The Undercut: Lewis in Wonderland, Ferrari in Blunderland…
Ferrari make it all too easy for Lewis (again)
You guys may remember ‘Days of Thunder’, that slightly naff NASCAR movie with Tom Cruise and one of his wives in it.
It was about a driver in a sport where they just went round in circles all day, encountering various dramas on the way, before the star act wins.
Well, 28 years on, it looks like we could do with a reboot and a tweaked title: ‘Ferrari: Days of Blunder’.
Only in this one, the star act will be played by somebody a bit more hapless than Mr Cruise and sadly, he won’t win at the end.
Now regular readers of ‘The Undercut’ will know by now, that we don’t really do race reviews as such.
You’ve watched it on telly already, possibly the highlights show too, when you got back from the pub, so there is little point reading about it on Monday, unless more detail about tyre degradation and power units are your thing, in which case, we suggest you need to get out more.
One group of people who are happy to hear more though, will be the shop owners in Mercedes home-town of Brackley, as it is now a dead cert that the drivers and constructors titles are staying local, and so there will be some big bonuses to be spent.
In previous years of victory, everybody at the factory, be it a cleaner or engineer, got around £10,000 to blow in town.
This year though, it would only be fair to share the cash with a couple of people outside the team, who’ve helped Merc along the way.
Ferrari’s strategist and their No 1 driver should share in the Mercedes bonus scheme.
So, here then is the Japanese Grand Prix summed up in a form which means you can spend your time doing something more productive.
Firstly, Lewis started from pole.
Then, he lead every lap. He occasionally pretended there was something wrong with the car in order to make it look like he actually had to put some effort in. Then he won.
Everybody else finished behind him in roughly the places they usually do, apart from Ferrari, who thought they’d like to finish a bit further back in this one.
Who needs pages of description when six lines will do?
Now, don’t get me wrong, if that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy the race, then apologies are duly issued.
It may not have been a stand-out of a Grand Prix, but I’d get up at 05:30 on a Sunday to watch shopping trolleys go round Suzuka, simply because it is truly such an epic track.
True, watching a race with a coffee instead of a beer (depending on which part of the planet you reside on) is not quite as enjoyable, but I’d take Suzuka in the small hours over somewhere like Shanghai at a more sociable time, any day of the week.
Verstappen biffs a red car.
After the race, it is now mathematically possible for only Lewis or Sebastian to win the title.
Everybody else is now out of it, although most of them, especially those unfortunate souls at McLaren and Williams, realised they were out of it when they took to the track in pre-season testing.
He may still be in the race based on points left to score, but Vettel is now 67 points adrift, though he may as well be 167 away, as he now has about as much chance of seizing the title as Theresa May has of winning ‘Strictly Come Dancing’.
Lewis, as you may know, can win the title in Austin in a couple of weeks, if he wins and Vettel is lower than second.
Ordinarily, you’d think that a tall order, but for two small details.
One: Of the six times the United States Grand Prix has been held at the rather fab Circuit of the Americas, Lewis has won five times.
Five times out of six.
Quote of the day came from Leclerc: “Magnussen is, and will always be, stupid. That is a fact”.
Two: Sebastian meanwhile has only managed the one victory there and that was when he was with Red Bull, a team who unlike his present employers, don’t tend to make monumental cock-ups or crumble under pressure, a la Scuderia.
This weekend's Ferrari fumbles were, for once, pretty much confined to the Saturday, when a wrong call on tyres left Vettel starting way back in ninth place, with his team-mate, Kimi Raikkonen in fourth.
Lewis had his faithful man-servant, Valtteri Bottas right behind him and Max Verstappen next up in third.
That then, on Saturday afternoon, was job done.
Lewis could serenely drive off into the sunset, knowing they’d be no real threat from behind, while there was no way on earth Verstappen would give up on a podium, so he drove even more ‘elbows out’ than usual, helpfully for Mercedes, clonking into any car coloured red when he got the chance.
Verstappen biffs (or gets biffed by) another red car.
One gets the feeling now, that Ferrari just want this over with.
Yesterday they couldn’t even be bothered to switch their drivers positions to grab a few extra points. They have given up. The towel has been well and truly lobbed.
Even the Italian press, who tend to get a bit rabid when things are going badly for the boys of Maranello, have stopped sticking the knife in. Like the rest of us (and Hamilton himself has alluded to this) they probably cannot believe how Ferrari have fallen so far and fast since the Italian Grand Prix.
After the first ten races of the season, the Scuderia were 20 points ahead of Mercedes in the constructors standings and the Prancing Horse was cantering along nicely.
Now, that happy little horse has been replaced by an old nag ready for the knackers yard, and after seventeen races, they are now 78 points behind and continuing to trip over every fence possible.
Ferrari, in a field somewhere, earlier today.
So, the pain may finally be over for Ferrari in America, and then hopefully there won’t be too much humiliation for them in the final thrashings of the season in Mexico, Brazil and Abu Dhabi.
They can then retire quietly back home to Italy, sack a few people (as per the norm) and start planning how to take the fight to Mercedes in 2019.
That, or maybe they’d simply better start praying that new boy, Charles Leclerc, will finally be the saviour they’ve long been waiting for.
At least Ferrari are in better shape than old foes McLaren and Williams. If they were horses they’d be put down.
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Comments (2)
Nicely written. However, don't plan on a holiday in Italy anytime soon ;-)
Probably good advice there!