MOTORSPORT: Mercedes' title hat-trick

Mercedes-Benz has joined the club of Formula 1 constructors to have won three world championships in a row. Some time in the next seven weeks it will have the world champion driver for the third year in a row too, most likely Nico Rosberg this time.

The German son of Finland’s 1982 world champion Keke Rosberg has now won nine grand prixs this season, and no driver has been so successful in one year without winning the world title.

Only Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton have ever won more GPs in a season than Rosberg junior, and there are still four races to go. If Rosberg were to win all four he would equal the record 13 in a year of Schumacher in 2004 and Vettel in 2013.

Lewis Hamilton, Rosberg’s teammate at Mercedes, won 10 in 2014 and 11 last year to be champion both seasons, but he’s 33 points behind now after Rosberg’s victory on Sunday at Suzuka in Japan.

Hamilton has gone winless in the five GPs since the mid-season break, although charging back to third at Suzuka after his admitted mistake on the grid that dropped him from second to eighth gave him his 100th podium – a tally topped only by Schumacher (155) and Alain Prost (106).

He made a late lunge for second place but Red Bull’s Max Verstappen blocked him, “using a bit of energy”, and forced him down an escape road. Mercedes lodged a protest but promptly withdraw it, perhaps at Hamilton’s instigation.

“We are champions, we move on,” Hamilton said.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff lauded 19-year-old Verstappen as “refreshing” for the sport, while Wolff’s Red Bull equivalent Christian Horner said his young charge had been “firm but fair”.

Verstappen was the driver of the day and now has six podiums since his promotion to Red Bull Racing from its junior team Toro Rosso five months ago. That’s as many as Australian teammate Daniel Ricciardo has had this year, while both have had one win – the only non-Mercedes factory drivers to have stood on the top step of the F1 podium this year.

It wasn’t Ricciardo’s weekend at Suzuka though. He reported, rather reluctantly, that his Renault power unit was “just bleeding on the straights” and that the race, in which he finished sixth, with the Ferraris of Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen that started behind him ahead of him at the chequered flag, “wasn’t very exciting for me”.

However, it was the first time in the past seven GPs that Dutch wonderboy Verstappen had outshone him, although Ricciardo will have a new power unit for the next GP in the US in a fortnight.

Verstappen was “really happy to get in between the two Mercedes” at Suzuka.

“It is a great result,” he said, although he admitted that finishing within 5sec of Rosberg had been flattered by “Nico only cruising”.

Rosberg’s third straight victory, although his first in Japan after having qualified on pole position there three years in a row, was the 15th for Mercedes this season and its 47th in the 55 GPs in the era of the 1.6-litre V6 hybrids.

The other constructors to have won a hat-trick of world championships have been Ferrari, McLaren, Williams and Red Bull, with McLaren and Red Bull also winning four times in a row – in 1988-91 and 2010-13 respectively.

Despite its dominance of the hybrids, which has included both its cars on the front row at 10 GPs this year, only twice have Rosberg and Hamilton been one-two at the end of the first lap of races this season.

Some other history was made at Suzuka. It is the only F1 venue at which every car in the field has finished two years in a row.

Even if the racing is not always greatly entertaining, the reliability of the cars in the modern era is a tribute to the companies participating. Only once in the first 54 years of F1 did every car finish. Now it’s happened seven times, and twice this year (the previous time was the Chinese GP in April).

Four-time world champion Vettel showed some of his old magic at Suzuka but, with just one podium in the past nine GPs, there are suggestions his relationship with Ferrari is getting tense and that, without an opening at another top team, he might contemplate retirement.

The first-year American team Haas amazingly had both its cars qualify in the top 10 in Japan, although they finished 11th and 20th in the field of 22, while 16th and 18th was disappointing for Honda-powered McLaren on the home soil of the engine supplier after the recent signs of progress.

New territory but as you were in Formula E
Formula E (all-electric open-wheeler racing) has begun its third season, at a new event in Hong Kong, with organisers claiming 30,000 spectators, and the podium was exactly the same as it was when the second series began in Beijing.

Swiss driver Sebastien Buemi, the reigning champion, won for the Renault e.dams team after a shrewd decision for an early car swap – something that is part of the category in the early years because of limited battery life.

Brazilian Lucas Di Grassi made up 17 places from the back row of the grid to be second for Audi Abt, with German Nick Heidfeld third for India’s Mahindra team.

Newcomers Jaguar, in association with Williams Advanced Engineering, had Northern Irishman Adam Carroll finish 12th while its New Zealander, Mark Webber protégé Mitch Evans, retired soon after his car swap.

Former Erebus V8 Supercar driver Maro Engel was ninth for the Monaco-based Venturi team.

Formula E chief executive Alejandro Agag has said that new teams will be charged 25 million euros – about A$36.8 million – to enter now. It was announced last week that Mercedes had taken an option on joining the series in 2018-19, when powertrain and battery storage updates are scheduled to eliminate mid-race car swaps.

BMW is already associated with America’s Andretti team and has signalled interest in a works entry at the same time as Mercedes.

BMW Motorsport boss Jens Marquardt has said: “We think that Formula E has huge potential. The technology is working really well. The races are in big cities.”

Honda 'wins' Ganassi back in IndyCar
Chevrolet-powered cars won 14 of the 16 IndyCar races this year, but its rival supplier of turbocharged 2.2-litre engines to the series, Honda, has had a post-season victory.

Chip Ganassi Racing is returning to the Honda fold after three years with the Bowtie brand.

Team Penske and Ganassi have had the champion driver in the series the past three seasons – Australian Will Power (Penske) in 2014, New Zealand Scott Dixon (Ganassi) in 2015 and Frenchman Simon Pagenaud (Penske) this year – with Chevrolet power.

Veteran American motorsport correspondent Marshall Pruett reports that many in the IndyCar paddock “regard Honda’s motors as the best in the series” – a notion he said was supported by the Japanese brand’s victory in America’s biggest open-wheeler race, the Indianapolis 500, with the Andretti team and rookie ex-F1 driver Alex Rossi in May.

While Penske, winner of 10 IndyCar races this season and with the top three drivers in the championship, remains firmly in the Chevrolet camp, Pruett says Honda likely will be supplying at least two-thirds of next season’s regular field – that is, other than the Indy 500, in which the entry list expands from around 24 to at least 33.

Atko best of the Subaru boys in GRC
For so long Australia’s top rally driver, Chris Atkinson has gained further kudos in his recent switch to rallycross.

At the double-header finale of the Global Rallycross Championship in Los Angeles at the weekend Atkinson chalked up a pole position and ended up the highest-placed finisher of Subaru Rally Team USA’s three drivers in 450kW WRX STIs.

While Atkinson was seventh in the 13-car field in both Saturday and Sundays finals, multiple US rally champion David Higgins was two places behind him on Sunday after finishing one place ahead of him on Saturday, when the Aussie had to fight back from a poor start that had left him last.

Japanese rally legend Toshihiro Arai struggled in his rallycross debut, finishing last in the third WRX STI.

Although called ‘Global’, the series is American and was won for the second consecutive season by American ex-F1 driver Scott Speed by six points from Andretti Volkswagen Beetle teammate Tanner Foust.

However, the victor in the last race was Chip Ganassi Racing’s Brian Deegan in a Ford Fiesta ST.