Who was really to blame for the Ricciardo vs Verstappen Red Bull crash?
It was the defining moment of the Azerbaijan GP, but who was most at fault?
The Azerbaijan Grand Prix proved to be the third race in a row which delivered a dramatic couple of hours of Formula 1 action.
The high speeds, high winds and the wall-lined track always had the potential for plenty of chaos and excitement and it didn’t fail to deliver. The Ferrari versus Mercedes battle is well and truly on for the World Championship and it’s a real shame that Bottas’ race ended with that puncture so close to the end because we would have otherwise left here with the top three drivers covered by just three points.
On Friday Ferrari looked to be in better shape than Mercedes and in fact even the Red Bulls looked like they were faster than the silver cars on the race runs. The track temperature was high though - up in the thirties - and a bit like in Bahrain, I think Mercedes struggled to get that balance right between the front and the rear axles, where they can’t get the fronts to work for them or they overheat the rear tyres. On a green track on Friday, the Mercedes drivers can’t lean on the front tyres and load them up how they would like, which exacerbates the problem I think because as the weekend progresses and the track gets grippier, they get more competitive.
Who was really to blame for that Red Bull crash?
There was so much action and so many stories from Sunday’s Grand Prix, but unquestionably the one that everyone’s talking about is the incident between the two Red Bull drivers.
Up and down the paddock, everyone had an opinion – Niki Lauda thought it was 70 per cent Max’s fault, Helmut Marko and Christian Horner predictably thought it was a 50 / 50, and there were others who believed that it was more Daniel’s fault as ultimately he was the car behind who drove into the car in front, a bit like when blame is apportioned in accidents on public roads.
Here’s my view on it: I think it was a 50 / 50.
Both drivers were racing harder than they really should have been doing all afternoon. They’re very lucky that Christian and Helmut allow them to race wheel to wheel without team orders but whenever you’re racing against your team-mate, you’ve got to leave a bit more margin and show a bit more respect - even if it’s not for the other driver, then at least for the 1000 people who have built these great cars that allow you to do battle.
I don’t believe Max treats his wheel to wheel racing with his team-mate any differently to racing anyone else on the track. His moving around in the braking zone and on the straights has been a discussion point in the past and he’s got a bit of a reputation for that. This is a very tricky thing for drivers behind because it makes it unpredictable and hard to judge which side they need to go to get the move done.
Even prior to their accident, his lunge at turn 2 and the wheel banging at turn 1 were both moves that really were on the edge and I’m not sure they would have got away without crashing in either of those instances if Daniel wasn’t more careful.
However, in fairness to Max, he’s not doing anything illegal, just flirting with the edge of the regulations in a way that the great drivers like Senna and Schumacher before him did.
From Daniel’s side, I think that he was willing to give Max the benefit of some extra racing room and respect earlier in the race. However after he finally did the hard work of getting past Max, he pitted a lap earlier and the subsequent challenge of getting the tyres up to temperature on the out lap meant that he ended up behind the Dutchman again.
Even if it’s completely untrue and irrational, psychologically, as a driver in the heat of battle in the race, your first thought at that point is “the team have messed this up for me and favoured my team-mate”. I’m sure that he was a frustrated man from that point onwards.
Daniel is a smart guy and I’m sure looking back at the videos he’ll realise that he would have been better off waiting a few laps and picking a better moment to pass. The DRS was proving to be extremely powerful and on the lap they crashed, Daniel came across the start finish line 27 kmh faster than Max, which is a massive speed difference. He was quite a long way back when they got onto the straight and really, knowing that Max doesn’t give up places easily, a bit of patience would have gone a long way.
The result was both Red Bulls out of the race (Pic: Sutton)
The other thing that perhaps Daniel will regret when he sees the video replay was his decision to go down the inside. I looked at the on board replay frame by frame with a couple of other racing drivers in the paddock afterwards and at the point where he’s chosen to go down the inside, all of us looked at it and thought, “hmm, not sure I would have really thought about that”.
Daniel’s a brilliant overtaker, arguably the best on the grid, but sometimes, when he “sends it in” (to use his words), he relies on the guy he’s overtaking to give him the space. With Bottas in China, he got that. With Max, he didn’t.
The finale
This of course set us up for a brilliant finale and Vettel’s overambitious lunge on Bottas on the re-start gave Mercedes the advantage they needed.
Like the entire paddock, I felt very sorry for Bottas on Sunday as he was desperately unlucky to run over that tiny piece of debris which caused his puncture. He wasn’t as strong in Baku as he was in China, qualifying a couple of tenths behind Lewis, but he was driving to a completely different strategy to Hamilton and I actually think that even without the late safety car, he would have ended up ahead of Hamilton.
