MOTORSPORT: Another blow for Ricciardo

Daniel Ricciardo's Formula One season is going up in smoke.

Although he has scored world championship points in all four races so far, a third Renault engine in Ricciardo's Red Bull RB11 car blew within sight of the chequered flag in the Bahrain Grand Prix early today.

He had enough momentum to still cross the finish line in sixth place, but the next power unit failure for the 25-year-old West Australian could bring him a 10-place grid penalty.

There is a proposal to change the season's rules to allow drivers five engines before incurring that penalty – but it won't be approved before the first of the European GPs in Barcelona on May 8-10.

F1 teams and the sport's commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone discussed future power units in Bahrain. Ecclestone wants them to have 1000-horsepower, make a more traditional F1 sound and has argued for a return to V8s. Mercedes team chief Toto Wolff says the manufacturers involved in the sport are adamant that they remain V6 hybrids. They agree that costs need to be reduced, but making that happen is another thing.

Merc driver Lewis Hamilton is cruising towards a third world title, and his second in a row, after his third win in four GPs this season.

Hamilton now heads teammate Nico Rosberg by 27 points, although both had brake problems at the end – costing Rosberg second place to Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen.

Ferrari is the only serious challenger to Mercedes, Sebastian Vettel having won in Malaysia three weeks ago while Raikkonen's podium today was his first since returning to the Italian team last year.

'The Iceman' also set the fastest lap of the race for the 41st time in his career, equalling Alain Prost on that table and leaving him equal second only to Michael Schumacher.

The sandy conditions in Bahrain created problems for several drivers, especially Vettel, who had qualified on the front row alongside Hamilton but finished only fifth – behind the Williams-Mercedes of Valterri Bottas.

A giant fireworks display began as Hamilton crossed the finish line and Red Bull team principal Christian Horner joked that Ricciardo's engine felt it need to join the pyrotechnics.

"A fairly spectacular finish, it [the Renault power unit] failed 200 metres before the line, but we had enough momentum to cross the line," Horner said.

"I think that engine will be a coffee table in the future."

The eternally-optimistic Ricciardo said the race had gone "as well as it could".

"I drove well to finish sixth," he said.

"The chassis is working better and through the corners we are more or less there.

"We'll move on to Europe and see if we can get further up the grid and keep improving. The weekend went pretty smooth for me until the end of the race.

"I don't know what happened, but the team will have a look at it."

A three-time GP winner last season, Ricciardo is sitting seventh in the championship this season. Horner, who flew to Paris after the previous weekend's Chinese GP to discuss the under-performance and unreliability of the team's power units with Renault Sport chairman Jerome Stoll, said: "We have had problems in every race so far, but it has to turn.

"Renault can't afford for this situation to continue and they are acutely aware of that.

"We are definitely making progress with the car. This is probably our most competitive weekend.

"The problem is we are running the car in such a compromised state that we are not in an optimum window with it.

"Our top speeds are down, then you end up trimming [the] wing to try to get somewhere sensible.

"Then that hampers things like tyre warm-up and downforce.

"We are not in a window with the car where we want to be, but made quite significant progress."

Hamilton's victory was the 36th of his F1 career, while the once-mighty McLaren team he left to join Mercedes is still languishing with its new Honda power unit.

Jenson Button's McLaren did not even start the Bahrain race after a troubled weekend with its energy recovery system while teammate Fernando Alonso finished 11th, albeit within 4 seconds of the team's first point of the season.

Ricciardo's teammate, Russian Daniil Kyvat, was pleased to pick up a couple of points with ninth place, albeit a lap down, after his lowly start.

Kyvat finished behind the Mercedes-engined cars of Frenchman Romain Grosjean (Lotus) and Mexican Sergio Perez (Force India) but ahead of Felipe Massa in the second Williams, also Merc-powered.

The energy drinks company has made clear it doesn't want to fund an engine program itself.

