I normally like to mull a race over before writing about it, thinking about its impact on the championships and hunting out various stats. However, I didn’t want to fall into the trap of not writing about it with the Japanese Grand Prix only a week away and with a busy weekend ahead then.
This was a race full of incident – three Virtual Safety Car appearances show that.
Yesterday, I wrote that the Mercedes team were on the verge, for the second time this season, of equalling the record for consecutive wins in Formula One. Yet again, though, it was not to be.
Daniel Ricciardo fended off team-mate Max Verstappen to take a shock victory after Lewis Hamilton retired from a commanding lead with 15 laps remaining. This was his fourth victory and his first of the season his first for over two years. Red Bull also gained their first one-two since 2013.
At the start, Nico Rosberg was placed into a spin by Sebastian Vettel – the Ferrari driver coming off worse with broken front suspension – however, he recovered to finish third and extend his championship lead to 23 points with five races to go.
Hamilton had driven the perfect race up until his retirement – a mixed strategy of soft then hard tyres allowed him to build a gap ahead of everyone else. But “an unexpected mechanical failure of the internal combustion engine with no prior warning” according to Mercedes, ended his hopes of a first victory since before the summer break.
Behind the podium finishers, Kimi Raikkonen finished fourth with Valtteri Bottas fifth and Sergio Perez sixth. Fernando Alonso battled his way up the field from last on the grid (a total of 45 grid penalty places seemingly ruining his weekend), to take seventh ahead of Nico Hulkenberg and Jenson Button. Jolyon Palmer finished 10th to score his first point of his F1 career.
