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Daniel Ricciardo Takes First-Ever Pole At Monaco Grand Prix
Surprising as it might be, the Red Bull Racing team that once went years in a row without giving up more than one pole to the rest of the grid in a season hasn't taken one since a dominant Sebastian Vettel's biggest challenge was his teammate, Mark Webber. Vettel is in a Ferrari and Webber a Porsche sports car now, but for the Red Bull Racing pairing of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo, just one race old, shades of that former glory are starting to appear. First came a win for Verstappen in his team debut in Spain, and while Ricciardo won a number of races in his alongside Vettel in 2014, pole today would mark not only the end of a long pole-less streak for the team but the first-ever top-of-the-grid start for him.
The impressive run for Ricciardo, just over a tenth of a second up on Mercedes teammates Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, came in no small part thanks to a lightly updated Renault engine in use this weekend by him and Renault factory driver Kevin Magnussen, but not his teammate Verstappen or Magnussen's teammate Joylon Palmer. The manufacturer had just two engines ready for the race, and just as with tire strategies last weekend, Red Bull made the curious choice of opting to give the significantly riskier, but potentially more rewarding, strategy to their more experienced and significantly steadier lead driver, rather than their extremely quick but risk-prone newcomer. The choice seems to have paid off, because while Ricciardo was able to start on pole, Verstappen would follow up his stunning drive at the Circuit de Catalunya with an incident in Q1, brushing the barriers hard enough to damage his suspension and, eventually, land him in the wall. He'll start 21st, a full ten rows behind his leading teammate, at one of the hardest tracks to pass on in all of motor racing.
Back at the front of the grid, the Ferraris, Force Indias and Toro Rossos all found themselves within a second and a half of the leaders, with Vettel leading the way for Ferrari in fourth ahead of Nico Hulkenburg's Force India in fifth. Fernando Alonso added a McLaren to the equation in tenth, and with a fairly quick lap for the struggling Honda-powered machine, ensured that every car to run in Q3 was within two seconds of the leading Red Bull. Williams ace Valtteri Bottas and Haas driver Esteban Guttierez would finish just outside the top ten, a disappointing result for two teams that have been able to find themselves around one another in Q3 consistently despite two very different recent histories.
As is tradition, the 61st Monaco Grand Prix of the modern era goes green at 8:00 AM Eastern on the last Sunday in May, four hours before the start of the 100th Indianapolis 500.
