Lewis Hamilton won an incident-packed Monaco Grand Prix on Sunday to get his Formula One championship bid back on track after a dismal run of eight races without a win. However, a courageous decision by Hamilton to not change the tires when his team had advised him to, paid off and he won the race in 1 hour 59 minutes, and 29.133 seconds ahead of Ricciardo.
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“The guys were running around like ducks, I don’t like being up here and being miserable because I got a podium in F1 and it should be a good day but when it happens two races in a row it is hard to take”. This mean that when Ricciardo arrived for tires, they weren’t ready. But the Australian paid the penalty for a bungled pit stop that cost him victory when his team did not appear ready for him to come in. The race then got going properly on the seventh lap as the Safety Car went into the pits.
His aggressive defensive manoeuvre on the opening lap of the Spanish GP offered more evidence of his new approach, yet the Rosberg we saw in Monaco was as submissive and weak as the driver who was constantly outclassed by his team-mate in 2015. “Unfortunately the set of tyres that were called for weren’t readily to hand and were at the back of the garage”.
But a slow tyre change cost him the lead. “I forced him into the fence and by doing so he made a mistake and cut across the chicane”, Ricciardo said. At the end, Nico [Hülkenberg] had a lot more rubber left on his Soft tires and my UltraSofts were finished, so I lost temperature in the drizzle and lost grip, which let him past too. “I’m not sure where to go from here, what to do”.
“Disappointed in myself and disappointed for the team, because they worked very hard to get the vehicle ready and I didn’t give them the result they deserved today.” said Verstappen “We were in a good way, we were in the points and to start from the pit lane and end in the points would have been very good, but I learned from this and hopefully we can come back stronger in Canada”.
Of course, a race in changeable conditions on the streets of Monte Carlo carried obvious dangers to the man nursing a 43-point lead in the championship.
The Englishman’s day to remember was in stark contrast to the once experienced by Hend who had fired an eagle at the 18th hole on Saturday to open up a one-shot lead. “A lap later we gave him the call of letting him by and he did that immediately”.
“First of all, for any driver it is extremely hard to accept such a call and we understand that”, he said. Bottas was handed a 10 second time penalty, imposed after the finish, for colliding with Haas’s Gutierrez.
It was the second ace of the day as Britain’s James Morrison also had an ace at the 14th to win a vehicle from the sponsors worth around $A190,000.
“We will investigate and find out, but it was a human mistake”.
PARIS: For the second time in a week Samantha Stosur’s French Open charge has been halted by the temperamental Parisian weather.
Radwanska held a healthy 6-2 3-0 over Pironkova before their match was also halted due to rain. Felipe Massa took home the last of the points in tenth.
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But the high-risk approach of going for winners had its drawbacks as Stosur racked up just as many unforced errors (12) compared to Halep’s six. Mercedes fifth in six races this year and fourth in a row in Monaco.
