A very good point!

That’s a bit strong, I think. Spa hasn’t changed that much since the 1980s, before which the drivers boycotted it because it was extremely dangerous. A track the size of the original Nurburgring was always likely to go the same way as speeds increased.

The Hockenheimring, to be fair, was changed for a number of reasons, a major one being that it was expensive to maintain. I believe local environmental groups pressured for the disused section to be ripped up, which is why it’s now a forest.

Is F1 ruined because of these changes? I don’t think so. There are plenty of ‘drivers tracks’ still on the calendar if the test is tracks drivers enjoy being challenged by — Monaco is one of them.

Yeah, I thought it was a bit poor of Hamilton and Alonso. If Hamilton had won, he’d be talking about how its the greatest circuit in the world rather than asking the sport to consider circuit changes.

As for Alonso, it feels increasingly like he doesn’t really want to be here any longer. Asking for fans to be repaid for their tickets — I mean, no-one goes to Monaco expecting an overtaking bonanza, and I didn’t think this year’s race was notably better or worse in that regard than previous editions.

I don’t know if it has much of an impact on terms of desire, to be honest — I don’t think Ferrari, Mercedes or Red Bull Racing had any doubt of his quality as a driver, impressive though this drive was. What it might well do is improve his bargaining power for pay or other contract perks, though.

You’re right, he certainly deserves to be regarded as one of our more successful exports. We don’t get too many drivers into top-tier international racing, and the fact he made, it, stayed there and won a title makes him deserving of a higher status.

The best motor racer ever? A very difficult question, but I think that’d be a bit of a bold call. I’m always inclined to say Jack Brabham is our best considering the quality of his era and the fact he built his own machinery.

Thanks, mate, Fair call about Ricciardo, but I’m hearing only stronger rumours he’s bound for Ferrari. Might hear about it soon if all contracts start getting signed, as seems to be the way these things happen.

Thanks, mate!

Not naive at all! It is in part finances, as it guarantees a certain predictable cost to the teams each year, but it also gives the sport a lever with which to influence the show.

When there was tyre competition, the tyre manufacturers produced tyres as durable and grippy as possible, but it meant there was less strategy variation because there was less impetus to make a pit stop. Worse was that a tyre company could partner with a team — for example, Bridgestone with Ferrari — to ensure that that team used its tyres better than other customers.

Having a control tyre means F1 can tell Pirelli to build tyres to a certain specification — to degrade at a certain rate, for example — to benefit the show, and it ensures all teams have equal equipment.

Pirelli derives a marketing benefit, and its sell point — aside from being in F1 — is that it’s clever enough to make tyres that do whatever the sport wants.

Yep, got it in one. Pirelli has the difficult task of making tyres that degrade when a tyre company would prefer to sell that their tyres last as long as possible. Add to that the various constraints of F1, like limited testing, and the task becomes substantially harder. Plus every time there’s a boring race, it seems to be Pirelli’s fault!

The tyers are softer this year, and Pirelli brought an extra stop softer to Spain as well, but the Spanish circuit has been resurfaced for this season and is substantially less abrasive, which brought everything back into balance, more or less. That 0.4 millimetre is apparently around 10 per cent of the tread, so it’s not insignificant. If your overriding weakness when it comes to tyre management is overheating, it can make a difference.

Thanks for the kind words, mate!

Certainly fans wouldn’t complain! And if the sport can make it work for everyone, the overall outcome should be positive. We’ll see what F1 can manage with next year’s calendar.

Certainly an idea worth considering. It could certainly help to justify the costs associated with setting up temporary infrastructure. On the other hand, some hosting venues would feel having a race only once every two seasons would dilute the event’s value because the opportunity to back it up wouldn’t exist.

But, like you say, it would allow for a more diverse calendar and potentially help to keep some races, particularly classic races (Germany being an example) on the calendar when a race every season is unviable.

In practice the ‘racing line’ in this context is the original line he took out of the previous corner. Neither driver was ever on the actual racing line.

I always enjoy Newey’s expressions on these occasions! He’s just in it to see his car’s perform, he seems to hate all the egos and the politics — fair enough too.

This pit stop was an interesting one. Ricciardo got a it held up by traffic on his out lap, but did that make all the difference? I haven’t had a chance to look into it but you’re right to say the undercut was disadvantageous in most cases this weekend.

Should they have switched them back after that? Hard to say. Verstappen might’ve been quicker on the ultrasoft, so would that’ve been fair? I guess they didn’t have time to think about it anyway!

I don’t think Max did move twice. He moved once and moved back to his original like (more or less), which is allowed. The problem was they were already at the braking zone when they made their moves, so they ran out of time to bail out.

