MOTORSPORT: Ricciardo’s brutal power failure

Daniel Ricciardo suffered a heart-breaking early retirement from the second Formula 1 race of the year as Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel notched back-to-back wins, holding off Mercedes pair Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton.

Ricciardo’s Renault-powered Red Bull RB14 stopped on the second lap of the Bahrain Grand Prix with an electrical failure as he was running fourth and confident of a podium finish.

“I just lost all power, everything switched off without warning and I couldn’t do anything," the carsales.com.au global ambassador said of his fourth retirement in the past six GPs.

“This sport can rip your heart out. It’s brutal sometimes.

“The weekend was going pretty good for us. I really felt like we were going to be in with a good chance, which makes it even more frustrating.

“I get really fired up for Sundays so now I've got two hours of adrenaline stored up inside me and I don’t know what to do with it.”

Red Bull had its first double retirement since the 2010 Korean GP with Max Verstappen clipping Hamilton’s front wing early in the race, puncturing his left front tyre and then damaging his transmission.

"Both cars retiring within two laps is extremely disappointing, particularly when we had a race car today that was capable of challenging Ferrari and Mercedes,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said.

“Thankfully the next race is only one week away [in Shanghai].”
Honda got its best result of the 1.6-litre hybrid era, with young Frenchman Pierre Gasly a brilliant fourth, in just his seventh GP, for Toro Rosso – the Red Bull junior team – which is using the Japanese company’s power unit after its three years of failure with McLaren.

Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost said Gasly raced “as if he had driven 100 races in F1 –extraordinary, a fantastic job”.

F1 owner Liberty Media’s “blueprint” announcement at the start of the event revealed little new other than its desire to cap team budgets at US$150 million a year, excluding driver salaries and marketing costs.

Ferrari was on course for another double podium as in Melbourne until Kimi Raikkonen was wrongly given the signal to leave the pits with only three of his tyres changed and collected the mechanic on his left rear, breaking one of his legs in two places.

The team immediately retired the Finn.

Ferrari opted for soft tyres at its pitstops and Mercedes the medium-compound rubber. Vettel had to nurse his tyres towards the end but withstood the rapidly-closing Merc of Bottas to score his 49th GP victory, by just 0.6 seconds, at his 200th start.

Mercedes has dominated the previous four years of the hybrids, but Ferrari and Vettel may have turned the tide now. Nobody has won the opening two GPs of a season and not won the world championship since 1982 – a great omen for Vettel.

The German already leads fellow four-time champion Hamilton by 17 points and Bottas by 28, while Ricciardo has dropped from fourth to seventh with his 12 from Melbourne.

Hamilton came from ninth on the grid, after a five-place penalty for a gearbox change, to complete the podium, six seconds back on teammate Bottas. At one point Hamilton passed three cars into one corner – Fernando Alonso’s McLaren-Renault, Esteban Ocon’s Force India-Mercedes and Nico Hulkenberg’s factory Renault.

Kevin Magnussen finished an impressive fifth for America’s Ferrari-powered Haas team, ahead of Hulkenberg, while McLaren scored a double points finish for the second successive race with Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne seventh and eighth.

Power in the wall at Phoenix

Australian Will Power led a race-high 80 of the 250 laps in the second round of the IndyCar series at Phoenix’s oval track but hit the wall on lap 153 and is only 14th in the points.

Power’s Penske teammate and reigning champion, American Josef Newgarden, leads the series after charging from fourth in the last six laps at Phoenix to steal victory ahead of Canadian rookie sensation Robert Wickens.

American Alex Rossi and Frenchman Sebastien Bourdais are closest to Newgarden on the points table, while Wickens – punted out of the lead on the last lap of the season opener at St Petersburg in Florida – is eighth, behind New Zealander Scott Dixon.

Three out of four for Ford in WRC

Ford’s Sebastien Ogier has won three of the first four rounds of the World Rally Championship, leading all the way on the asphalt on France’s Mediterranean island Corsica at the weekend in his M-Sport Fiesta.

Ogier, the WRC champion the past five years (the first four times with Volkswagen and last year for M-Sport Ford), finished 36.1 seconds clear of Estonian Ott Tanak’s Toyota Yaris on Corsica.

Hyundai’s Belgian Thierry Neuville was third, losing more than half a minute to Tanak on the final day as his i20 had engine troubles, but he is closest to Frenchman Ogier in the championship, 17 points behind with Tanak another 22 down in third.

However, Hyundai leads the manufacturer standings, with 111 points to Ford’s 107, while Toyota is third on 93 and Citroen has 81.

Ogier’s nine-time world champion countryman Sebastien Loeb, in his second event of the year after retiring from full-time WRC competition in 2012, crashed his Citroen on the first leg in Corsica but returned to win three stages.

Citroen’s regular lead driver, Northern Irishman Kris Meeke, crashed out of the second leg after mishearing a pace note.