Think Lewis Hamilton has the world championship sewn up? A charging Red Bull should make you think again

David Tremayne: There’s a school of thought of late that the fight is over with Hamilton 34 points in front of Sebastian Vettel, but in truth the real fight might just be starting

With Red Bull on the charge Lewis Hamilton knows he still has work to do to seal the title (Getty)

What do you do with your drivers when you have just finished a grand prix one weekend and are heading to the next only days later?

If you were Mercedes with Lewis Hamilton, you’d be working through all the data points after having a massive post-race debrief which was more like a post-mortem into why your car only finished second and was suddenly (for the second race in succession) a long way off the pace of your rivals.

If you were Ferrari with Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen, you would first of all be treble-checking the former’s gearbox to make quite sure that a big collision on the slowing down lap of the previous weekend’s grand prix had not done sufficient damage to the transmission to necessitate a replacement which would cost you five grid places (apparently, it’s okay). And you’d also be trying to figure out the engine/turbocharger problems that afflicted your man in qualifying and made him start from the back of the grid. And then caused something similar to happen to your other guy who was due to start from the front row of the grid and would probably have won, but instead didn’t start at all.

That’s what happens when you are fighting tooth and nail for a world championship title, as Hamilton and Vettel are. They come here 34 points apart after Hamilton’s recent run of three consecutive victories which was interrupted, finally, in Malaysia last weekend.

But what if you are quirky Red Bull, whose drivers Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo finished first and third in Sepang? Well, you get them to learn the art of Kendo. Of course you do.

“Japan is undoubtedly one of our favourite destinations on the planet, a country with an amazingly rich culture, fabulous food and a flat-out bonkers take on pretty much everything from robot restaurants to cafés where you can have an owl sit on you while having a beverage,” a refreshingly amusing press release said.

“But, in dreaming up something for our drivers to do in Tokyo this week, we resisted the temptation to make them do anything offbeat or even too classically calming (we figured that racing drivers, who generally have the attention span of a guppy, would react badly to a tea ceremony or nice origami session), and instead we made them hit people with big sticks. Kind of a no-brainer really.

“So, just before we headed for Suzuka we brought Max and Daniel to the Konnou Dojo in Shibuya for a training session in the 300-year-old martial art of Kendo. That’s the really cool one with the masks and body armour and the massive bamboo swords…”


 Hamilton knows he still has a fight on his hands 
 (Getty)

In its own way, that was only what they will be seeking metaphorically to do to both Mercedes and Ferrari this weekend.

Suzuka is old school, a classic grand prix circuit so utterly different from the street tracks in destination cities that may yet lie in the sport’s future if Liberty Media get too carried away. A track penned by the late, great John Hugenholtz (who also designed Zandvoort in his native Holland) which features a massively challenging series of fast swoops and swerves in the first part of its 5.807 km lap, followed by tricky, big commitment corners and then fast curves, a hairpin that requires heavy braking, then a flat-out run to the once notorious 130R left-hander where none less than Michael Schumacher crashed heavily in 2001 before going out in his spare car and lapping quicker still. It’s a man’s race track, and the drivers love it.

And Verstappen and Ricciardo would love nothing better than to dominate here the way they did last weekend as Ferrari and Mercedes struggled.

Red Bull have had a tough season, with only Ricciardo winning the dramatic race in Baku with an opportunist’s skill until his just-turned-20 team-mate finally had a reliable run to get the job done last time out.


 Red Bull triumphed in Malaysia and will be competitive in Japan too 
 (Getty)

Verstappen sounded a cautious note when he said: “Of course, in qualifying, I think it’s a bit more tricky for us to be in front of them but we know that in the race normally our car is a bit stronger and we can look after our tyres quite well, so hopefully that’s a benefit maybe for some upcoming races but we have to wait and see. Every single weekend you have to set up the car well. You can say, yeah, here we were really quick so now we should be quick on every track, but you are never 100 percent sure.

“We just have to wait and see when we get to Suzuka. I think it’s a bit too early to say that we will be really competitive here. We were not too bad last year, but we still have to find a good set-up.”

Hamilton himself made no bones about how he felt about Red Bull’s return to the front, whether a third contender made things better.

“Absolutely, absolutely. I think we need even more than that. Red Bull have really stepped up their game and it’s great to see them performing so well. We obviously want them to be even closer so it really mixes things up. I think it’s great, I think it’s more exciting for the fans. Wouldn’t it be great if we had Williams back there and McLaren back there and then there would be a real race.”

But both he and Vettel are all too aware that if the Red Bull drivers can wield their motorised Kendo sticks hard enough this weekend they could take away valuable points from them in their battle.

There’s a school of thought of late that the fight is over, with Hamilton those 34 points in front. In truth, if Red Bull can keep up their pace here and in succeeding races, the real fight might just be starting.