Nico Rosberg took his fourth win in the last five races around the legendary Suzuka circuit, extending his lead in the drivers’ standings over Lewis Hamilton.
An incident-free race saw all 22 drivers finishing the race. Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton finished off the podium, but no one could challenge Rosberg.
Before the race started, two more grid penalties were handed out to shake up the grid. Jenson Button took on his new Honda power unit before the race rather than waiting until Austin, giving himself a 35-place drop. He started from the back. Kimi Räikkönen picked up a five-place drop for changing his gearbox, meaning he started the race from P8 rather than P3.
Rosberg held the lead off the line as Hamilton had a poor start. He slipped backwards down the grid as the front running cars shot passed him. It is not yet known what happened to Hamilton off the start, but he was P8 as the grid settled down. The Ferraris made a decent charge with Sebastian Vettel on a mission. He shot to fourth off the line after narrowly avoiding the slow-starting Hamilton. Räikkönen followed his teammate through but Daniel Ricciardo split the pair.
Hamilton’s race became a recovery race as he tried to pick up as many points as possible. His Mercedes seemed to be lacking during his first stint on the scrubbed soft tyres but after he got onto the hard compound in his second stint the pace in the car came alive.
Vettel was trying hard to use his tyre strategy to get onto the podium. It looked to be going well for the Scuderia as Vettel held the lead over Rosberg once the championship leader had made his second pit stop. However, Vettel elected to take on the soft compound for his final stint to try and reel in Hamilton for the last step on the podium. The problem was that the softs, as they had been all weekend, degraded extremely quickly when being pushed hard. Vettel had a good challenge on for a few laps by the tyres fell off the cliff and he had to back off and settle for fourth.
Räikkönen followed his teammate home for fifth, with Ricciardo behind him by about five seconds. The fourth-place constructors’ championship battle remained in Force India’s advantage as the Force India duo finished seventh and eighth with the Williams duo rounding off the top 10.
Although there were a lot of overtaking moves in this race, most of the action happened at the front.
At Honda’s home Grand Prix, they had a race to forget this weekend. Fernando Alonso finished 16th, two places ahead of his teammate. It could be said that this was McLaren’s worst race of the season after they have had such an impressive run since coming back after the summer break.
Mercedes wrapped up the Constructors’ Championship with the 40 points that Hamilton and Rosberg brought back to the team. Rosberg now leads the Championship with a 33 point lead. With just four races to go and Hamilton’s demeanour appearing to be giving up, could Rosberg be in line to winning his first F1 title?
