcome relief and injected some jeopardy into a sedate afternoon at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez.
And after his season-worst performance at the United States Grand Prix, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
The smile was back. Ricciardo was back.
Of course his race wasn’t just a cracking drive but also an astute strategy gamble by the team, which put its full weight behind the Aussie to deliver a strong result.
It also wasn’t without controversy. Yuki Tsunoda will certainly feel hard done by after retiring from the race in a melee with the McLaren.
But at the end of a difficult two seasons and ahead of an uncertain future, Ricciardo and McLaren will certainly take it.
Further — much, much further — up the field Max Verstappen was doing what Max Verstappen does: dominating races and setting records. And crushing the hopes of Lewis Hamilton in Red Bull Racing’s most convincing season in almost a decade.
And somewhere in between what quickly became a race of two fields were Ferrari enduring a season-worst performance that’s threatened to turn a promising year into a disappointment.
HOW RICCIARDO FIRED UP MEXICO — AND THE BATTLE FOR FOURTH
When Ricciardo dropped two places off the line at the start, it was tempting to see it as the start of another disappointing weekend for the Australian, but in fact it put in place the conditions to prompt him and McLaren into the strategy gamble that set for fireworks at the end of the race.
“We kind of had the plan that if we were at the tail end of the group, then we had the opportunity to try something,” Ricciardo told Sky Sports. “We thought, ‘Why not?’. We had a chance to attack.”
He and his upper midfield battle group — teammate Lando Norris, Alpine drivers Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon, and Alfa Romeo’s Valtteri Bottas — all started on the medium tyre, and they all stopped after lap 30 onto the hard, a trend that had been set by drivers further up the field.
Ricciardo, however, stayed out.
“I don’t think I was rapid on the medium, but I think I had good tyre deg and we had confidence to go long.”
Ricciardo’s ability to manage the tyres has historically been strong, and he was in the groove this weekend.
Meanwhile, it was becoming clear the hard tyre wasn’t switching on. The C2 was slightly too hard, and despite the teams expecting them to activate eventually, that moment never came.
It helped Ricciardo competitively extend to lap 44, which was late enough to switch to the soft compound.
His stop dropped him to 15th, but with fresh soft rubber — ironically in his possession because he didn’t make the top-10 shootout — he sliced through the field effortlessly.
He started the stint 12.5 seconds behind Esteban Ocon. He ended it 12.1 seconds ahead pre-penalty for a turnaround of more than 24 seconds.
To get there he had to pass Yuki Tsunoda — just; more on that below — Norris, Bottas, the stricken Alonso and Ocon. Having hustled his way past Zhou Guanyu and Tsunoda earlier in the race, it capped of comfortably the most aggressive drive of the afternoon.
True, he had a considerable grip advantage, but there was plenty of old-school Ricciardo to get around in this performance. This was a rare afternoon in which he had confidence in the car, so much so he was visibly on the machine’s limit in that final dash. He even showed off some trademark late-braking aggression.
But it was also important for McLaren. Ricciardo’s lack of competitiveness this year is a major part of the reason the team hasn’t been able to capitalise on the faster Alpine’s chronic unreliability in the battle for fourth. By passing both Alpine drivers — after which Alonso retired — his seventh place reduced the deficit to seven points with two rounds to go.
A little bit more old-school Ricciardo and he might be able to end his tenure with the team on the relative high of securing midfield honours.
TSUNODA FUMES OVER ‘SUCH A ROOKIE’ MOVE
Ricciardo was voted driver of the day for his thrilling finish, but clearly no-one asked Yuki Tsunoda or AlphaTauri what they thought about it.
Tsunoda bore the brunt of Ricciardo’s comeback when he wasn’t so much bossed out of the way as he was punted off track in a dice at turn 6.
Ricciardo had been sizing up the Japanese driver through the first sector when he put his nose down the AlphaTauri’s inside. He didn’t have his front wheel alongside when they hit the brakes, and Tsunoda closed the door, as he was entitled to do.
They crashed mid corner as Ricciardo completed his dive. The McLaren’s struck the AlphaTauri’s sidepod and then launched it into the air with wheel-to-wheel contract.
The damage was terminal, and Tsunoda limped back to pit lane to retire.
“How can he think that overtake there?” he fumed. “I don’t know. Such a rookie guy.”
Ricciardo was apologetic but unwilling to wear all the blame.
“Of course you never want contact to a point where the other guy goes off,” he told Sky Sports. “I just saw a replay … I don’t feel as bad about it now.”
The stewards found that his passing attempt was “too late and too optimistic” and that he was “wholly at fault”. It earnt him a 10-second penalty — which he overcame by finishing more than 10 seconds ahead of Ocon — but the Aussie rejected the judgement.
“I thought five [seconds] would’ve been okay,” he said. “I didn’t miss the apex. I didn’t lock and go into him.
“I’ll take responsibility, but the truth is just tried to stay there and keep him a little wide to get him at the exit.
“I think it’s one where for sure I’ll take a bit more responsibility, but I can’t say it’s 100 per cent my fault.”
But maybe that was the fire-up Ricciardo needed to maximise his pace.
