Mexican GP 2018: Verstappen Wins by 17s, Hamilton Champion

Twenty-six thousandths of a second. That's what separated Daniel Ricciardo's pole lap from Max Verstappen's on Saturday at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, a margin closer than a blink. By Sunday evening it counted for nothing: Ricciardo was in the garage with an engine failure, nine laps shy of the finish, and Verstappen was on the top step for the second time this season.

This was a race decided less by who was fastest and more by who was still running. Verstappen had the pace to win Mexico regardless, but it was Ricciardo's retirement, and the tyre-management gulf that opened up behind the two Red Bulls, that shaped the final order from second place backwards.

Two Red Bulls, two different Sundays

Ricciardo took pole by 26 thousandths over Verstappen, with Hamilton a tenth further back in third and Vettel fourth. Both Red Bulls made it through the opening laps in the podium mix, and for a while it looked like the kind of afternoon Ricciardo had been chasing all year. It didn't last. Ricciardo's tyre and pit sequencing during the race put him on a single stop, a bold call that briefly had him running with winning pace, but the car gave out with an engine problem and he was classified 17th, down 16 places from where he'd started. It's the shape of Ricciardo's season in miniature: pole position pace with nothing to show for it.

Verstappen, on the other side of the garage, ran the two-stop textbook. He came in on lap 13 for supersofts and stayed there to the flag, and while the pit-cycle math briefly handed the effective lead to Vettel on lap 14 (Verstappen was in the pits, Vettel wasn't), the reshuffle when Vettel finally stopped on lap 17 put Verstappen back in control by lap 18. Both changes at the front were pit-cycle inheritance, not wheel-to-wheel racing; there wasn't a single on-track pass for the lead all afternoon. Once the sequence settled, Verstappen simply built. The gap to Vettel dropped as low as 8.4 seconds around the second round of stops near lap 50, but by the chequered flag it was out to 17.3 seconds, the same margin, roughly, that separated the top two at the flag in real time.

The altitude explains part of why this race played out the way it did. Mexico City's thin air strips around a fifth of the downforce off these cars, and it showed up in exactly the sectors you'd expect. Vettel's Ferrari was the fastest car through the opening sector, the power-sensitive run to Turn 4, on 40 of the 71 laps. Verstappen answered by owning the middle sector and the twisting stadium section for most of the race, fastest through Sector 2 on 31 laps and Sector 3 on 38. A low-drag, power-sensitive car versus one that kept its downforce advantage through the slow stuff: that was the technical battle running underneath the strategic one, and Red Bull won the argument where it mattered, in the corners that make up two-thirds of the lap.

The data behind the race

Timing and telemetry from every car on track.

The Mercedes tyre problem nobody talks about

Hamilton's race was the quiet story of the front six, and it needed to be: fourth place, with a lock-up costing him a chunk of his second stint, was enough. He started third, ran second early, and lost the place he'd earned once his front-left tyre wear caught up with him in the closing stint. His weighted race pace, 1:22.038, was the slowest of the top six front-runners, and the numbers back up what the on-track picture suggested: this was a Mercedes that simply couldn't get comfortable with the compounds at 2,200 metres.

Bottas had, on paper, the more competitive car all afternoon. He ran a full second faster than Hamilton across the race on the same weighted measure, and yet finished a place behind him in fifth. The explanation is tyres, not pace: Bottas needed three stops to Hamilton's two, including a late switch to hypersofts that cost him ground even as it bought grip, and by the time the strategy math settled, the extra stop had eaten more than the pace advantage was worth. It's a reminder that being the faster car on a given lap and being the faster car over 71 of them are two different questions, and Sunday in Mexico answered them in opposite directions for the same team.

Fourth place was more than enough for the bigger picture. Lewis Hamilton was crowned Formula One world champion for the fifth time on Sunday after finishing in fourth place at the Mexico Grand Prix, a result that drew him level with Juan Manuel Fangio and left only Michael Schumacher's seven titles ahead of him in the record books. Going into the weekend Hamilton held a 70-point cushion over Vettel in the standings; Vettel's second place here, without the win he needed, was never going to be enough to keep the fight alive. It's the second year running this circuit has settled Mercedes' championship business, and it happened again with barely a fight for the actual race lead.

The midfield's better story

Behind the top six, this was a weekend of contrasts inside the same garage. McLaren's two cars could not have looked more different: Stoffel Vandoorne climbed from 15th to eighth, gaining seven places on a single-stop strategy, while Fernando Alonso was out inside the first five laps with an engine failure that ended his afternoon almost before it began. Sauber quietly had a strong day too, with Charles Leclerc up two places to seventh and Marcus Ericsson ninth, both cars home and both on the quicker of Sauber's tyre strategies.

The drive of the day outside the podium battle belonged to Pierre Gasly, who started 20th and finished 10th, the biggest recovery in the field. Retirements further back for Sergio Perez (brakes) and Carlos Sainz (suspension) meant this wasn't a clean afternoon for everyone, and Brendon Hartley's five-second penalty for causing a collision on lap 47 was the only sporting sanction of the race. None of it threatened the story at the front, but it filled out a midfield that, on a circuit with only brief Virtual Safety Car interruptions around laps 5, 31 and 62, had to make its own action.

Mexico won't settle much for the title fight, because it's already been settled. What it does set up is a straight pace question heading to Brazil: Red Bull's low-drag, downforce-retaining package has now won the last two races it was built to win, and Ferrari's Sector 1 speed without the corner-exit pace to match it is a problem that doesn't go away just because the altitude does. Ricciardo, for his part, takes a pole lap and nothing else into what's left of his time at Red Bull, and the team will want an answer for that before he's racing for someone else next season.