Ricciardo’s sprint outburst explained; Mercedes’ sprint mystery: F1 Talking points

Max Verstappen won Brazil’s sprint race, but it wasn’t the dominant Saturday you might’ve expected.

Lando Norris beat him to sprint pole to begin with, making good on Friday’s wasted potential.

That advantage lasted only one corner, with Verstappen using his grid spot’s position on the inside line to immediately deprive Norris of the lead.

But the Dutchman couldn’t build the sort of gap we’ve come to expect. In fact Norris was able to lose a place to George Russell and earn it back again without losing touch with the leader.

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At once stage the McLaren driver even looked like a DRS threat, closing to within almost a second of the RB19.

Both drivers were managing their tyres to make the 24-lap distance. It took Verstappen pulling the pin to abuse the soft rubber to stabilise his losses, albeit without Norris dropping back.

It was only when the McLaren burnt up its tyres first that the gap widened, with the margin ending at a modest 4.2 seconds after 24 laps.

The ultimate outcome wasn’t a surprise, but the way the drivers got there was food for thought.

At a circuit McLaren thought on balance would be one of its least favourable of this final part of the season, it was not only Red Bull Racing’s closest challenger but also a genuine sprint victory threat.

It’s made more remarkable for the fact that Verstappen’s usual margin over the rest of the field — 13.6 seconds over Sergio Pérez in the same car and then 25.8 seconds over Russell as the next-best driver — was as large as it has been pretty much everywhere else.

McLaren has made up just that much ground, and Norris was able to fully exploit it.

“My last few weekends have been very strong,” Norris said. “The last four or five weekends have been my strongest in terms of absolute pace and extracting the maximum out of the car.”

In a strategic race of multiple stops, could McLaren’s higher degradation be masked with an aggressive strategy? We’ll find out on Sunday, but with Norris starting sixth, he’s unlikely to be close enough to put a genuine challenge on Verstappen on the lead without a sizzling opening lap.

It’s likely to leave the tantalising question of the sprint unanswered.

MERCEDES PESSIMISTIC AFTER SPRINT MYSTERY

McLaren was pessimistic ahead of the weekend but turned out to be in fantastic form. Mercedes was quietly hopeful of replicating last year’s race-winning performance but ends Saturday looking far short of podium pace.

Russell was 25 seconds behind Verstappen, while Lewis Hamilton was a massive 34 seconds adrift. This race was just 24 laps long.

Around the fourth-shortest track on the Formula 1 calendar, that equates to per-lap losses of 1.04 seconds and 1.42 seconds respectively, an enormous margin in race pace.

At least in Hamilton’s case the Briton can argue he had some battle to do early in the stint. Russell had a relatively clear run from early on. The pace was representative.

“I was quite happy with my management, but the pace of Red Bull and Lando really caught us by surprise,” Russell said. “It’s so challenging to understand these tyres. It was a strange one.

“Right now you’d say I don’t think we’re challenging along with those guys, which is a real shame.

“We need to work to understand how we got it wrong today. It’s very unforeseen.”

Russell said the team was left hoping for cooler Sunday conditions to play to its tyre problems, with car set-up locked in and only limited changes allowed before Sunday’s grand prix.

Hamilton was even less optimistic.

“The [lesson] is the car is not great today, and most likely it will be something similar tomorrow,” he said. “I really have no idea, but it is going to be a real struggle tomorrow.”

Ferrari, meanwhile, sees its maximum battle with Mercedes.

With tomorrow’s grid comprising Charles Leclerc ahead of the two Aston Martin teammates and then Hamilton and Norris, the grim reality is that Verstappen will likely have a clean early swing at establishing a comfortable lead before any strategy can come into play that might’ve brought him back into the pack.

RICCIARDO HAS HIMSELF TO BLAME FOR LACK OF PASSING

Daniel Ricciardo had good forward momentum in the sprint, having qualified representatively inside the top 10 after a disappointing Friday qualifying.

His battle with Carlos Sainz ended up as one of the sprint’s highlights, with the AlphaTauri quick enough to launch several moves on the Ferrari in the first sector.

For several laps he menaced on Sainz’s gearbox, and several times he got ahead with some slick moves into the first three turns, using a combination of his old trademark late braking and some superb car placement demonstrating his new-found confidence in the At04.

But each time Sainz breezed back past through the DRS zone between turns 3 and 4, resuming position. Eventually that gave Oscar Piastri a chance to sneak past momentarily.

Ricciardo’s post-race radio underlined his immense frustration.

“F**k, f**k, f**k, f**k, f**k,” he blasted over team radio. “That f**king DRS in turn 2. You pass in [turn] 1 and you just get f****d. It’s impossible.”

It must have been doubly frustrating for the fact that Ricciardo’s moves to get ahead were well judged and executed, the sort of side-by-side battling that gets the juices flowing, whereas Sainz’s were anathematic DRS-assisted blasts.

But the DRS has long been integral to Formula 1, and DRS tactics are part of racing. Sainz, as one of the grid’s smartest drivers and best tacticians, was never going to be defeated by Ricciardo’s parries.

It was on Ricciardo to strategise a better way past the Spaniard.

“Some things good, some things I can keep improving,” he summed up.

He’ll own that mistake and go again on Sunday, when he’ll start behind cars slower than the Ferrari and be eyeing points.

SPRINT DEBATE STARTS IN EARNEST

Few people will argue with the value of trading in some of F1’s three practice hours for some competitive jeopardy in the form of the sprint.

Sao Paulo is a great advertisement for the short race, the circuit being naturally conducive to overtaking by encouraging varied lines.

But the sport has so far struggled to land on a format that doesn’t disrupt the flow of the weekend towards the grand prix.

The first version of the format — sprint qualifying — demeaned pole position and became effectively the first stint of the race, with too few points on offer to make them exciting.

This year the sprint is its own stand-alone event with its own shootout, but it separates grand prix qualifying (Friday) from the grand prix (Sunday), turning Saturday into a largely meaningless novelty.

It also adds complication for the teams by requiring them to lock in set up on Friday, which was the key contributor to Hamilton and Charles Leclerc being disqualified in the United States. This weekend Hamilton is concerned Mercedes has locked in the wrong set-up, which means Sunday will now miss out a potential victory battle.

And while Brazil delivered one of the season’s best sprint races, its qualifying shootout was flat, with the pole climax seeing most of the top-10 drivers sitting in their garages for most of the eight minutes before setting one flying lap. And the entire qualifying format last longer than the sprint itself.

With this weekend’s sprint being the last of the year, the sport is weighing up changes, with one mooted solution being a shuffle of the session order.

“You do the sprint shootout and then [the sprint] and then the second qualifying for the race, which would be Saturday 2 o’clock. It’s the time we know, and it would create maybe less confusion,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff told Sky Sports. “Then you can [mentally] correlate it easier.

“We all have the same objective, between Formula 1 and the teams. I say it often, but I’m not keen on these weekends overall, but if it makes sense from the audience point of view, then obviously we need to do it.”

Christian Horner said the sport needed to simplify the entire schedule while also making the sprint more meaningful.

“It’s got to mean something,” he told Sky Sports. “It’s got to have sufficient points to it. You could tell at the end of that race we’re not quite sure whether we congratulate each other or not. I think it’s got to have more meaning to it.

“It’s got to be more of an event to itself than an extended long run with a medal at the end.

“Why not take championship order and just reverse the top 10 for the [sprint]?

“I think there’s really merit to doing something, but I don’t think we’ve got it quite right at the moment.”

With this year’s sprint rules agreed on the eve of the first event in Azerbaijan, the sport has a long time to think about it yet.