Lewis was owed a win for Melbourne and his body language and attitude after the race was clearly of someone who knew he had been lucky to win. Vettel should have won, Bottas could have won but the reigning World Champion was there to capitalise and took the lead of this year’s title race.
Winners and losers
I’ve got to mention a couple of other big winners and disappointments from the weekend.
Sergio Perez and Force India are always strong in Baku and once again he proved how he’s one of the most opportunistic drivers out there – whenever there’s low hanging fruit and the odd chance of a podium when the top 3 teams falter, Perez seems to be at the head of the queue to capitalise.
Another podium for Sergio Perez (Pic: Sutton)
This is the exact opposite of Nico Hulkenberg who has been driving superbly for the past 18 months at Renault, but yet again, when there was the chance of a strong result, he ended up missing out with a very uncharacteristic error.
Charles Leclerc and Sauber were the other big winners of the weekend. The young Monagasque rookie came into F1 with a big reputation and high expectation and after a couple of mistakes early this season, he delivered a superb performance. This was genuine pace from Leclerc and the team – he got ahead of people like Stroll and Alonso and held his own.
F1 - boring?
I find it extraordinary that I still get comments from people saying “F1 is boring now, I’ve stopped watching”. That really winds me up, to be honest.
Of course you’ll still get the odd dull race but if they take their rose tinted glasses off and actually think about the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s, we had plenty of dull races then too!
We should always look at the season to see the stories build and intrigue that surrounds the world championship battle that takes shape over a 10 month period.
Think of those Schumacher vs Hakkinen battles or the Prost versus Senna years? There were some painfully dull races where the field was totally spread out, but I think the world has changed and in the past people had more patience to let the stories build than they have now, when we live in this age of wanting instant entertainment.
Plenty of the Schumacher vs Hakkinen races were not thrillers (Pic: Sutton)
On to Barcelona next and I’m very interested to see what upgrades and updates the teams bring to the first European race of the season. I’ve said all along that the first four races need to be judged as a collective, as the individual tracks are too dissimilar to draw real conclusions on.
The conclusions at the moment seem to be that Ferrari and Mercedes are very evenly matched, Ferrari have a car that’s got a wider working range for the tyres, Red Bull are in the hunt on the Sundays, the midfield battle between Renault, Haas and Force India is super tight while McLaren have a lot of ground to catch up with Renault, let alone Red Bull in qualifying although Alonso’s brilliance on a Sunday gets them out of jail.
All in all a brilliant start to the season – roll on Spain!
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Comments (18)
I'm with Lauda on this one. Max moved twice, and at least once in the braking zone, both of which are against the regulations. Daniel on the other hand should've expected that Max wouldn't be compliant. So 70:30 seems a fair ratio to allocate blame.
Comments everywhere are full of partisan support for whichever driver the commentor likes, and the Team politically calling it 50/50. It is a fact captured on video that Max moved twice, and has done so a few times before this incident. The rules say you can only move once, so he should receive the lion's share of the blame. I am sure that Ricciardo was getting frustrated and was approaching this aggressively, but at those speeds you have to trust the other driver, and perhaps more so your team mate, to behave respectfully and within the rules.
Only one of his modes was in the breakingzone. Het did nothing illegal.
Moving twice to defend is against regs, whether in the braking zone or not. Moving in the braking zone (which he did once) is against regs full stop.
Max holds drivers to ransom with his style. Its brinksmanship nothing more. Daniel called his bluff. Someone had to do it.
Couldn't agree more
Here's a novel idea, maybe there was nothing wrong with what happened, maybe this is just a result when 2 aggressive top racers race, maybe we need to accept it and move on, shunts happen. At the end of the day we want racers to race. You have 2 very aggressive racers going flat out against each other fighting for position, a shunt is one possible outcome, why is that a shock? Isn't that we want from racing? Don't we want our racers to be aggressive and battling on the grid? Don't we call these guys "gladiators"? Stop the blaming, stop the excessive analyzing and trying to "fix" incidents like these and accept them as part of the sport because that's what it is. That's why they call it a "racing incident" it happens. The worst thing we can do is to put any restraints on 2 spectacular racers, especially when they race each other. We live too much in a fix-it culture assuming something is wrong when this happens. I say let them fight!
I'm with Niki Lauda on this one. Max's shimmy right then back left made Ricciardo go the left and by then you're commited at 200mph+ as the braking zone begins.