“That was a little bit the difficult moment in the race. Tom told me I had 10 seconds. I didn’t respond; I was pretty dark,” he said.
“But I still had really good pace, got on with it and somehow made it work.”
It was clearly clumsy work by Ricciardo, who was obviously eager to maximise his pace, and Tsunoda’s new-ish medium tyres meant he presented a sterner defence than those further up the road.
However, bit of patience would surely have seen him past all the same given his pace, and in that move he risked seeing his superb final stint coming to nothing via a penalty. Had Alonso’s retirement forced a safety car, for example, he would’ve finished well out of the points.
But that’s all academic thanks to the performance that followed.
VERSTAPPEN STILL ON TRACK FOR HISTORIC SEASON
You have never seen a driver win as much as this.
Verstappen’s 14th victory of the year makes the most of any driver in one season, eclipsing the record jointly held by Michael Schumacher and Sebastian Vettel in 2004 and 2013 respectively.
The Dutchman has always been quick to point out that a record like this is set more easily in the equal-longest season in F1 history, and that’s true. But victory in Mexico also keeps him on track to finish second in the count for most wins by percentage, a truer measure of domination.
He’s currently equal third on that count, having won 70 per cent of the races this season, the same as Jim Clark (seven from 10 in 1963) and behind Michael Schumacher (13 from 18 in 2004).
Winning the next two races in a row will take him to a 72.73 per cent record, ahead of Schumacher and behind only Alberto Ascari, who won six of eight races in 1952.
That would also put him second for most wins in succession, equal with Ascari (1952–53), Schumacher (2004) and Nico Rosberg (2015–16) and behind only Vettel’s nine wins straight in 2013.
Red Bull Racing is now third in the ranking for most consecutive wins by a constructor. One more would take it equal second with Ferrari (2002) and Mercedes (2015–16, 2016 and 2018–19), while two more would equal McLaren’s 11 straight wins in its uber dominant 1988 season.
Sergio Perez’s third place — the only false note, with a slow stop preventing him from undercutting Hamilton for second — was enough to put him back up to second in the drivers championship with a five-point advantage over Charles Leclerc.
Red Bull Racing has never finished one-two in the individual standings, which will surely be a major focus for the team in the final two rounds.
MERCEDES DEFEATED IN ITS BEST RACE OF THE YEAR
Mercedes said it would throw everything at victory in its most competitive round of the season, but it turned up to the race with a conservative strategy applied to both cars.
Both drivers started on the medium compound assuming it was the only way to one-stop to the finish. It relied on the hard compound being competitive and Verstappen’s medium tyre suffering high wear.
Neither transpired. The signs were there when Verstappen could take the soft tyre to lap 28, and the team’s chances evaporated with the realisation that the Dutchman was able to push harder and further in his second stint to claim a dominant victory.
The hard tyre was always going to be a gamble. It’s difficult to warm up was comfortably the slowest tyre of the range. Putting one driver on it would’ve been a prudent gamble with the other covering Red Bull Racing. Instead Hamilton finished second only because a slow stop for Perez meant he wasn’t able to undercut ahead.
Russell suggested a medium-soft strategy partway through the race — the strategy maximised by Ricciardo — but he was shut down by the team.
“Had we been on the strategy as Red Bull, we probably could’ve fought with them,” Russell told Sky Sports.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted the team had made a mistake.
“We didn’t think the medium would go to the end,” he responded. “We just got it wrong … soft–medium wasn’t even on the radar.”
But it’s also true to say Red Bull Racing likely had unbeatable pace regardless. The margin probably would’ve been larger had Verstappen not been focused on management early in the stint.
It means Mercedes is also on track for a historic year: its first winless campaign in more than a decade and Hamilton’s first winless season ever.
FERRARI SLUMPS TO NEW LOW AS BATTLE FOR SECOND TIGHTENS
You’d have been forgiven for thinking both Ferrari cars retired from this race early. Instead both Carlos Sainz and Leclerc were so far off the frontrunning pace that they had no-one to race all afternoon.
Sainz in fifth was more than 30 seconds behind Russell before the Briton made his late pit stop to snatch fastest lap. Leclerc was 10 second behind his teammate and 50 seconds ahead of the midfield.
No man’s land.
Ferrari knew it was going to struggle at altitude, where its aero package is less effective and its power unit is robbed of its regular strengths, but finishing around a minute behind Verstappen was chastening for a team that started the year looking like the championship favourite.
“This weekend we were just slow,” Sainz told Sky Sports. “With the altitude we knew we were going to lose quite a bit of performance — [but it was] more than what we expected. We were just off the pace.”
Both drivers had to lift and coast to manage temperatures, which mea
nt neither was really in the frame to move forward.
“The thing that hurts is that I felt like we maximised absolutely everything today, and even though we’ve done that, we are one minute away from Max, which is a huge difference,” Leclerc said.
“We need to look into that and make our bad days better, because whenever we have a bad day, especially on a Sunday, it seems to be a really bad day.”
Next is Brazil, which is also at altitude, albeit far less dramatic than Mexico City. With just 40 points splitting it from Mercedes behind, a reduction of 13 points from last week, it will have its work cut out to stop a rejuvenated Mercedes from snatching second place in the standings in the final races of the year.
