MOTORSPORT: Renault upgrade no use to Ricciardo

Daniel Ricciardo is unlikely to use an upgraded Renault power unit available for his Red Bull car at this weekend’s United States Grand Prix.

Ricciardo says the 10-place grid penalty that installing the latest unit would incur makes it “probably not worth taking”.

While uncertainty remains about Red Bull’s engine supplier for next year, Ricciardo is confident he’ll still be racing in Formula 1 next season – and hopeful that it will be competitively.

Ferrari also has a revised power plant for the race at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas and will accept the 10-place grid penalties for Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen, even though that will make it easier for Lewis Hamilton to clinch the drivers’ world title.

Hamilton’s Mercedes team already has won the constructors’ championship and he only needs to outscore his teammate Nico Rosberg by two points and Vettel by nine to become champion for the third time – and second year in a row.

“If you look at just this race isolated, it (the Ferrari grid penalty) is not great news, but you have to look at the whole project, the whole season, and it was always the plan to have a fresh engine here,” Vettel said.

“Obviously we have to take the hit here, but we should take the positive – which is that we were able to make big steps, rather than just [focus on] the penalty.”

Heavy rain is forecast at the circuit in Austin over the next two days, perhaps easing for the race early Monday, Australian time.

Red Bull’s junior team Toro Rosso won’t use the latest Renault power units in the cars of Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz there, or indeed at any of the season’s remaining GPs – Mexico, Brazil and Abu Dhabi come after the US – as it prepares to revert to Ferrari engines next year.

The performance gain with the latest Renault has been projected at only 0.15 seconds a lap for Texas, according to Britain’s Autosport, and Ricciardo said that would not be enough to achieve a decent finishing place after grid penalty.

“It’s available if we want to use it,” Ricciardo said.

“Obviously that would mean a penalty, though, so we’ve got to understand if it’s worth it.

“Last I heard it (the improvement) is not massive, so from my understanding it’s probably not worth taking it.

“I think we’re down such a chunk that I don’t think we’re going to gain enough in this short time to make it up, so if we start from the back I don’t think we’re going to make (up) the ground we need.

“Right now I would say we’re probably less likely to take it.

“Hopefully they tell me something different, and we’ve found a bigger chunk of horsepower from it, but I think realistically there’s not a whole lot.

“Because we’re not really fighting for the title it’s sort of irrelevant.

“I think I have missed out on a fair few bags of points at various occasions this year, but I’m not too worried.

“Obviously you want to finish in front, but when you’re seventh or eighth in the championship it’s sort of irrelevant.

“Yeah, the little Russian (Red Bull teammate Daniil Kyvat) has jumped in front of me (76 points to 73), but we’ll see.

“I’m confident I’ll end up with more points.”

Regarding the uncertainty over next season, Ricciardo said: “We’re still not really confirmed with anything (a power unit supplier) yet.

“I’m still confident I’ll be racing, confident we’ll be there – hopefully competitive.

“I think that (competitiveness) is more the concern.

“I have confidence we’ll be on the grid; it’s just the concern is: can we be competitive?

“I want to make sure we can be.

“This year obviously we have got a couple of podiums, which is nice, but certainly not enough to keep us extremely happy.

“We want to be competitive again – and I think that’s just as important as being on the grid.”

There have been reports of Red Bull contemplating a withdrawal from F1 at the end of this season if it can’t find a suitable power unit to challenge Mercedes and Ferrari, but that would cost it $US500 million under the terms of its contract to participate in the sport until 2020.

F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone’s fallback position in case of a pull-out by Red Bull and Toro Rosso would be for the remaining teams – or at least the major ones – to field three cars each.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff can see pros and cons in that.

“I think it would give the driver market some movement and it would be exciting for the fans,” Wolff said.

“[But] we must ensure that there are not three Mercedes or three Ferraris on the podium.”

Victorians ‘invest’ another $61.7 million in GP
The Australian Grand Prix Corporation’s annual report has revealed a loss of $61.735 million – or what it quaintly terms “investment” by the Victorian government – on this year’s F1 season-opening race in Melbourne’s Albert Park in mid-March.

That was $1.76 million more than the bill to the state’s taxpayers on last year’s race and brought the accumulated losses over the past five years to almost $280 million.