An alternative, it seems, would be for Audi – which has dominated Le Mans sports car racing this century, most recently with hybrid power units – to replace Renault as the engine supplier to the team that won four consecutive world titles in 2010-2013.

The BBC's Andrew Benson reported at the weekend that Audi has done a feasibility study on entering F1, but there were fresh suggestions throughout the weekend that the German company would not contemplate doing that while Bernie Ecclestone remains at the sport's helm – because of the VW-Audi board's chairman Ferdinand Piech's antipathy for Ecclestone.

Ecclestone said that if he was the impediment to the company coming into F1 that he would quit to enable it.

"I would be happy to step down if it brought those people in," he said.

Contrary to his previous insistence that F1 ought to return to naturally-aspirated V8 engines, Ecclestone agreed at the weekend that the V6 hybrids ought to be retained – if the cost of building them and supplying them to customer teams could be made reasonable.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff insisted that the four companies supplying power units were adamant that the sport continue with the hybrids and that they could be made more exciting.

"I think all engine manufacturers are pretty clear that the current engine architecture with the hybrid component needs to stay in place," Wolff said.

"This is the direction we have had and this is, at least at the moment, the current status between Ferrari, Renault, Honda and Mercedes.

"The discussion about a 1000-horsepower engine has been around quite a while, and I appreciate very well that it needs to be a spectacular formula – and if that's the way forward then we should continue to work on it.

"I think in terms of the 2017 rules, those engines between all manufacturers will have north of 900 horsepower.

"Then it's a question [of] what do you want to market? Does it make a big difference between having 950 horsepower and 1000 horsepower?

"I think there are pretty easy ways to increase the horsepower – this is increasing fuel flow.

"If you want to increase the fuel flow by 10kg or 20kg etc an hour then you are going to have more than 1000 horsepower, but then you need to redesign crucial components of the engine, you need to make them more reliable – and that again involves a lot of development costs.

"I think we all understand we want a spectacular formula, not only on the chassis side but also the power unit side, and what is being discussed at the moment is about how to achieve that.

"Clearly increasing the fuel flow means redesigning crucial and major bits and pieces of the engine. So we need to know earlier than later."

Ecclestone said he would be happy for the V6 hybrids to be retained if they could be made more powerful but cheaper – although he seemed to doubt the latter would happen.

"We have got past sticking plasters and we need an operation," Ecclestone said.

"We need to make the cars more difficult to drive.

"If it's going to be the current engine, upgraded to 1000hp, good.

"Sure, absolutely. At what price? The two things that have to happen: whoever supplies engines to teams has to supply the same engine they currently use.

"If it's going to be the current engine upgraded to 1000 horsepower, good. And they need to supply it to the teams at a price the teams can afford to pay."

Formula One World Championship driver standings after four of 19 rounds – 1. Lewis Hamilton (Great Britain, Mercedes) 93 points; 2. Nico Rosberg (Germany, Mercedes) 66; 3. Sebastian Vettel (Germany, Ferrari) 65; 4. Kimi Raikkonen (Finland, Ferrari) 42; 5. Felipe Massa (Brazil, Williams-Mercedes) 31; 6. Valtteri Bottas (Finland, Williams-Mercedes) 30; 7. Daniel Ricciardo (Australia, Red Bull-Renault) 19; 8. Felipe Nasr (Brazil, Sauber-Ferrrari) 14; 9. Romain Grosjean (France, Lotus-Mercedes) 12; 10. Nico Hulkenberg (Germany, Force India-Mercedes) 6; 11. Max Verstappen (Netherlands, Toro Rosso-Renault) 6; 12. Carlos Sainz Junior (Spain, Toro Rosso-Renault) 6; 13. Sergio Perez (Mexico, Force India-Mercedes) 5; 14. Marcus Ericsson (Sweden, Sauber-Ferrari) 5; 15. Daniil Kvyat (Russia, Red Bull-Renault) 4.