Monaco Grand Prix 2016: Winners and Losers from Monte Carlo Race
Lewis Hamilton claimed his first victory of the 2016 Formula One season in Sunday's Monaco Grand Prix.
After an unfortunate start to the campaign, the three-time world champion suffered yet more reliability issues in qualifying and was forced to settle for third on the grid as Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo secured the first pole position of his career.
But with a helping hand from the Mercedes pit wall and team-mate Nico Rosberg, who endured his least convincing race of the season in changeable conditions, Hamilton was able to take advantage of Ricciardo's slow pit stop and secure his first win since last October.
Hamilton and Ricciardo were joined on the podium by Sergio Perez, who made up for Force India's slow start to 2016 by beating Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel to third place.
On a day Fernando Alonso claimed another points finish for McLaren-Honda, Kimi Raikkonen became his own worst enemy and Renault's Jolyon Palmer and Kevin Magnussen found themselves involved in silly accidents, here are the main winners and losers from Monte Carlo.
Winner: Lewis Hamilton
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The night, as they say, is darkest just before the dawn.
"I'm just trying to keep myself together," Lewis Hamilton told Sky Sports' Pete Gill after suffering his latest reliability glitch in qualifying, when a fuel-pressure issue meant he would start no higher than third at a circuit where pole position is crucial.
Following his poor starts in Australia and Bahrain, his technical problems in China and Russia and his first-lap crash with Nico Rosberg in Spain, it felt like the three-time world champion's start to 2016 couldn't get any worse.
But as the dark clouds formed over the most challenging circuit of them all on Sunday morning, it felt like a day for redemption. A day for heroes.
A day for Lewis.
Hamilton's only previous victory on the streets of Monaco had also occurred on an afternoon he started from third in the wet. But while this perhaps lacked the sheer drama of the 2008 race, it was far more important in the context of his season.
Despite occasionally struggling in changeable conditions in recent years, Hamilton was quick from the start and his pace was such that even his main championship rival, Nico Rosberg, felt compelled to move out of his way early on.
Mercedes' gamble in extending his first stint on extreme-wet tyres, as almost every other driver switched to intermediates, was the sign of a team operating at their best. And Daniel Ricciardo's slow stop on Lap 32 gifted Hamilton the all-important track position.
Despite his tyres being a step softer than the Red Bull's, Hamilton still found himself under attack from Ricciardo. It was his ability to defend while managing his rubber over a 47-lap stint that allowed him to claim one of the most impressive victories of his career.
Now just 24 points adrift of Rosberg with 15 rounds remaining, his start to the season doesn't seem quite so dreadful after all.
Loser: Red Bull
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Perhaps the most impressive aspect about Red Bull during their 31-race winless run between Belgium 2014 and Spain 2016 was that they never allowed their standards to drop.
Although they had tumbled from race-winning contention through no fault of their own, the team continued to extract the absolute maximum from each grand prix, operating as stylishly and effectively as they did throughout their four consecutive title triumphs with Sebastian Vettel.
So much so, in fact, that it was thought that when Red Bull did eventually rise again, they would ease to victories as if they'd never been away from the top step of the podium.
We are now two races into the Red Bull renaissance, however, and twice they have made rather serious and uncharacteristic operational errors.
Only the brilliance of Max Verstappen rescued them from regretting the decision to switch Daniel Ricciardo to a three-stop strategy in the Spanish GP. With the boy wonder Verstappen crashing left, right and centre in the most difficult weekend of his career to date, Ricciardo was again hindered by his own team in Monaco.
The standout performer of the weekend—and, for that matter, the entire 2016 season—the Australian was called to the pits on Lap 32 only to find there were no tyres waiting for him when he arrived.
The time his crew wasted in carrying fresh supersofts to the No. 3 car—the result of a "misunderstanding" between the pit wall and mechanics, as Helmut Marko told Sky Sports' Matt Morlidge—was the time Lewis Hamilton required to maintain his lead, having stopped for ultrasofts the previous lap.
Ricciardo channelled his frustration to hound Hamilton almost all the way to the chequered flag, but at a place where track position is key, he was forced to settle for "the sad story" of second place, as he told the team's official website.
It was another race where Red Bull, once so reliable, let him down badly.
