Spanish Grand Prix 2015: Winners and Losers from Catalunya Race
Nico Rosberg finally returned to winning ways in Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix, registering his first victory of the 2015 Formula One season.
It was a timely triumph for the German, who despite finishing on the podium in each of the previous four races had endured a testing start to the campaign. He had been unable to recreate his strong performances from last season when he came within touching distance of the world title.
After setting pole position, Rosberg had told Sky Sports of his desire for an unexciting race. That was exactly what he—not to mention the rest of us—got, with the threat from behind failing to materialise and little action throughout the field in a grand prix that revolved around tyre strategy.
Despite the performances of drivers and teams depending on their rubber, there were a handful of notable showings across the race weekend.
Here are the winners and losers from Spain.
Winner: Nico Rosberg
1 of 6
After he claimed a comfortable pole position, the Spanish Grand Prix was going to be a pivotal race in not only Nico Rosberg's season but his career as a front-running driver.
Starting at the front of the field for the first time in 2015—after seeing his team-mate record three victories in the first four grands prix—the German had what he had always craved this year: the chance to control a race.
If he made a mess of it from there and let Lewis Hamilton or Sebastian Vettel steal victory from under his nose, it would have been difficult, from a psychological point of view, for Rosberg to ever recover.
Fortunately, for his own sake, he was never going to lose the race from the moment Vettel overtook Hamilton at the start, which allowed Rosberg to build a decent early lead.
From there, it was about managing the pace and conserving the tyres, the type of race that suits him perfectly.
Such was the German's dominance that Hamilton, the famously never-give-up, relentless racer, decided against trying to pressurise his team-mate in the latter stages. That was the biggest compliment on a day when Rosberg—as he has for each of his nine grand prix wins—was in complete control.
Now just 20 points behind his Mercedes' team-mate in the drivers' standings, Rosberg is well and truly back on track.
Loser: Ferrari
2 of 6
According to Sky Sports' Pete Gill, Ferrari introduced 16 different upgrades at the Spanish Grand Prix, "including a new floor, shrink-wrapped sidepods, and tweaked bargeboards" as they attempted to close the gap to Mercedes.
But that gap, if anything, seemed to have expanded at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, where Ferrari's weekend never got off the ground.
After splitting Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in Bahrain, Sebastian Vettel was 0.8 seconds adrift of the latter's pole time in Spain, according to the official F1 website, while Kimi Raikkonen could only manage seventh after his tyres were charred by their own blankets, as he told ESPN.com's Laurence Edmondson.
It looked promising at the start when Vettel squeezed ahead of Hamilton into second, and Raikkonen, in typical style, quickly made up places to fifth, but that optimism soon disappeared.
Despite Vettel resisting Hamilton across the opening two stints, Ferrari opted against covering the reigning world champion after the British driver's second pit stop.
A strategic error? Perhaps, but it was more an admission that the team were no match for Mercedes in Spain and wouldn't prolong a battle they ultimately wouldn't win, with the German switched to a three-stop strategy en route to a distant third.
Like in Bahrain, Raikkonen adopted an alternative strategy and took the hard-compound tyres for the middle stint, but he was unable to pass Williams' Valtteri Bottas for fourth at the end.
With Vettel finishing 43 seconds behind Rosberg, as per the official F1 website, the Prancing Horse was put firmly in its place in Spain.
Winner: Valtteri Bottas
3 of 6
In a week when rumours surrounding Valtteri Bottas' potential move to Ferrari intensified, according to Motorsport.com, it was fitting that the youngster managed to keep Kimi Raikkonen, the man he would most likely to replace at the Prancing Horse, at bay in the Spanish GP.
A second fourth-place finish in as many races was a just reward for another fine performance by the Williams driver.
Just 0.2 seconds slower than Sebastian Vettel in qualifying, according to the official Formula One website, Bottas was a lingering threat to the Ferraris in the race, in which he switched from a three- to a two-stop strategy, including a strong 27-lap middle stint on the medium tyres.
