2018 Russian GP Preview – By Bob Constanduros
And so to the final six Grands Prix of the year, conveniently packaged into a series of two races each, and starting with the Russian Grand Prix in Sochi, followed a week later by the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka. That, in itself, is going to be a pretty remarkable feat in a year of remarkable feats when it comes to the calendar but already looking at next year, we will have no triple header and Sochi will be twinned with Singapore with the Japanese Grand Prix as a stand-alone.
As it stands at the moment, Sochi is a difficult place to get to, a bit like its near neighbour Baku. When flying back from Singapore, we seemed to be heading to fly over Baku, then Sochi, maybe Istanbul and then Budapest – all stops on the Formula One calendar at some stage but not exactly interconnected, nor as easy to get to. Last night, flying out here on an afternoon when the visibility was exceptional, I spotted Brands Hatch, Buckmore Park kart circuit and Spa before it clouded over.
This isn’t easily accessible, in spite of apparently being joined by a straightline all the way from Singapore. You can fly out to Moscow (careful which airport) and then on down here, or perhaps to Istanbul and then on here which is what I did. But it’s scarcely a sociable schedule. Turkish Airlines flew me out of Heathrow and after I’d finished circuit spotting, I watched The Imagination Game in which my son Max has a small part as an extra, so that was fun. There were scarcely any other Formula One people on that flight, but after 90 minutes or so in an Istanbul lounge, we met up with more F1 people on the 1am flight to Sochi.
And although the flights and even rather slow immigration wasn’t too bad, it all started to go downhill a bit from there. We have a new promotor in Sochi, Rosgonki, and like their predecessors, they try and smooth the media’s way with advantageous hotel rates, shuttle buses and greeters at the airport. Well, they had a list of people at the airport but took a long time organising the people they were meeting into the right minibuses. Eventually we left and the guy took us to the new media hotel. Except he took us to the wrong reception.
These hotels were mainly built for the 2014 Winter Olympics and most are pretty good, certainly functional if not mega-comfortable. They really are OK but they usually comprise big blocks of rooms with various accompanying facilities. As they are right beside the Black Sea, they can now be used as holiday hotels.
Our hotel has two reception areas and about ten blocks of rooms. And – you guessed it – the driver took us to the wrong reception area. (This is now 03.00 in the morning, incidentally). So that reception area very kindly organises a taxi to pop us round the corner – at the other end of the ten blocks – to the right reception area.
There are various delays here, such as scanners that won’t work, night workers who aren’t used to talking to people, let alone in English, people trying to make us pay for our whole stay and giving us passes we don’t need, while not explaining how we actually get into the bloody buildings. But finally we are given keys to our rooms which in my case is the other side of the ‘other’ reception area.
So we tramp back out again and walk back to try and find and then gain access to our rooms. It is a long night. Eventually we managed it; the rooms are comfortable, the right temperature and quiet. At around 5am, sleep eventually overtakes. I’ll spare you the adventures of getting into the circuit this morning, but that was a further epic with poor guidance.
That just might be the only overtaking manoeuvre of the weekend incidentally; according to Mercedes, there were ‘no’ normal overtakes last year and no DRS overtakes. Like many teams and people involved in F1, Mercedes put out a series of statistics to aid the writing of pieces like this. Mercedes are the best but they perhaps don’t expect me to actually update what was written last year and it’s surprising how things ‘change.’ So I tend to take some of the figures with a pinch of salt.
One thing that might change this weekend are the conditions. Today has been surprisingly cloudy but it’s meant to warm up over the weekend, reaching a maximum on Sunday of 27 degrees. That’s been the maximum in the past and could well be the maximum again this weekend; the range has been from 19 to 27. Track temperature is 27 degrees at the moment; the average is 30 from the past with a range from 33-42. I say this because this race is once again an autumnal event, having been staged in early spring
This weekend’s tyre choice is the same as Singapore, with Pirelli’s yellow soft, then by-passing their supersoft to purple ultrasoft and then pink hypersoft. Just Alonso has three sets of softs, everyone else has one or two sets. Hulkenberg has just one set of ultras, everyone else has two, three or four sets (the latter being the case at Mercedes, Stroll and Gasly). Renault have ten sets of the hypers and Mercedes this time have a set more than they did in Singapore, with just seven sets, fewer than anyone. Everyone else has eight or nine sets.
It’s quite a long circuit, the fourth longest but it is very much in the street circuit genre so we might see the same difficulties of cars following one another as we saw in Singapore, with the circuit bordered by walls and debris fencing. The chosen strategy is usually a one stop, changing in the past from ultrasoft to supersoft between laps 26 to 40.
But it is a circuit with quite benevolent kerbs although the stop-start nature of the circuit means that tyres suffer a lot from wheelspin. It’s a track where Mercedes have won every time in the previous four editions; Sebastian Vettel has two second places. Neither of Red Bull’s current pair have even finished in the top four – but it will be Max Verstappen’s 21st birthday on Sunday. Of the F1 rookies, only Brendon Hartley and Charles Leclerc will be making their real debuts here having never raced here before in anything.
Can Mercedes’s onward charge be halted? Can Ferrari claw back some points? They need a massive Mercedes failure for that to happen and I can’t envisage that. Turn two is a major traffic jam here (turn one is the slight curve on the way down there) so there could be a kerfuffle there – but it’s just as likely (more so?) to involve the Ferraris so that’s no guarantee. Ferrari should be most keen to avoid another foot/bullet interface. They can’t afford any more…
Ends
