MOTORSPORT: Webber wins, Ricciardo a brilliant runner-up

A ‘gold’ and a ‘silver’ for Australia’s two biggest international racing stars in a couple of big races at the weekend – Mark Webber won the World Endurance Championship round at the Circuit of the Americas and Daniel Ricciardo came within half a second of victory in the Singapore Grand Prix.

Some championship ‘medals’ too for Aussies overseas. Will Power had a troublesome IndyCar finale but still finished runner-up for the season (Penske drivers ended first, second and third in the series).

Another Queenslander, Liam Talbot, has won the Amateur Cup in Europe’s Blancpain GT endurance series for GT cars.

And Australian-based New Zealander Shane van Gisbergen won the outright Blancpain endurance title, even though he was in Melbourne finishing second in the Sandown 500 and taking the Supercars championship lead.

Ricciardo … numero uno but without the title?

Daniel Ricciardo can’t win the Formula 1 world title this year, but he may well end the season regarded as the best driver.

The West Australian is doing everything he can in a Renault-powered Red Bull car that is still not quite in the same league as the Mercedes factory machines of Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton.

He qualified on the front row in Singapore, little more than half a second (close in this F1 era!) behind Rosberg, and ahead of Hamilton, who admittedly had difficulties from the outset, as well as his Red Bull teammate Max Verstappen.

Throughout the race Ricciardo ran second to Rosberg and in the last 16 laps, on supersoft tyres, made up almost half a minute on the German – setting the fastest lap of the race in the process.

The margin at the chequered flag was less than half a second.

There’s more to it than that. Singapore, where F1’s new American executive chairman Chase Carey loomed large in the paddock, is the place in the 21-round world championship to which the Mercs are least suited. Last year they had a horror weekend there and this time both had trouble with overheating brakes. And Rosberg drove the last 28 laps last night on the same set of soft tyres.

Mercedes had pulled the right rein on strategy with Hamilton, bringing him in for a tyre stop to get him back in front of Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari.

But Red Bull caught out Mercedes with its timing of Ricciardo’s last stop, which prevented the dominant team bringing in Rosberg because it would have cost him the lead.

Ricciardo delighted in knowing the pressure he was applying to Rosberg, with the Merc man’s engineer telling him over the radio that the Aussie was closing in on him at 2-3 seconds a lap.

“It’s not a nice feeling to hear that, so I was just trying to keep on pushing and keep the crowd entertained,” Ricciardo said.

“Even if this track’s difficult to overtake on, it was nice to be able to push to the last lap and know that I was at least putting some pressure on him and giving the crowd still a little bit of hope.

“I did all I could. I left it all on the track. The perfect race [except for not winning].

“If there was anything that could have been more perfect it was the start, but Nico got off the line well.”

Six GPs remain and, while Singapore was the circuit that gave him and Red Bull its best chance of a victory (after the bungle in Monaco and the strategy call that favoured Verstappen in Barcelona), Ricciardo remains optimistic of a win this season.

But he says he will need some rain to do it. Among the remaining circuits, there’s every chance of that at four of them – Sepang in Malaysia and Suzuka in Japan, and the Circuit of the Americas in Texas and Interlagos in Brazil. The others are Mexico and Abu Dhabi.

Ricciardo has now been on the podium four times in the past four GPs – and second four times this season.

Even without adding another victory to the three he scored in his first year with Red Bull Racing in 2014, the F1 paddock – and the likes of the annual Autocourse publication – may well regard him as the finest driver in the sport at the end of the season, if not already.

He doesn’t make the mistakes of some of the five world champions in the field and his racecraft, especially his overtaking, is superb.

There is, quite understandably, great admiration for Max Verstappen, especially as an 18-year-old in only his second season of GP racing, but he is short of Ricciardo for polish and consistency at this stage.

Sebastian Vettel’s drive from the back of the grid in Singapore to fifth (behind teammate Rakkonen) was a reminder of the brilliance that won him four world titles with Red Bull before his switch to Ferrari.

Rosberg has regained the championship lead – by eight points – with his eighth victory of the year, while his only title rival, Hamilton, has won six of the 15 so far. Verstappen has been the only other winner.

Formula 1 World Championship driver standings after 15 of 21 rounds – 1. Nico Rosberg (Germany, Mercedes) 273 points; 2. Lewis Hamilton (Great Britain, Mercedes) 265; 3. Daniel Ricciardo (Australia, Red Bull-Renault) 179; 4. Sebastian Vettel (Germany, Ferrari) 153; 5. Kimi Raikkonen (Finland, Ferrari) 148; 6. Max Verstappen (Netherlands, Red Bull-Renault) 129; 7. Valtteri Bottas (Finland, Williams-Mercedes) 70; 8. Sergio Perez (Mexico, Force India-Mercedes) 66; 9. Nico Huelkenberg (Germany, Force India-Mercedes) 46; 10. Felipe Massa (Brazil, Williams-Mercedes) 41.

F1 constructor standings – 1. Mercedes 538 points; 2. Red Bull-Renault 316; 3. Ferrari 301; 4. Force India-Mercedes 112; 5. Williams-Mercedes 111; 6. McLaren-Honda 54; 7.  Toro Rosso-Ferrari 47; 8. Haas-Ferrari 28; 9. Renault 7; 10. Manor-Mercedes 1; 11. Sauber-Ferrari 0.

