Formula 1: Winners and losers from the 2018 Mexican Grand Prix

The wait is over. Lewis Hamilton secured the 2018 Formula 1 championship with his fourth place finish in the Mexican Grand Prix.

The debate about who will take home the 2018 Formula 1 championship has finally come to an end with the Mexican Grand Prix providing excitement that extended beyond the battle between Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel.

While the resolution to the season-long debate over who would reign is over, there were a number of other storylines from the Mexican Grand Prix, including a surprise driver on the top step of the podium and heartbreak for Formula 1’s unluckiest driver of 2018.

With a champion crowned and the confetti settled, here are the winners and losers from the Mexican Grand Prix.

Winners

Max Verstappen

There have been very few opportunities to celebrate a race in 2018 that was not won by a Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport or Scuderia Ferrari driver. Max Verstappen nearly had a sweep of a weekend. which was spoiled when he was narrowly beaten out for the pole position in the final round of qualifying by his Aston Martin Red Bull Racing teammate Daniel Ricciardo.

Verstappen started the race from the second position in a car that hypothetically should be lacking in horsepower compared to the Mercedes cars of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas and the Ferrari cars of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen, but this did not faze the Dutchman.

Once the lights went out, Verstappen managed an impressive start while his Ricciardo was swallowed up by the horsepower-heavy Mercedes of Hamilton. Verstappen built up a gap over Hamilton in second place with Hamilton understanding that all he needed to do was score five points and the championship was his.

Tire wear became an added variable with Ferrari and Mercedes both experiencing significant levels of it. Verstappen managed to nurse his tires for a longer period of time, which helped him to offset some of the speed disparities between the Red Bull Racing cars and the Ferrari and Mercedes cars. Verstappen ended the race with a wide winning margin of 17.316 seconds over Vettel, who finished in second place.

Lewis Hamilton

Coming into the Mexican Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton knew that all he had to do to take the championship was score five points, as those five points would mathematically eliminate Sebastian Vettel from having enough races to close the points gap. Hamilton qualified for the race in third place, right in front of Vettel in fourth. The game plan was set for Hamilton: drive a clean race and score five points or more.

More from Formula One

• Formula 1: Top Red Bull threat identified for 2024
• Formula 1: Why the Max Verstappen retirement obsession?
• Formula 1: Williams ‘mistake’ hints Logan Sargeant’s future
• Formula 1 awaiting key confirmation for 2024 season
• Formula 1: The ‘championship’ Max Verstappen only leads by 3 points

Once the race began, Hamilton made clear efforts not to get tangled up with either of the Red Bull Racing drivers who qualified in front of him. Once Hamilton got past Daniel Ricciardo and up into second place, he let discretion become the better part of valor and made the concerted effort to stay out of the wake of Max Verstappen, which allowed him to try to conserve his tires and finish in a position that resulted in him scoring the necessary amount of points to win his fifth career championship.

As the race wore on, tire degradation became a larger variable and Ricciardo and Vettel moved past Hamilton. In the end, Hamilton did what he needed to do and scored 12 points by finishing in fourth place, allowing him to clinch his fifth career championship. Get in there, Lewis!

Losers

Sebastian Vettel

Sebastian Vettel did not have a disastrous result in the Mexican Grand Prix, but his result was more of a culmination of poor results that led the four-time champion to this position of being runner-up. There was one requirement that Vettel had to meet in order to even have a chance at continuing his quest to win the championship that had been slipping away with each passing Grand Prix weekend. He needed to win out.

One of the surprising detriments to Vettel and his championship effort was contact with other cars that resulted in spins and losses of position. Vettel nearly had that same exact situation happen once again on the first lap of the Mexican Grand Prix when the he made wheel-to-wheel contact with the Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas. Vettel did, however, show an immense amount of post-race respect by congratulating Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton on a well-raced season.

Daniel Ricciardo

There has not been a driver who has had more potentially strong results taken away from him for reasons out of his control than Daniel Ricciardo. Ricciardo surprised many in qualifying by beating out teammate Max Verstappen to take pole position for the Mexican Grand Prix.

Ricciardo was jumped off the starting line by Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, but he was in no way looking to have a quiet race. He spent time battling and upholding his unofficial title of the “last of the late breakers”. It did not last though, as on lap 62, the distinctive thin white smoke began to emanate from the exhaust of his car, showing the all too familiar signs of a Renault power unit gone sour.

This marked eight total retirements so far this season for the 29-year-old Aussie, who stated the following after the race: “The car… I’ll let [Pierre] Gasly drive it, I’m done with it.”

Ricciardo has expressed that he is well and truly done with the reliability issues that he has faced at Red Bull Racing. Will his move to Renault Sport provide an improvement in reliability for him?

Conclusion

With the driver championship already wrapped up and the constructor championship looking to go to Mercedes for the fifth consecutive season, the last two races of the season will turn the attention back to the mid-pack where points battles still rage on.

Mercedes can finish out the season knowing that they put forth the best team effort over the course of the season while Ferrari have two races to try to draw back some of the points that they threw away throughout the season to show that the championship battles were not as one-sided as they might have seemed.

The next round of the Formula 1 calendar is set to take place at Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This race, the Brazilian Grand Prix, is scheduled to place on Sunday, November 11 at 12:10 p.m. ET, and it is set to be broadcast live on ABC.