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Once considered a serious title contender, Australian fan favorite Daniel Ricciardo’s career on the F1 grid has fizzled out in a disappointing way. This weekend in Singapore he ran a race that can be described as forgettable, starting 16th and finishing 18th, but that middling performance has the potential to impact the 2024 world championship title fight. It’s clear that the battle for the WDC is between defending champ Max Verstappen and McLaren’s Lando Norris, but Danny Ric’s actions on the final lap of the event seriously helped Max.
As the race wound down it sure looked like Lando Norris would come out of the weekend with max points, scoring the “Grand Slam” of pole, race win, and fastest lap. That fastest lap is worth an extra bonus point, which would help him catch up to Verstappen’s once-thought-insurmountable points lead. Sitting a lap down in 18th, Ricciardo’s VCARB team called him into the pits to bolt on a set of soft tires and rip off a quick lap to take the fastest lap away from McLaren. “If Max wins by a point then I just guaranteed myself a nice Christmas present,” Ricciardo quipped to Sky Sports after the race. Daniel did not earn a bonus point for his efforts, however, as the fastest lap bonus point only applies to drivers who finish in the top ten.
By denying Norris this point, it meant that Max doesn’t need to win any of the remaining six Grands Prix in order to keep his title points lead. The current points situation has Verstappen on top with 331 points (despite not having won a race since June) and Norris on 279.
In a hypothetical situation where Norris wins every Grand Prix and Sprint, and collects all six fastest laps between now and Abu Dhabi in December, and Verstappen finishes in second each time, Max will still win the championship by a single point. In that scenario Norris would take 150 points for winning races, 24 points for winning three sprints, and six bonus points for fastest laps, ending the season on 459 points. Verstappen would take 108 points for finishing second in six GPs, and 21 points for runner upping in the three sprints, giving him a season-ending points total of 460.
That scenario seems seriously unlikely, but as the races wind down it becomes increasingly likely that Max will keep his points haul just high enough to keep the title in spite of a serious Red Bull performance drop off in the second half of the 2024 season. If Max manages to find a win in there somewhere, or McLaren’s “flexy wing” getting soft outlawed impacts the Papaya team’s speed, it’s pretty much over.
Since its inception as Scuderia Toro Rosso in 2006, the team now known as Visa Cash App RB’s raison d’etre has been as a Red Bull helper. There isn’t a rule in the F1 book specifically disallowing teams from helping other teams, though it is something of an unfair advantage for Red Bull to have four drivers on the grid instead of the two that every other team has. Is it ethical to have the team from Faenza, Italy acting in a manner beholden to the team from Milton Keynes?
