MOTORSPORT: Dark day for our boys abroad

What started out promisingly ended as a weekend of woe for Australia’s big-name race drivers overseas.

Daniel Ricciardo admitted to under-achieving in the Chinese Grand Prix, Mark Webber’s Porsche dropped out of the first round of the World Endurance Championship after leading the first quarter of the race, while Will Power was only seventh in a shambolic new IndyCar race in New Orleans and has dropped a place in that championship.

The Honda Performance Development second-tier prototype sports car David Brabham shared in the WRC race at Britain’s Silverstone was 25th – the second last finisher.

Shane Van Gisbergen, one of New Zealand’s V8 Supercar stars, was 15th in the McLaren he shared in the opening round of the Blancpain Endurance Series at Monza, while Brisbane’s Liam Talbot – with only two years of racing under his belt – shared a Ferrari 458 that was classified 23rd in the field of 58 and scored a class victory.

V8 Supercar investigation officer Jason Bargwanna clinched the NZ Touring Car title in a Toyota Camry at Pukekohe and Kiwi Simon Evans the NZ V8 SuperTourer crown there in a Holden Commodore ahead of the likely merger of the two categories next season.

Having qualified seventh, Ricciardo fluffed the start – RBR team principal Christian Horner attributed it to “human error” and called it “an expensive error” – and dropped to 17th on the opening lap but climbed back to ninth at the finish.

It was the first of the three GPs this season in which Ricciardo’s RB11 car, with an underpowered and unreliable Renault power unit and other problems, had not been lapped.

F1 drivers are allowed four engines this year and Ricciardo already is on his third – and acknowledges that it won’t be long before he’s used four and incurs a 10-place grid penalty.

His Russian teammate Daniil Kyvat’s engine blew early in the Shanghai race, while another brilliant drive by 17-year-old rookie Max Verstappen ended four laps from the chequered flag when the Renault unit in his Toro Rosso car expired.

It was that car parked on the pit straight, and the tardiness and clumsiness of officials in removing it, that saw the race GP behind a safety car.

The order of the podium finishers was the same as in Melbourne four weeks earlier – Mercedes pair Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg ahead of Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel.

Indeed, they have been the three drivers on the podium at all three GPs so far this season, although the order was different in Malaysia because of Ferrari’s shock win.

Rosberg complained about Hamilton slowing up on his second set of tyres in Shanghai, claiming it could have brought him (Rosberg) under pressure from Vettel. He accused Hamilton of selfishness.

But Hamilton and Mercedes team bosses Niki Lauda and Toto Wolff brushed off the gripe from Rosberg, who has been beaten by his teammate nine times in the past 10 GPs.

Four teams got both cars to the finish in the points – Mercedes, Ferrari (Kimi Raikkonen was fourth), Williams-Mercedes (Felipe Massa fifth, Valtteri Bottas sixth) and Sauber-Ferrari (Brazilian rookie Felipe Nasr eight, Swede Marcus Ericsson 10th).

Romain Grosjean’s seventh place in a Lotus-Mercedes gave the Frenchman his first points in 16 races, while the Honda-powered McLaren’s of Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button both finished – but a lap down.

The Ferrari-engined Manor Marussias of Brit Will Stevens and Spaniard Roberto Merhi finished too, but both two laps down.

Ricciardo’s ninth place earned him two points and he now has 11 for the season to be eighth in the drivers’ championship after finishing third last year.

He said his car had gone into anti-stall mode on the start line and he was “not quite sure why”.

“That hasn’t happened before – we have to look and see what happened,” Ricciardo said.

“It’s frustrating. That shaped the race and in the traffic we struggled to get by.

“The start was obviously what shagged our race.

“At least some positives are that we learned a few areas where we need to improve and the smart guys in the team can find a solution.”

RBR reverted to Italian-made Brembo brakes from the German Hitco brakes it used in Australia and Malaysia and Ricciardo said they at least were more consistent.

He felt RBR’s strategy could have been better in Shanghai and was diplomatic in calling his difficulty in overtaking teammate Kyvat, when the team had instructed the Russian to let the faster Australian by, “a little battle”.

“I don’t know if I was optimistic in trying to get past [which he ultimately did],” Ricciardo said.

“We were on different race strategies, but we’ll sort it out in the debrief.

“We underachieved today, but hopefully we find something in the next few days and have a better result in Bahrain [next weekend].

“Driveability on Renault’s side is getting better. We obviously still have some more steps to make, but we’re at least making them in the right direction.

“We’ve just to keep our head up and keep pushing.”

