Red Bull Motorsports
F1
This is what happened at the Japanese Grand Prix
Lewis Hamilton ruthlessly cemented his championship credentials with a dominant victory, while Valtteri Bottas made it a Mercedes 1–2 at Suzuka after surviving intense pressure from Max Verstappen.
Lewis Hamilton moved one step closer to claiming a fifth Formula One Drivers' Championship title after a dominating the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, where the British driver cruised to victory over Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas by 12 seconds, while Red Bull Racing's Max Verstappen pushed the Finn all the way to the flag to finish a strong third.
Hamilton now leads the Drivers' Championship by 67 points and could win his fifth world title at the next round of the the championship, the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas, in two weeks time.
6 things we learnt at the Japanese Grand Prix
1. Honda shows promise
At Suzuka, Honda raced their 2018 spec-3 engine for the first time. This had more significance than the average upgrade given that it's the last chance Honda have to demonstrate an improvement before their engines go into the back of a Red Bull Racing RB15 next year.
2. Daniel Ricciardo doesn't do Saturday
Daniel Ricciardo is enduring a torrid time on Saturdays at the moment, failing to make it into the Q3 qualifying session for the fifth time in the last seven races. In Hungary he suffered the bad luck of a yellow flag during the chaos of a wet session, which cancelled out his only chance of setting a decent time, but the other four no-shows have all been engine-related. He took penalties for new Renault power unit components in Germany, Italy and Russia, consigning him to the back of the grid and thus obliging him to do no more than have a 107% trundle in Q1.
In Japan, Ricciardo had the misfortune of a broken throttle actuator in Q1. Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner was suitably scathing of the team's engine partner, saying failures of that kind "shouldn't happen at this level". Ricciardo opted to keep his own council. He's off to Renault next year and that isn't a bridge he can particularly afford to burn.
3. Pole number 80 for Hamilton
Lewis Hamilton took his 80th pole position at Suzuka. He's already far and away F1's most successful Saturday driver. He took 26 poles during his six years with McLaren and has been remorseless in racking up the numbers at Mercedes. He's also improving his win percentage and is currently fifth on the all-time list, having taken pole in 35.56% of his races. At his current rate, Hamilton has Senna, Ascari, Clark and Fangio in his sights. That's not bad company to be in.
4. Hamilton can now win the title in Austin
Sebastian Vettel's eventful Suzuka weekend now leaves him 67 points adrift of Lewis Hamilton in the race for the Drivers' Championship, with 100 points left on the board. Mathematically, Hamilton needs to outscore Vettel by seven points to take the title at the US Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas. In real terms, if Mercedes can take another 1–2 with Hamilton in front, the title is his. Ferrari opted to not have their drivers swap positions at Suzuka, suggesting they've already given up the battle.
5. Ricciardo is driver of the day
F1 fans voted Daniel Ricciardo their driver of the day at Suzuka, as the Australian carved his way through the field from 15th on the grid to fourth at the finish. Suzuka is much narrower than the average race track and a difficult place to overtake, but Ricciardo picked his moments well and turned his qualifying disappointment into a strategic advantage. Having not made it into Q3, he had a choice of starting tyre and chose to ignore the supersoft rubber, starting on the soft tyre and finishing the race on the durable medium compound.
As had been the case in Sochi, the pace advantage of the top three teams puts them in a different race to everybody else, and Ricciardo would have been expected to clear everybody up to P6. With Vettel out of the running, that became P5, but a terrific sequence of laps leading up to his mandatory pitstop gave him enough margin to clear Kimi Räikkönen's Ferrari as well.
6. Max the Ferrari Slayer
The crew of car #33 will have plenty of red paint to scrap off the right-hand sidepod after Suzuka, as Max Verstappen managed to tangle with both Ferraris in the opening exchanges. He hit Kimi Räikkönen first, overcooking the chicane and coming back onto the racing line in the Finn's path, for which he received a five seconds penalty. In his usual blunt fashion, the Dutchman labelled the stewards' decision "Stupid."
Shortly afterwards, he was nerfed by Vettel at the Spoon, as the German attempted a move down the inside at the high-speed double-apex corner While the impact pushed Verstappen wide, Spoon has plenty of run-off and he was able to get good traction and keep his place. Vettel paid the price for his ambition and was left facing the wrong way, subsequently re-joining at the back of the field, undoing the good work he'd done to rise from eighth on the grid.
