MOTORSPORT: Not all winners are grinners

Mercedes-Benz remains clearly on top of the world in Formula 1 but its F1 team boss is furious. While the three-pointed star won for the eighth time in nine rounds of this year’s world championship in Austria last night, Mercedes F1 team principal Toto Wolff branded contact between his drivers Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton for the third time in the past five races “brainless”.

What should have been a one-two finish became first and fourth, but Wolff’s concern was that it could so easily have been a double DNF [did not finish].

It was a very different story in America, where Roger Penske’s team scored its 100th victory in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup, with victorious driver Brad Keselowski given a little help by teammate, Joey Logano.

Four of the top five finishers in the 400-mile (640km) race at Daytona were Fords.

But back on the other side of the Atlantic there was heartbreak for the Blue Oval as Estonian driver Ott Tanak was robbed of a maiden World Rally Championship victory, and what would have been the first for Ford team M-Sport in the WRC since 2012.

Tanak’s Fiesta RS suffered a puncture on the penultimate stage of Rally Poland, wiping out a 20sec lead and handing victory to Volkswagen’s No.3 driver, Norwegian Andreas Mikkelsen.

But a Ford Focus RS prepared by Ken Block’s Hoonigan Racing Division won its second successive round of the World Rallycross Championship in the hands of another Norwegian, Andreas Bakkerud, in Sweden. Home favourite and championship leader Mattias Ekstrom didn’t finish the final but still leads in his Audi S1 by five points from Norway’s two-time champion Petter Solberg, who didn’t make the final this time in his Citroen.

Switzerland’s Sebastien Buemi won the second Formula E electric open-wheeler championship for Renault eDams by one point from Brazil’s Lucas di Grassi, but Nicolas Prost – son of French F1 great Alain – won the final two races of the season in London’s Battersea Park.

And Luis Leeds, the 17-year-old rising open-wheeler driver from Melbourne who is competing in Britain this year as a Red Bull junior, won a race in the Australian Formula 4 Championship round at Sydney Motorsport Park, while West Australian Nick Rowe is the series leader.

Big bad Wolff threatens team orders
Nico Rosberg was within a couple of kilometres of winning the Austrian Grand Prix but had a brake problem and Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton overtook him – and then they collided.

Hamilton survived the contact to score his 46th F1 victory and the 250th by a British driver.

It was the first time in five years there had been a last-lap pass for the lead of a GP.

Rosberg limped to the finish with a damaged car, taking the chequered flag fourth.

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen passed Rosberg in the last few hundred metres to join Hamilton on the podium.

Usually-diplomatic Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff exploded at this latest clash between his drivers, after those at the Spanish and Canadian GPs, initially calling it “brainless”.

While invoking the old line about it taking two to tango, later Wolff talked about the need to analyse the situation, but warned that Mercedes may need (as much as the thought abhorred him) to start using team orders rather than let its drivers race each other.

Rosberg claimed he “had the car fully under control at all times”, although the television footage showed he either did not or could not turn at the point where he and Hamilton came together.

Stewards found Rosberg to have been in the wrong and penalised him 10sec, although that was not enough to drop him behind Australia’s fifth-placed Daniel Ricciardo.

Hamilton was simply happy to pick up his third win of the year, which has brought him to within 11 points of Rosberg in the championship.

Niki Lauda, the straight-talking Austrian triple world champion who hovers over the Mercedes team as its executive chairman, said: “Lewis did nothing wrong.”

Ricciardo was mystified at his Renault-powered Red Bull’s lack of pace after he had outqualified 18-year-old teammate Verstappen but soon found himself behind him in the race.

“I just want to know why,” Ricciardo said, with another race looming this weekend – the British GP at Silverstone.

The West Australian’s only consolation is that he has been the most consistent driver of late – the only one to score points in all of the past five races.

Verstappen drove 56 laps on a set of soft tyres yet still kept Raikkonen’s Ferrari at bay at the finish to give Red Bull its first podium at the circuit it owns and has redeveloped as the Red Bull Ring.

The other Ferrari crashed after Sebastian Vettel’s right rear tyre exploded.

Jenson Button’s sixth place was his best result of the season, another boost for McLaren-Honda after he qualified fifth and started third (courtesy of grid penalties on others) and teammate Fernando Alonso’s fifth-placed finish at Monaco in May. However, Alonso retired with a battery pack failure in Austria.

A highlight was the first world championship point for rookie Pascal Wehrlein, a German with Mauritian blood and a protégé of Mercedes. His 10th place also was the first for the Manor team that so narrowly escaped collapse at the start of last season.

Swiss team Sauber is the only one yet to score this year, while new American team Haas has a most creditable 28 points – including six in Austria from Romain Grosjean’s seventh place.

Penske rings up ‘ton’ in NASCAR
Roger Penske has been a huge success as a team owner in IndyCar and NASCAR, leaving V8 Supercars now as the category for him to conquer with the team he has taken over from Dick Johnson.

Penske was “proud to be an American” as Brad Keselowski brought up the century of wins for Team Penske in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup at Daytona on the eve of Independence Day in the US.

“To win 100 races with the competition we have in this sport is amazing,” Penske said.

“Sixteen years ago we won our 100th race on the IndyCar side. It took us some time to catch up over here. Pretty important night for us,” he stated.

It was Keselowski’s first Cup race win at Daytona. His four previous restrictor-plate wins were at Talladega, most recently in May.

Tony Stewart, winner the previous weekend after a three-year drought, is now in the top 30 of the championship after missing several early rounds and in line to make The Chase – the “playoffs” over the final rounds to decide the champion.

WRC serves up six of the best
The WRC has had six different winners in the past six rounds, but the latest one could have been so different.

Ott Tanak deserved to be the victor at Rally Poland, after excelling on the sandy but lightning fast (and ultimately treacherously wet) roads from Friday afternoon, but the puncture to his front right tyre halfway through the second last stage on Sunday put paid to that.

“All this and then you get nothing. It’s too hard,” Tanak said.

The Estonian did salvage second place, just 2.3sec ahead of New Zealander Hayden Paddon in a Hyundai i20.

Paddon’s Belgian teammate Thierry Neuville closed to within 0.8sec of him at the finish, with the Volkswagens of Finn Jari-Matti Latvala and French triple world champion Sebastien Ogier fifth and sixth as their Norwegian teammate Andreas Mikkelsen notched his second victory – and first this year.