Fair call, Blake. Red Bull Racing definitely deserves credit for letting them race, and for continuing to let them race after this too.

I don’t believe this is the case, but then Ricciardo’s decision to stay or go, like you say, may be more telling as to whether he feels he’s being given a fair deal at RBR. I don’t see it as the same Vettel/Webber bias — after all, Red Bull has invested heavily in Ricciardo’s career for years; they bought Verstappen one year before his F1 debut — but even Daniel’s said that Red Bull loves records and the the novelty factor, and Verstappen is a good example of that.

Tom Kristensen was also a steward, and he’s highly respected. I think a race ban is extreme — drivers do crash from time to time in motorsport. He’s certainly having a messy run of races, and time will tell if he can clean himself up, but I would go so far just yet.

In practice the racing line in this context is whatever line the defending driver exits the previous corner/enters the next corner. Verstappen held the inside line on the run down the straight, he didn’t move to it in defence. If this wasn’t the case, the stewards would be investigating most overtaking moves.

I think you’re probably going a bit far with your Jos theory! Daniil Kvyat was quick but inconsistent; Verstappen is quicker and also consistent.

As for team orders to let Ricciardo past, the team certainly could’ve taken this route, but it had generally erred against it, especially when both are on the same strategy, as was the case here. Maybe they would’ve made the call in the last stint with the promise to switch back if Daniel couldn’t pass Hamilton, but I guess we’ll never know.

I don’t really see those post-race apologies as PR, either. Christian Horner, as team principal, was absolutely right to feel aggrieved for the hundreds of other employees who were wronged by the crash and also and to be angered by the lost points, so it’s fair enough he ensured that was addressed this first. Any sit-downs with the drivers to sort out what needs to change could wait until tensions have eased later in the week.

We don’t know what happened in the meeting immediately after the crash, but that’s not how I see it. Horner equally apportioning blame, I take it, is more him putting his foot down about putting the team first.

Undoubtedly Horner learnt his lesson that when RBR was putting Vettel first in various scenarios when Mark Webber was in the other car — taking sides or publicly adjudicating doesn’t really work for anyone. Nico Rosberg in his Spa crash with Lewis Hamilton in 2014 is another good example — Mercedes thought it’d be a good idea to lay down the law hard and punish Rosberg, and it killed the team for the rest of the year.

In any case, even if Verstappen was mostly to blame in the sense he was racing too hard against his teammate, Ricciardo also stepped it up in that last move, even if you could argue he was provoked.

Thanks for the comment, marfu. You’re not allowed to move twice in defence, but you can move once and then back to your racing line, which is (more or less) what Verstappen did, which is why the stewards wouldn’t have felt it necessary to give him more than a reprimand.

As for Verstappen learning, the reflect does reflect what you’re saying: every race weekend so far he’s crashed or otherwise damaged the car. I think there was genuine reflection after China, and we don’t know how he reacted behind closed doors afterwards; there may have been genuine remorse, which would explain why Ricciardo was fairly calm afterwards.

Fair call, I haven’t suggested an alternative line-up. It might be ambitious to champion Robert Kubica given he’s apparently been assessed by Williams and Renault as not quick enough, but if giving him reserve-driver status is a sign they think he has potential, then at least giving him the race seat would’ve been a signal of ambition. After all, he’d come much more quickly to that potential by driving regularly than he would be just watching.

I get the money-driven approach that, like you say, gives the team the finance to develop, but there must be a counterbalance, too. Development is obviously not all down to the driver, but is the money you make from sponsorship more than the money you lose from dropping points? That was the Maldonado equation, after all — apparently he cost the team more in repairs than he was worth in sponsorship!

To be fair, Patrick Head isn’t there anymore and the team seems generally like a nice bunch of people, but I take your point. I think you could well be right about McLaren, too. There’s certainly no prospect of being too big to fail for Woking.

No question on Leclerc vs Ocon, but Esteban is more experienced anyway, so that’s not a surprise. Charles might’ve had the chance to make a direct switch after one season, but his first three races suggest he needs to time to make rookie errors, meaning he won’t get to the Scuderia until 2020 at the earliest, I’d have thought.

The trouble is that he and the teams may not have time to assess the entirety of the season before making a decision — moves will surely be made before that.

I see what you mean about driving without expectations, but I think having Verstappen in the other car is creating enough pressure on Ricciardo to be a test of how he performs when it matters.

I wonder how much say Vettel and Hamilton have on who sits in the other car. Vettel didn’t have a veto clause or any such thing, as far as I understand, in his first Ferrari contract at very least. Mercedes, similarly, seem to like the idea of having two strong drivers so long as they don’t become political. Ricciardo would meet that test, I think.