Motorsport on Monday: 23/11/15
Webber wins but so does Vettel, Montoya gets a WEC P1, will the Macau double-champ get a drive?
Quite the celebration!
This meant the #17 car needed a fourth-place finish to grab the title. Too tight to call. And even tighter, when the throttle problem returned in the fifth hour. It was genuine tenterhooks stuff until... Lotterer took the wheel during a pitstop - and had to return back the following lap to fix a loose wheelnut. The victory would duly go to the #18 Porsche of Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb (the sixth win of the year for Stuttgart), meaning the fifth place for Webber, Bernhard and Hartley would be enough to grab the title.
Was a "super-stressful" event
An opportune moment for former Porsche boss and new Volkswagen AG chairman Matthias Muller to set out his stall too. "The World Endurance Championship's ground-breaking regulations allows both of the group's brands - Audi and Porsche - to test and develop future technologies for road going cars. Motorsport was and remains an important tool within the Volkswagen Group."
OK, that's still a little bit unclear, given how much Volkswagen may need to save in order to pay for dieselgate, so over to new Porsche AG chairman Oliver Blume: "This is a great position to start the 2016 season from." Whatever, if any, money-saving motorsport cuts may be made in the close season, Porsche's title-winning WEC programme won't be one of them.
Filling his trophy cabinet once again
Strewth, Seb! You just can't let Mark have his moment in the limelight, can you? Nope, and so Sebastien Vettel stormed to a clear Race of Champions individual win at Olympic Park on Saturday night to put right a long-standing gap in his trophy collection. He beat Mr Le Mans Tom Kristensen in the final too (three times the bridesmaid for Tom...), after also seeing to Petter Solberg, Nico Hulkenberg and David Coulthard.
Pity we didn't have a Brit in the final, despite Coulthard and Alex Buncombe making the semi-finals. They made much better progress than two other 2015 champions, mind - both Jose Maria Lopez (WTCC) and Pascal Wehrlein (DTM) were eliminated in the first round...
Fastest rookie at the Bahrain test
What next for Juan Pablo Montoya after scooping another Indy 500 win in 2015 but so painfully just missing out on the IndyCar title? This weekend it was back to being a rookie, driving the FIA WEC title-winning Porsche 919 Hybrid in a five-hour test at Bahrain.
He duly ended up fastest of the rookies, despite going up against young talent such as 2015 LMP2 champion Sam Bird, Richie Stanaway and Mitch Evans. But then, he did have the best car. He'd earlier described the 919 as "a helluva toy" and said he was "shocked because it's so good". Even so, he said the idea of the day was to enjoy the car rather than anything else. He wanted to "have fun and drive the hell out of it".
He did that, ending the day almost 1.3 seconds faster than Stanaway in the R18 Audi. Pretty impressive, and although he's confirmed for IndyCar in 2016, he did admit a shot at the Le Mans 24 Hours "would be cool", as would a possible switch to WEC in future years.
Which could be history in the making. The Triple Crown of Motorsport, that unofficial achievement of winning the Indy 500, Monaco Grand Prix and 24 Hours of Le Mans? Graham Hill is the only man ever to achieve it but Montoya is currently the only driver in the world to have won two of the three. Missing on his score sheet? Le Mans...
Surely he has to get an F1 drive
Felix Rosenqvist is a 24-year-old Swedish star. He's won the F3 Masters, twice, the Pau Grand Prix and, in 2015, the FIA Euro F3 Championship. He also won Macau in 2014 - and, this year, has only gone and done it again! Domination of the F3 'triple crown' and an overall title to boot - so why isn't he on F1 teams' radar? Why isn't he vying with the man he raced in 2014, Max Verstappen, on the Grand Prix grid?
All to do with contacts, he reckons. F1 is half how fast you are, half who you know. He does know Mercedes-AMG well, and they've supported him for the past couple of years (powering him to quite the haul of race victories), but this hasn't led to an F1 test and now, it seems, Rosenqvist may even struggle to get on the GP2 grid next year.
Seems tough for only the second man to win Macau F3 back-to-back. Let's hope he doesn't become another quick but relatively cash-poor youngster not to realise the success his talents (or a bit more cash) deserve.
[Photos: LAT]
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