Despite Raikkonen using the undercut technique and the theoretically faster medium rubber for the final stint, as well as benefitting from DRS, Bottas—as he did against Hamilton in Germany last year and Vettel in Bahrain—defended admirably, remaining unruffled and perfecting his corner exits as he held onto fourth.
After a difficult start to the season that saw him miss the Australian GP through injury, Bottas is now producing the kind of performances that allowed the Finn to take six podiums in 2014.
.jpg?w=256 "Colts Jaguars Football")
Loser: Pastor Maldonado
4 of 6
Ahead of the race weekend, we explained how Pastor Maldonado needed a big result in the Spanish Grand Prix to kick-start his season.
And it all looked so promising when the Venezuelan, who failed to score a point in the first four races of 2015, made his way up to seventh in the opening stages.
But by that point, the damage had already been done.
Maldonado's race took a turn for the worst on Lap 4 when his Lotus team-mate, Romain Grosjean, went off track at Turns 1 and 2.
With Grosjean still getting back up to speed, Maldonado overtook the Frenchman around the outside of Turn 3, the long right-hander, but misjudged the gap between the cars. As a result, the pair brushed wheels, with the energy of the collision transmitted to Maldonado's rear wing.
As the team's head of track-side operations, Alan Permane, told Autosport's Ben Anderson and Matt Beer, the FIA ordered Lotus to remove the broken part at Maldonado's first pit stop, which cost the Venezuelan more than 30 seconds. That dropped him to 18th and left him with the strange-looking rear wing shown above.
Faced with yet another pointless race, Lotus called Maldonado to the garage on Lap 45, which means he has now retired from four of the five races this season.
Winner: Carlos Sainz
5 of 6
Alongside the most exciting youngster in a generation in the shape of Max Verstappen, life could have been difficult for Carlos Sainz at Toro Rosso this season.
While Verstappen gained many plaudits across the opening four grands prix of the season for his overtaking prowess and, of course, his run to sixth on the grid in Malaysia, Sainz fared relatively well against the 17-year-old in the flyaway races.
He finally had his own day in the sun in front of his home crowd this weekend.
Sainz was undoubtedly the standout performer in qualifying, hauling the STR10 to fifth, 0.1 seconds ahead of Verstappen, according to the official F1 website.
Given the team's general performance deficit to their rivals, Sainz and Verstappen were bound to fall back to some extent, with the Spaniard immediately losing places after a sluggish start.
But Sainz utilised a two-stop strategy—spending 28 laps on the hard tyres in the second stint before switching to mediums on Lap 42—to make a late charge. He overtook Verstappen, who remained on hards for the final stint, and Red Bull's Daniil Kvyat in quick succession.
The 20-year-old's pass on Kvyat was subject to a stewards' investigation after Sainz ran off track to the complete the move, but the Spaniard was rightly allowed to keep ninth place, securing his first points since the Malaysian GP.
On a weekend when Fernando Alonso's career sunk to a new low, it seems Spain has a new home hero in Sainz.
Loser: McLaren
6 of 6
The Spanish Grand Prix had long been targeted as the race where McLaren's 2015 season would really begin.
Indeed, the new graphite livery introduced for the race was almost symbolic of the team's attempt to cleanse from their memory the opening four races of the season, in which Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button failed to score a point.
But any performance gains made in the three weeks since the Bahrain Grand Prix were unapparent, despite both cars reaching Q2 for the first time this season.
The Honda-powered MP4-30, in fact, looked more like a deathtrap than a state-of-the-art race car in Spain.
A brake failure on Alonso's car, caused by a visor tear-off being caught in the rear-right brake duct, according to the team's official website, led to the two-time world champion retiring after completely missing his pit box, which forced his front jackman to take avoiding action.
Button, meanwhile, described the first 30 laps of his race as "the scariest of my life" to Motorsport.com's Pablo Elizalde after struggling with intense wheelspin, which meant the 2009 world champion could only finish 16th ahead of the Manor Marussia cars.
After a weekend that promised so much but delivered so very little, it is unclear just what, if anything, McLaren can salvage from 2015. Button told Elizalde, "After today, I don't think I expect points at all this year."
You suspect he was only half-joking.
.jpg?w=480 "Colts Jaguars Football")
