Was it Vettel's largest ever defeat to a team-mate?How times - and Australian team-mates - change for Sebastian Vettel. After going through the whole of 2013 undefeated against Mark Webber on race day when both Red Bulls made the chequered flag, Shanghai represented the second successive race in which the quadruple World Champion had been beaten by Daniel Ricciardo.
The particularly eye-catching thing about the Chinese result was the gap between the two RB10s in fourth and fifth: 20 seconds in Ricciardo's favour, and this despite the Red Bull new boy initially dropping behind Vettel off the line. The history books show that Vettel has suffered only five heavier race-day defeats when both he and his team-mate have lasted the distance in his seven years in F1, but two of those to Webber in Malaysia 2012 (58 seconds) and Britain 2010 (37 seconds) owed more than a little to mitigating circumstances in the form of costly punctures for the German at both events.
If those two races are discounted from the analysis, then it's only
Germany 2011 (38 seconds), when Vettel, off-colour all weekend, spun mid-race,
Spain 2010 (51 seconds) and
Turkey 2007 (35 seconds) against Tonio Liuzzi at Toro Rosso in only his third F1 start when Vettel has trailed a team-mate by a bigger margin than we saw on Sunday.
In that context, Ricciardo's performance becomes all the more impressive.
And how much slower was Raikkonen than Alonso?If the 20-second gap between the Red Bulls raised a few eyebrows, then the difference between the two Ferraris in Shanghai was an F1 chasm. While Fernando Alonso ran the dominant Mercedes cars closest and delivered Ferrari's first podium of the season, his fellow ex-World Champion team-mate Kimi Raikkonen, hampered by tyre warm-up problems in the chilly conditions after a generally disjointed weekend, finished eighth - a whopping 52 seconds behind the Spaniard.
Their respective grid positions, fifth and 11th, always meant that any intra-team turnaround for Raikkonen on Sunday was always going to be difficult whatever happened and, although picking up two places on lap one, Kimi was already 11 seconds adrift of the fast-starting Alonso just five laps into the race. But that the gap grew to the best part of a minute over the next 50 laps despite Raikkonen not being particularly stuck in traffic, especially once past his old team-mate Romain Grosjean on lap 13, underlined the extent of his Shanghai struggle. During his 21-lap second stint Raikkonen didn't once lap quicker than 1:44.1 whereas Alonso only twice lapped as slow as that and that was when his medium rubber was 20 laps old and his second pitstop was imminent.
As noted by the Finn himself post-race, his pace did briefly pick up at the start of the final stint and some initial laps in the 1:42s - including his fastest of 1:42.300, the eighth quickest of the GP - started to slowly reel in the Williams of Valtteri Bottas. However, by lap 38 the grip had gone again and Raikkonen was back in the 1:43s. He eventually finished in a relative no man's land - 21 seconds behind Bottas but six seconds clear of Sergio Perez's Force India.
Kimi's assessment that "obviously there's a lot of work to do" reflected what has so far proved a disappointing return to Ferrari.