Hat-trick for Webber … with a little luck

Audi set the pace in the sixth round of the World Endurance Championship for sports cars, but the Porsche 919 Hybrid of Mark Webber and his two co-drivers ultimately prevailed.
It was the third straight win in the series for Webber, New Zealander Brendon Hartley and German Timo Bernhard.

The two Audi R18 e-tron quattros qualified on the front row of the grid at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, and had command of the race for more than half of the six hours.
The Porsche trio got the best of a full-course yellow and ended up winning by about 23 seconds.

It was the fifth WEC win for Porsche this year and the seventh for Webber, Hartley and Bernhard of the marque’s 12 with its 919 Hybrids in three years.

One of the Audis finished second in Texas and a Toyota TS050 third, just another two seconds behind.

Porsche leads the manufacturers’ championship with 238 points to Audi’s 185 and Toyota has 137.

The drivers in the other Porsche – France’s Romain Dumas, Switzerland’s Neel Jani and Germany’s Marc Lieb – finished fourth in Texas but, courtesy of two earlier wins (including the Le Mans 24-Hour), lead the drivers’ standings by 37.5 points ahead of the best of the Audi line-ups.

The Ford GT that Sydney’s Ryan Briscoe and Englishman Richard Westbrook drove in the previous day’s International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) 2¾-hour race at the same Texas track started from pole position but lost time in the race with a broken steering arm.

That came after contact from the GTLM class-leading Chevrolet Corvette of Englishman Oliver Gavin and American Tommy Milner, who have gone further ahead of the Ford pair with just one round remaining.

Any which way Penske prevails in Indy series

A repeat of his 2014 IndyCar title has eluded Toowoomba’s Will Power at Sonoma in California today.

Frenchman Simon Pagenaud, who went into the double-points finale leading Power by 43 points, dominated qualifying and the race, leading from start to finish, to notch his fifth win of the season and his first championship.

He ended up 137 points ahead of teammate Power, who finished 20th – and eight laps down – in the field of 22 at Sonoma after clutch control issues at mid-distance.

Brazilian Helio Castroneves’ seventh-placed in another Penske-Chevrolet gave ‘The Captain’, Roger Penske, the top three finishers in the championship.

It is also Team Penske’s 14th IndyCar championship in its 50th year of operation

Atkinson like a duck to water in rallycross

Chris Atkinson, for a long time Australia’s premier rally driver, has been a star in rallycross since his move into that sport – a combination of circuit racing and rallying on very short courses – with Subaru in America.

Atkinson was sixth of the 11 drivers in the Global Rallycross Championship round in Seattle at the weekend – three places ahead of his Subaru teammate, multiple American rally champion David Higgins.

At his debut in Atlantic City a fortnight earlier Atkinson was third in his semi-final before a puncture wrecked his chances in the final.

Tanner Foust, the host of the Top Gear TV show in America, has regained the GRC lead from his Volkswagen Andretti teammate, ex-F1 driver Scott Speed.

The only remaining round is a double-header in Los Angeles on October 8-9.

Swede Mattias Ekstrom’s fourth victory of the year in the World Rallycross Championship has given him the series lead over two-time champion, Norwegian Petter Solberg.

Ekstrom is 10 points ahead after Solberg’s seventh place at Barcelona at the weekend.

However, the Swede now has to decide with his manufacturer, Audi, on whether to compete at the next round in Latvia or at a clashing round of the DTM (German touring car championship) – a series in which he raced for 15 years and been a multiple champion.

‘The Giz’ a GT champion in absentia

The Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup was only decided on the final lap of the final race at the Nurburgring in Germany – and Shane Van Gisbergen has become one of its champions even he though wasn’t there.

One of the drivers with whom van Gisbergen shared a McLaren 650S in earlier races, Rob Bell, said the title had been “won ugly”.

The car started from 21st, copped a drive-through penalty and van Gisbergen’s substitute, Duncan Tappy, had to limp to the pits with a puncture during the three-hour race.

Frenchman Come Ledogar drove the crucial final stint in the McLaren, taking the wheel when the car was outside the top 30.

Apart from the overall success for the driving trio in the endurance races, ‘Garage 59’ – which runs the McLaren and is managed by former Minardi F1 driver Bas Leinders – took the teams’ trophy.

Brisbane’s Liam Talbot and his co-drivers in a Ferrari 458, Marco Zanuttini and Vadim Gitlin, clinched the Amateur Cup in the Blancpain enduros with sixth place in their class at Nurburgring. They had won earlier rounds at the Paul Ricard circuit in France and at the 24 Hours of Spa in Belgium.

Matt Simmons, the former Australia Post courier from Brisbane and inaugural Australian winner of Nissan’s GT Academy, finished 11th in the Pro-Am class at Nurburging – and 31st outright – in a NISMO GT-R.

Melbourne’s James Davison was 11th and seventh in another GT-R at the two Pirelli World Challenge races at Sonoma in California as part of the IndyCar finale.