There was little to separate the front runners throughout much of the Spanish Grand Prix.
More often than not the race leader had at least one other car within two seconds of him – something we’ve seen little of so far this year.
Ferrari and Red Bull each chose to put one of their drivers on a theoretically quicker three-stop strategy. Daniel Ricciardo’s pace in the second stint, seen in the race gaps chart below, shows he could have reached the end of the race at around the same time as the eventual winner, his team mate Max Verstappen.
However this assums Ricciardo could have passed any traffic in front of him easily. This would have been tricky enough once he’d caught the relatively slower race leaders, particularly as Kimi Raikkonen had the benefit of DRS.
But this is a moot point as he never got that far – he instead caught Sebastian Vettel who had already converted to a three-stop strategy. Vettel’s pace on mediums was not as strong as Ricciardo’s, so he inadvertently served as a spoiler for Ricciardo’s hopes of catching the front runners.
2016 Spanish Grand Prix lap chart
The positions of each driver on every lap. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, click name to highlight, right-click to reset. Toggle drivers using controls below:
Position change summary
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2016 Spanish Grand Prix race chart
The gaps between each driver on every lap compared to the leader’s average lap time. Very large gaps omitted. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan and right-click to reset. Toggle drivers using controls below:
2016 Spanish Grand Prix
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ColdFly F1 (@)
16th May 2016, 18:40
What’s so amazing to me in this win is that Verstappen kept first Vettel behind him (from lap 19 until Vettel copied Ricciardo’s strategy) and then kept Raikkonen behind him from lap 43 until the end. Not a single mistake, maturely using sector 3 to keep the gap just above the 0.6sec or Raikkonen needed to make a pass, and focussing on traction in the last corner. Well beyond what I expected of a still little experienced driver who just ‘got the keys to his father’s car’.