Winner: Sergio Perez
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Force India introduced a major upgrade package at the Spanish GP, but the improvements appeared to have no real effect on the team's place in the pecking order as Sergio Perez and Nico Hulkenberg took their customary positions on the fringes of the top 10 in qualifying.
Yet with the post-race test allowing the team to gain a greater understanding of the new parts, and with the high-downforce requirements of Monaco favouring teams who run with plenty of rake, this weekend offered Force India a better indication of where they stand.
After the disappointment of qualifying 0.176 seconds and three places behind his team-mate, eighth-placed Perez told the team's official website of the importance of reacting "quickly" and making "the right calls" in a race as "unpredictable" as Monaco.
And not for the first time in his F1 career, that was exactly what he did.
The Mexican's race effectively revolved around two well-timed tyre changes, the first of which—from extreme wets to intermediates on Lap 21—allowed him to jump Hulkenberg, Carlos Sainz Jr. and, crucially, Sebastian Vettel.
After just nine laps on inters, Perez returned to the pits to receive a set of soft-compound rubber on Lap 30, making his stop a lap earlier than Vettel and Nico Rosberg, who also lost a place to the Ferrari driver for good measure.
With the hardest available tyre compound at his disposal, Perez was permitted to push harder than those on the less durable supersoft and ultrasoft rubber. His pace was so brisk on the yellow-striped tyres that he seemed to be working his way into contention for the win at one stage.
Lewis Hamilton and Daniel Ricciardo, however, were just out of reach, with Perez absorbing late pressure from Vettel to secure his third top-three finish in as many years for a team who had just one podium to their name prior to his arrival in 2014.
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Loser: Nico Rosberg
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While a three-time world champion secured one of the most beautifully executed victories of his career, the current championship leader was nowhere to be seen and fortunate to avoid falling a lap behind.
As he claimed win after win in the first four races of 2016, there was a sense that Nico Rosberg had finally made something of a psychological breakthrough, that after two years of living in Lewis Hamilton's shadow he had decided to behave a little more selfishly in an effort to win the world championship.
His aggressive defensive manoeuvre on the opening lap of the Spanish GP offered more evidence of his new approach, yet the Rosberg we saw in Monaco was as submissive and weak as the driver who was constantly outclassed by his team-mate in 2015.
Of course, a race in changeable conditions on the streets of Monte Carlo carried obvious dangers to the man nursing a 43-point lead in the championship.
But Rosberg—with "no confidence" on the extreme-wet tyres, as he told Motorsport.com's Charles Bradley—was alarmingly defensive from the moment the race began, making no attempt to pressurise Daniel Ricciardo in the early stages.
His decision to gift second position to Hamilton—which he described as a "painful but quite simple" act of teamwork, per Bradley—was embarrassing for a driver fighting for the title, especially when you consider how horrified Hamilton was when asked to move aside for his team-mate at Hungary in 2014.
From the moment he released Hamilton to pursue Ricciardo, damage limitation was the aim of the game, yet Rosberg's lack of ambition on a day so many others sensed opportunity left him extremely vulnerable.
A slow second pit stop effectively dropped him out of podium contention, and he became increasingly desperate when stuck behind Fernando Alonso. Rosberg misjudged a pass at the Nouvelle chicane before the late rain shower saw him lose sixth place to Nico Hulkenberg on the approach to the finish line.
On a day Hamilton returned to winning ways and Rosberg's seemingly healthy points advantage was suddenly sliced to 24, there is an inescapable feeling that normal service has finally resumed at Mercedes.
Winner: Fernando Alonso
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As racing director Eric Boullier told Autosport's Ben Anderson and Ian Parkes in the buildup to the weekend, McLaren-Honda were genuinely confident of finishing as high as sixth at the Monaco Grand Prix.
When Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button qualified 10th and 13th respectively on Saturday—behind both Force Indias and Toro Rossos—it felt as though Boullier had been lost in translation and instead meant McLaren would be the sixth-best team at the principality.
It's not the first time in recent history the team—so careful to manage expectations in the early months of this season—had been guilty of overstating their own competitiveness despite making the third segment of qualifying for the second weekend in succession.
However, Alonso's drive from the midfield to fifth place allowed the team to exceed their original target and equal the best result of McLaren's latest Honda-powered era.
