MOTORSPORT: F1 hybrids four years down the track

Mercedes has concluded the Formula 1 World Championship with its 12th win in 20 races and its fourth one-two of the year, this time with Valtteri Bottas ahead of world champion elect, Lewis Hamilton.

Daniel Ricciardo was one of only two retirements from the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, with a “weird” feeling he initially thought to be a puncture but which, after an impromptu pitstop for a tyre change, turned out to be a hydraulics failure affecting power steering and ultimately preventing him changing gears.

Kimi Raikkonen finished the race fourth, behind Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel, pushing Ricciardo down to fifth in the drivers’ championship, having scored only eight points in the last four GPs to the Finn’s 57.

“Not a good day… not a good last few races, unfortunately… not the nicest way to end the season,” carsales.com.au global ambassador Ricciardo said.

The 1.6-litre V6 hybrid cars have now completed four seasons and the verdict on them is not good either. Compounded by the characteristics of Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina circuit, the 79th GP with the hybrid power units was branded “boring” by Raikkonen and Ricciardo’s teammate Max Verstappen.

“If I had a pillow in the car I could have fallen asleep,” said Verstappen, who finished fifth, within a second of Raikkonen.

Blunt Raikkonen said it had been “more like endurance racing” because of drivers having to save fuel with the hybrids.

“It was not a lot to do with racing, because the fuel saving was a lot. I think Max was more or less the same story. As we were close to each other it looks okay, but if you look closely you were lifting off 200 metres before the corners,” the Finn stated.

Vettel -- the only non-Mercedes driver to have finished runner-up in the past four years -- said that saving fuel at the start of his second stint meant losing touch with Bottas and Hamilton, eventually finishing almost 20sec down.

Not only did Hamilton wrap up the drivers’ title in Mexico with two rounds to go, and Mercedes the manufacturers’ title even earlier, the final margin between Mercedes and Ferrari was 146 points, almost 3.4 times the maximum 43 points team can earn from a race.

Red Bull wound up 300 points behind Mercedes!

While less than three months ago the F1 championships were intensely competitive between the two top teams and Hamilton and Vettel, before Ferrari (and to some extent Vettel) imploded, in the wash-up the quality of racing has been dreadful.

Hamilton said that he would have needed to have been 1.4sec a lap faster than Bottas to have overtaken his teammate in Abu Dhabi, and in equal equipment there was no way there was going to be that much difference between them.

“Impossible to pass here… when you get to within 1.1 to 1.2sec (of someone in front) the car just loses grip,” he said, saying changes needed to be made to the otherwise glitzy track.

Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner was severely understating it when he said this latest Abu Dhabi race was “not the best advert for F1”.

The vastly-experienced Nigel Roebuck, perhaps the most eloquent of scribes on F1, wrote last week on Autosport.com: “What we have had, in the F1 of the last four years, has in my opinion been largely a disaster, and it seems – from too many empty grandstands and falling TV figures – that I am not alone.

“The grand prix car of the current era has power aplenty – more even than the best V10s – and achieves it with remarkable fuel consumption, but comes at incredible cost.

“It has been financially ruinous for the smaller teams, obliged to beg – and buy – engines from one of four, ultra-powerful, suppliers [Mercedes, Ferrari, Renault and Honda], who have not, as was confidently predicted, been joined by such as Audi.

“Given the burden of all the systems, batteries and so on, today's F1 car weighs about the same as a Mercedes W125 from 80 years ago, and that is frankly grotesque.

“Speeds are about the same as 13 years ago. An unfathomable amount has been spent simply in marking time.

“Yes, the saving in fuel has been extraordinary – but when did F1 ever tell anyone about it?” Roebuck could also have asked whether race fans, rather than motorists on the roads, care about fuel savings.

He highlighted that new F1 owner Liberty Media’s motorsport director Ross Brawn had said, in the discussion about the next-generation F1 engine from 2021: “The current engine is an incredible piece of engineering, but it’s not a great racing engine. It’s very expensive, doesn’t make any noise, has componentry that, in order to control the numbers of uses, is creating grid penalties that make a farce of F1, there are big differentials of performance between the competitors, and we are never going to get anyone else to come in and make engines. We can't leave the engine as it is.”

While agreeing with Brawn, Roebuck pointed out that “the pity is that we’re stuck with it for the next three seasons – and for 2018 the drivers are restricted to three apiece (down from four this year)”.

The BBC’s chief F1 writer, Andrew Benson, takes a much brighter view of the season just ended with the wider cars and fatter tyres but has reported on other problems.

Benson says that not only is revenue dropping for Liberty since taking control of the sport from long-time supremo Bernie Ecclestone and majority owner for the previous decade, private equity company CVC.

“The sport’s biggest television market – Germany – does not yet have a free-to-air broadcaster in 2018 because RTL is yet to renew its contract [despite a GP at Hockenheim being back on next year’s calendar after no German GP this year],” Benson wrote.

“Another major market – the UK – is losing its free TV in a year’s time.

“[And] the F1 Group has still not provided any detail on its plans for the future despite nearly a year of saying that they have lots of them.”

A new F1 logo – red and meant to represent two cars approaching the finish line – will be used from next season, starting at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on the last weekend of March.

It’s going to take a lot more than that, though, to get the F1 show back on the right road.

Formula 1 World Championship final driver standings after 20 rounds: 1 Lewis Hamilton (Great Britain, Mercedes) 363 points; 2 Sebastian Vettel (Germany, Ferrari) 317; 3 Valtteri Bottas (Finland, Mercedes) 305; 4 Kimi Raikkonen (Finland, Ferrari) 205; 5 Daniel Ricciardo (Australia, Red Bull-Renault) 200; 6 Max Verstappen (Netherlands, Red Bull-Renault) 168; 7 Sergio Perez (Mexico, Force India-Mercedes) 100; 8 Esteban Ocon (France, Force India-Mercedes) 87; 9 Carlos Sainz Junior (Spain, Toro Rosso-Renault and Renault) 54; 10 Nico Hulkenberg (Germany, Renault) 43; 11 Felipe Massa (Brazil, Williams-Mercedes) 43; 12 Lance Stroll (Canada, Williams-Mercedes) 40; 13 Romain Grosjean (France, Haas-Ferrari) 28; 14 Kevin Magnussen (Denmark, Haas-Ferrari) 19; 15 Fernando Alonso (Spain, McLaren-Honda) 17; 16 Stoffel Vandoorne (Belgium, McLaren-Honda) 13; 17 Jolyon Palmer (GB, Renault) 8; 18 Pascal Wehrlein (Germany, Sauber-Ferrari) 5; 19 Daniil Kvyat (Russia, Toro Rosso-Renault) 5.

F1 constructor final standings: 1 Mercedes 668 points; 2 Ferrari 522; 3 Red Bull-Renault 368; 4 Force India-Mercedes 187; 5 Williams-Mercedes 83; 6 Renault 57; 7 Toro Rosso-Renault 53; 8 Haas-Ferrari 47; 9 McLaren-Honda 30; 10 Sauber-Ferrari 5.