However, outgoing AGPC chairman Ron Walker – drawing on a report on Victoria’s major events by Ernst & Young and the Victorian Major Events Company – claimed the GP had helped contribute $1.8 billion to the state’s economy.

Walker said that in his two decades at the GP’s helm – which had included four changes of government and six premiers – the GP had “proven its place in Melbourne and gone from strength to strength”.

However, the total revenue for the event reported in the latest annual report was $39.836 million compared with $51.640 million for Melbourne’s first F1 GP in 1996.

Total expenditure on this year’s race, including the Victorian government’s “investment”, was $101.571 million.

On these numbers, revenue is less than 40 per cent of the cost.

The Save Albert Park group, which has always opposed the staging of the GP in the park only a couple of kilometres from Melbourne’s CBD and argued it should be run at a permanent circuit, had been agitating for the release of this year’s annual report, claiming it had been delayed.

A clue that the government had sat on the report for weeks was the opening sentence of the chairman’s report, in which Walker said Melbourne was set to host the GP until 2020 – when Victorian premier Daniel Andrews announced on September 12 (40 days earlier) that his government had extended the contract with F1 for a further three years until 2023.

Curiously, and particularly in light of the four-day attendance of 296,600 announced for this year’s GP, the main picture (among four) on the front cover of this latest annual report is of six planes flying above the Albert Park without a solitary spectator in sight.

While all the cars were the same in the debut season – called Spark SRT_01Es, with a chassis built by Italian company Dallara, powered by a battery from F1’s Williams, with electronics from another F1 team, McLaren, and a five-speed Hewland gearbox – there will be eight different powertrains among the 10 teams this season.

Two teams – America’s Andretti and Japan’s Aguri, headed by Australian engineer Mark Preston who previously headed the now-defunct Super Aguri F1 team and before that was a designer for McLaren – are sticking with the original Spark specification hoping to extract from it.

Renault and Audi are the car companies most heavily involved in Formula E, while Jacques Villeneuve – Canada’s 1997 F1 world champion, also an IndyCar and Indianapolis 500 champion, a Le Mans 24-Hour runner-up and fleetingly a V8 Supercar driver in Australia – is the star addition to the series.

Villeneuve will race for the Venturi team partly-owned by American actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who this week was named to chair Formula E’s sustainability committee to promote the mass use of electric vehicles.

“Formula E really can be a powerful tool to change people’s perception of electric cars,” said DiCaprio, a long-time environmental activist.

Venturi is supplying its powertrain to another team, Dragon Racing, headed by one of Roger Penske’s sons, Jay.

Formula E projects itself as a pioneering motorsport championship and has formed an association with Facebook under which the Beijing event will be streamed live on that social media platform in Spain.

Apart from live streaming on Formula E’s website, highlights will be screened on Fox Sports 5 in Australia next Monday and Wednesday.

The only other races in the series before the new year are at Putrajaya in Malaysia on November 7 and Punta del Este in Uruguay on December 19.

Evans, in a Citroen DS3 with Glen Weston as his co-driver, heads Taylor, in the Renault Clio in which Scott Pedder won last year’s championship and with Bill Hayes as her co-driver, by 31 points.

That’s 23 points more than before the previous round run in conjunction with Rally Australia on NSW’s Coffs Coast last month, but there are bonus points to be scored at this fifth event of the series.

The event begins today with a Power Stage, followed by some stages on forestry roads and a new night stage of 20.45km at Mt Crawford.

There was huge controversy over the night stage introduced at Rally Australia, with world championship stars claiming the combination of dust and darkness made it excessively dangerous – concerns dismissed by senior international rally officials, while organisers intend to retain a night stage next year.

Rally SA director Ivar Stanelis said cars would start at two-minute intervals on the Crawford stage tonight, but that the gap could be stretched if circumstances required.

Rain in the Adelaide Hills this week will have lessened the risk of lingering dust.

Evans has won the ARC twice, driving a Honda Jazz both times – in 2012 and ’13 – while taking the title would be a first for 27-year-old Taylor.

Adrian Coppin was the third mathematical chance in the championship but he has switched from his two-wheel-drive Citroen to a four-wheel-drive Toyota Corolla for this event.

Harry Bates, son of multiple national champion Neal and one of the sensations of the season, has switched from a front-wheel-drive Corolla to an all-wheel-drive Super 2000 version.

Mick Patton has a commanding lead in the 4WD series, driving a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution IX with Bernie Webb.