However, Renault’s F1 boss Cyril Abiteboul has foreshadowed another tough weekend in Bahrain and said it may be the Monaco GP – six weeks away – before the company’s reliability issues are overcome.

While RBR principal Horner as well as Red Bull energy drink company owner Dietrich Mateschitz and his adviser Helmut Marko have been highly critical of Renault in recent weeks, Horner has professed faith in Renault’s engineers at its Viry-Chatillon base near Paris to find answers.

Horner said Mateschitz’s threat to quit F1 was his way of “encouraging Renault to step up and do the job properly”.

“Ferrari in six months have done a super job [improving its power unit], so it demonstrates what is possible in a relatively short period of time,” Horner said.

Abiteboul, having accused RBR technical guru Adrian Newey of lying three weeks ago, said Renault now had “no issue with Red Bull, in the sense that they are a team that wants to be extremely successful”.

“They are impatient to be back in a winning position, as we were two years ago [when the partners won a fourth straight world title together].” Abiteboul said.

“So we understand that, and their frustration. We are a supplier, but we are also racers and also extremely frustrated.

“It is about supporting each other, not dragging each other down, but we want to deal with it together.”

Webber went straight into the lead and had a seven-second advantage when he pitted under a full-course yellow for fresh tyres after 24 laps.

But 20 laps later, having stretched the lead to almost 10 seconds, he was called in by the Porsche crew because of a gearbox problem, the 919 was wheeled into its garage and did not return to the track.

An Audi R18 e-tron quattro ended up winning by 4.6 seconds from the other Porsche 919, with Toyota TS040s in third and fourth.

The first three cars completed 201 laps, the fourth finished a lap down and another Audi four laps down.

David Brabham’s LMP2 HPD was 36 laps down in 25th place.

The victorious Audi, which confirmed pre-race suspicions that the long-dominant manufacturer at Le Mans would have the best stint performance this season, had led by 72 seconds with 15 minutes to go but had to make two late stops – one for a splash of fuel, the other a stop-go penalty.

There is another six-hour race at Belgium’s Spa-Francorchamps on the first weekend of May before the Le Mans 24-Hour in mid-June.

Webber said Silverstone had been “going really smoothly … a nice run at the front of the field, then we had a drivetrain issue”.

“I only felt it a lap before, but I couldn’t continue,” he said.

“It’s a real shame because we were in a great position. We had a really good build-up to the weekend. The guys worked hard, but we didn’t get the result.

“We were in better shape with the tyres than we thought we would be, and that was a nice surprise.

“Our hybrid technology is just sensational. It puts us in a good position in both the short and long term.”

The new Lamborghini Huracan GT3 that won the three-hour Blancpain race at Monza was disqualified for a refuelling infringement, handing victory to a Ferrari.

Two of this year’s Bathurst 12-Hour winners, Japan’s Katsumasa Chiyo and Belgian Wolfgang Reip, finished eighth in a Nissan GT-R with Brit Alex Buncombe – who missed the Bathurst victory because of the birth of a child.

The starting grid was determined, because of a washed-out qualifying, by the finish order of the opening round two weeks earlier in Florida, which put Australia’s reigning series champion Will Power alongside Penske teammate Juan Pablo Montoya on the front row.

But in a race plagued by yellow flags Power could finish only seventh and has dropped to third in the championship, behind Montoya and another Penske driver, Helio Castroneves.

Canadian James Hinchcliffe won in New Orleans in a Honda-powered car for Schmidt Peterson Motorsports after starting 16th and stretching his fuel and tyres to run a 34-lap final stint.

It was Hinchcliffe’s first win since June 2013 and he took the chequered flag ahead of Castroneves, Schmidt Peterson teammate James Jakes, Andretti Autosport’s Swiss female driver Simona de Silvestro, Montoya and Chip Ganassi Racing’s Tony Kanaan.

Six-time Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson won the weekend’s NASCAR race at Texas Motor Speedway ahead of reigning champ Kevin Harvick and Dale Earnhart Junior.

The three Chevrolet drivers headed Penske Ford pair Joey Logano and Brad Keselowski.

The 2012 Cup champion for Penske in a Dodge, Keselowski might have won in Texas had he not hit a cone entering the pits at three-quarter distance.

Harvick leads the championship again this season, 26 points clear of Logano, with Chevrolet driver Martin Truex Junior third ahead of Keselowski.

Johnson is sixth, sandwiched between Kasey Kahne and Earnhart.

Aric Almirola, the teammate Marcos Ambrose left behind at Richard Petty Motorsports, is ninth on the points table.