The two-time world champion was among the first drivers in the top 10 to swap his extreme-wet tyres for a set of intermediates. He made the change early on Lap 14 and spent 18 laps on the green-striped rubber before making his final stop for supersofts on Lap 32.
McLaren's aggressive strategy allowed Alonso to make up places and head a train of faster cars containing Nico Rosberg, Nico Hulkenberg and Carlos Sainz Jr., with Button a little further back in ninth.
Per Motorsport.com's Pablo Elizalde, Alonso later warned against drawing "many conclusions" from the race, explaining how the result had masked the team's struggles for pace throughout the weekend.
But a fourth points finish in six races has maintained the momentum at McLaren, who have overtaken Haas for seventh place in the constructors' standings and now sit just six points behind Toro Rosso and a further seven adrift of fifth-placed Force India.
Loser: Kimi Raikkonen
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It was at last year's Monaco Grand Prix when the whispers surrounding Kimi Raikkonen's future at Ferrari began to grow louder.
A clip of the outside wall at Sainte Devote in the final practice session sparked a run of three races when the 2007 world champion made a series of elementary errors, to the point where Raikkonen started to resemble a dead man walking.
But he has the unflinching support of Sebastian Vettel, who told Italian publication Gazzetta dello Sport (h/t Jonathan Noble of Motorsport.com) he wants his team-mate to be retained for 2017. That coupled with his three podium finishes in the opening five races of 2016 should ensure Raikkonen's place in F1 won't be subjected to the same scrutiny this year.
Yet his performance in Monaco was as pitiful as any Raikkonen produced during his mid-2015 meltdown.
A five-place grid penalty due to a gearbox change hardly helped him gather momentum ahead of qualifying, but Raikkonen was forced to settle for sixth after Force India's Nico Hulkenberg squeezed between the Ferraris.
The safety car start shielded him from the shenanigans that usually come with starting in the midfield at Monte Carlo, and on a drying track, the key was surely to keep things neat and tidy until the time came to attack on slick tyres.
Yet Raikkonen—unbelievably for a man of his experience—orchestrated his own downfall in those early laps by sliding into the barrier at the slowest corner on the calendar and dislodging his front wing, which tucked underneath his car.
Having obstructed Felipe Massa and Romain Grosjean at Portier, Raikkonen soldiered on through the tunnel like a poor man's Gilles Villeneuve before admitting defeat and hiding behind the wall on the short straight toward Tabac to suffer a second retirement of the season.
With Sergio Perez, a former member of Ferrari's junior-driver scheme, beating Vettel to third in Monaco, it is worth wondering whether the Prancing Horse should consider consigning Raikkonen to retirement for good.
Loser: Renault
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Formula One folk don't tend to forget weekends like this in a hurry.
In the same way Romain Grosjean struggled to repair his reputation after causing a multi-car crash at Spa 2012 and Daniil Kvyat may find it difficult to rid himself of the shame of Russia 2016, the events of the Monaco Grand Prix will haunt Jolyon Palmer for some time to come.
In his first appearance at the principality since his title-winning GP2 campaign in 2014, the British driver never looked remotely comfortable on the tight and twisty streets, crashing on each of the three days of on-track action.
A tap of the barrier at Tabac on Thursday morning compromised the rest of his practice running. Then a high-speed spin at the swimming pool section on Saturday damaged both his R.S.16 and confidence ahead of qualifying, when he was eliminated from Q1 for the fifth race in succession.
When the safety car start finally ended on Lap 8, Palmer's race lasted a matter of metres before he lost control on the wet white lines of a zebra crossing and clattered the outside wall of the pit straight, sliding into the Sainte Devote crash barrier to bring the most humiliating of weekends to a premature end.
As Palmer sailed toward retirement, team-mate Kevin Magnussen was replacing his extreme-wet tyres with intermediates as Renault attempted to make up for the vices of their car with a little inventive thinking.
Yet Magnussen also found himself embroiled in avoidable incidents, with the Dane assaulted by Daniil Kvyat at La Rascasse and prodding his front wing against the barrier at Mirabeau shortly before his retirement on Lap 36.
As Magnussen told the team's official website, Monaco was a missed opportunity for Renault, who "were very optimistic for the race."
But for Palmer, already with his place at the team under threat, this could mark the beginning of the end.
All timing and tyre data sourced from the official F1 website, the FOM television feed and Pirelli Motorsport's infographic on Twitter.
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