MOTORSPORT: All in front of Ricciardo at Monza

The Italian Grand Prix is the most historic of all in the Formula One World Championship. Monza, on the northern outskirts of Milan, was part of the first world championship in 1950. Having missed only 1980 (when Imola, down the road from the Ferrari factory at Maranello) was the venue – Sunday’s race will be the 65th Italian GP there.

For many years Italy had two F1 races, with Imola hosting the other – which was called the San Marino GP, even though it was not in the little republic of San Marino.

Imola lost its place on the calendar almost a decade ago, and F1 commercial tsar Bernie Ecclestone is now putting his renowned financial squeeze on the Autodromo Nazionale at Monza to keep its race beyond next year.

Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi will have a message for Ecclestone this weekend: “Hands off Monza!”

But Bernie will get his money and the event will go on.

Only one thing can come near a Ferrari victory for the passionate Italian F1 fans known as The Tifosi – and that would be a win by an Italian driver.

Only three of the 83 Italian drivers to have started their home race have won – Nino Farina in an Alfa-Romeo in 1950, Alberto Ascari in Ferraris in 1951 and ’52 and most recently Ludovico Scarfiotti in 1966, again in a Ferrari.

The marque that so famously carries the black prancing horse badge has won its home race 18 times – to McLaren’s 10, Williams’ six and Lotus’ five. That was the real Lotus of Colin Chapman, not the broke outfit about to be reclaimed by Renault.

Mario Andretti won at Monza in a Lotus in 1977 but, while he was born in Italy, he is American.

There has been no Italian driver in F1 for some years now, so Australian Daniel Ricciardo, who is of Sicilian origin, is the next best thing.

But this weekend is as good as over for Ricciardo before it starts. Red Bull Racing (RBR) will fit the sixth Renault power units of the season in the RB11s of Ricciardo and his Russian teammate, Daniil Kyvat, which automatically incurs 10-place grid penalties for them.

That could put them right at the back of the field, as just qualifying among the top 10 or 12 times will be even harder than usual.

The 5.793km Monza is the fastest circuit in the championship (average lap speeds can be close to 260kmh, which is to Renault’s disadvantage) and Mercedes, which has dominated the era of V6 hybrids, and Ferrari, the only team to have beaten the German brand this season, have upgrades to their power units.

Under the complicated token system for engine modifications, Mercedes has used all its options to improve what already is the benchmark power unit, while Ferrari has used some.

Only the Mercedes factory team will use the latest incarnation of the power unit with customer teams Williams, Force India and Lotus having to wait a while.

Honda has been a huge disappointment in its return to F1 this year with McLaren, but its F1 project chief Yasuhira Arai boldly claimed this week that its unit was now only 40-50hp down on Mercedes, 30hp behind Ferrari and at least 25hp up on Renault.

RBR has opted to take its medicine with the grid penalties at Monza knowing that its chances are much better on Singapore’s street circuit in a fortnight.

“We’ve decided to take it tactically at Monza because it’s a track where you are flat out for 75 per cent of it, so of course it’s not going to be our strongest circuit of the year,” RBR team principal Christian Horner said.

Red Bull Racing ‘more on top of it now’
Ricciardo remains as positive as he can be in light of neither RB11 having led a single lap this season after he won three GPs in last year’s RB10.

“The last couple of races have been our strongest… Budapest [in Hungary, where both RBR drivers were on the podium] and Spa [in Belgium, a high-speed circuit where Ricciardo started fifth but retired with a mechanical failure while Kyvat was finished fourth] have gone well for us,” Ricciardo said.

“I think in terms of understanding the car we're much more on top of it now than we were earlier in the season. I think the chassis is back to a really strong level. [But] Monza's not obviously a circuit that suits us particularly.

“We've got the penalties as well, so you know that's obviously a strategic thing as well – take the penalty here rather than in Singapore, where we expect to be very competitive,” the Aussie stated.

“All year we have updates, but I'd say since Silverstone [the British GP in early July] it's really come on strong… We seem to be in the [set-up] window a lot easier now with getting the car there, so I'm definitely a lot happier with where the chassis is now.

“We're always going to be somewhat down for the rest of the season. That's why we look at Singapore and some of the circuits which are obviously a lot less power-dependent, a lot more chassis, and we look at those as potential podiums for us,” he commented.

Vettel blasted the blow-out in his right-rear Pirelli as extremely dangerous and unacceptable, although Ferrari had gambled on a long stint after just one pitstop at Spa – while every other driver made at least two.

Vettel and Ferrari’s anger stemmed from having been given indications the tyre could last 40 laps, yet it blew on the 28th.

The governing Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) and Bernie Ecclestone’s Formula One Management (FOM) have stood strongly behind Pirelli, which has said there were 65 cuts to tyres during the Belgian GP weekend and called for greater efforts to keep circuits clean of debris.

Drivers remain concerned, but Vettel has said that – after intense discussions with Pirelli – “things are going the right way”.

Mark Webber, who was Vettel’s teammate for several years at RBR and now races a Porsche sports car in the World Endurance Championship, said Vettel had been “100 per cent right’ in his criticism.

“A blow-out must not be the penalty for using a tyre for too long,” Webber told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport.

“You should be slow [with worn tyres], fair enough, but as a driver you need to be confident that the tyre is going to hold together… Safety is the number one thing for the FIA… You can’t turn a blind eye to something as fundamental as the tyres.”

For Monza this weekend Pirelli has ordered that tyre pressures should increase by 4psi (pounds per square inch) to 22psi at the front and 3psi to 21 at the rear.

Head protection in open-top single-seater F1 and Indy cars also is a talking point following Wilson’s death a day after flying debris hit his helmet at Pocono, Pennsylvania – just weeks after Frenchman Jules Bianchi finally succumbed to head injuries from when his Marussia car hit a recovery crane in the wet Japanese GP last October.

Britain’s 2009 world champion Jenson Button (who raced with Wilson as a junior and also with Dan Wheldon, another Brit to die in an horrific IndyCar crash four years ago) said he had changed his mind about covering the cockpits of single-seater racing cars.

“I was one of the drivers who [for so long] said, ‘This is open-cockpit racing, it should stay as open-cockpit racing’. But I think we’ve all had enough now and it’s time to something serious about it,” Button said.

“You’ve got to get a canopy on the car of some sort, because we can’t have this happening as much as it has over the last few years… It just shouldn’t happen at this time in motorsport. It’s not the 1970s – we should know better.”

German Nico Hulkenberg, who won the Le Mans 24-Hour in an enclosed Porsche sports car in June and races for Force India in F1, is against covering F1 cockpits, while Britain’s reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton is undecided but said there were “different mechanisms” that could be studied.

The FIA is to investigate two concepts this month – one a ‘halo’ designed within Mercedes, the other a series of ‘fins’ around the cockpit, arranged at angles to preserve vision while deflecting objects.

The FIA already has ruled out a jet fighter-type canopy like that on top fuel dragsters in America.