RICCIARDO ENDS McLAREN’S WAIT AS TITLE RIVALS CLASH

We earned it. We were leading. We were putting ourselves in a great position – the team made good pitstops. We put ourselves in a winning position and it wasn’t circumstances. We can sleep knowing that we earned every bit of this.”

Daniel Ricciardo was entirely correct in his assessment of McLaren’s 2021 Italian Grand Prix result. The Australian won the race ahead of team-mate Lando Norris, while title contenders Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton controversially clashed twice, the second contretemps putting both out and leaving the Mercedes driver dangerously close to being seriously injured.

But, even without that clash at the Rettifilo chicane just before the race’s halfway mark, there are plenty of reasons to suspect that Ricciardo and McLaren would have triumphed at Monza anyway.

Ricciardo had gone a long way towards earning some Sunday success with his excellent performance to take third in the sprint race (see page 21), which of course became second on the Grand Prix grid when Valtteri Bottas’s penalty for taking a fresh engine pre-‘normal’ qualifying was applied.

Then, right at the start, Ricciardo’s main race was transformed. He’d tried to banish thoughts of Hamilton’s terrible getaway from the second-place grid spot the day before – “Sometimes you do get a grid offset, like left side is better than right or something” – but nevertheless didn’t feel his start was all that wonderful. This was thanks to the medium tyres that all the leaders, bar Hamilton from