Word on the beat

λ Red Bull has reshuffled some roles within its team in the wake of the imminent departure of sporting director Jonathan Wheatley for his new role as Sauber principal. Max Verstappen’s race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase will be head of racing while retaining his existing role with Verstappen. He will in addition now be in charge of the race, heritage and car build teams. Race strategy engineer Steve Knowles becomes acting head of sporting matters, reporting to Lambiase.
Rich Wolverson becomes head of race team operation. Current chief mechanic Phil Turner will be promoted to race team factory operations manager.

λ At the time of writing it was expected that Daniel Ricciardo would be replaced in the RB team by Liam Lawson, with effect from the next race, the US GP in Austin, thereby bringing Ricciardo’s F1 career – which began at Silverstone in 2011 for HRT and encompassed seven grand prix victories for Red Bull and one for McLaren – to a close.

λ Max Verstappen’s response to his ‘public service’ penalty for swearing in a press conference at Singapore was to limit the length of his answers to questions in the subsequent FIA conferences – and then to hold fuller interviews outside the conference. After the race he said, “If you can’t be authentic, can’t be yourself with these kind of silly [restrictions] I’m now at the stage of my career that I don’t want to be dealing with this all the time. For me, that is not a way of my continuing in this sport. We’ll see. Racing will go on, F1 will go on, without me.”

λ Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s speed on his one-and-a-bit flying laps in the Mercedes before crashing out of FP1 at Monza created something of a stir. His speed through the Ascari chicane remained unmatched for the rest of the session at 118mph. The second-fastest was Lando Norris’s McLaren at 111mph.