But then Mercedes inadvertently put itself under massive pressure by switching its other car, that of Lewis Hamilton, to a three-stop strategy in a last throw of the dice to retake third from Kimi Räikkönen’s Ferrari. And the race came alive. Hamilton’s stop triggered a domino effect as Ferrari responded to it with Kimi, Red Bull responded to Räikkönen’s – this in turn forcing Mercedes to prepare to bring Rosberg in to defend against Ricciardo from possibly using his new tyres to more than make up the pit stop loss over the old-tyred race leader. But a combination of a stunning out-lap from Ricciardo and Rosberg hitting traffic on what was going to be his in-lap forced Mercedes to leave him out, for to have pitted was certain to have lost them the lead and probably the victory.
So instead the last 14 laps played out with a rousing chase, Ricciardo on barely used super-softs hunting down Rosberg on much older and harder compound tyres; tension and thrill interspersed, each marshalling their finite resources differently, trying to judge how much and when to give out, when to conserve, Mercedes accepting Rosberg was going to be caught but guiding him, particularly in the usage of his very marginal brakes.
This track, Montreal and Mexico City are the toughest on the calendar for brakes and define the maximum cooling capacity for the brake ducts (which cost aerodynamic performance and which designers therefore want to miniaturise as far as possible at the car’s conception stage). If you figure you are going to be running out front, you might conceive even smaller ducts, knowing you’ll be in clean air for much of the time and also with less need to use them so hard. Right there is defined the small ducting of the Mercedes, even at maximum capacity. So both Rosberg and Hamilton were hard up against that limit from very early in the race and for most of the rest of the evening. That too played its part in the shape of the race, for if Hamilton had not had to back off so much, he’d not have been passed in the second stint by Räikkönen (in a Ferrari with massive front brake ducts), Merc wouldn’t have thrown the strategy dice – and the dominoes wouldn’t have fallen.
