The last time an Aussie stood on the Australian GP podium

Fans of the fairytale genre will know – spoiler alert if you aren’t or you don’t – that towards the end of Cinderella the carriage turns back into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight.

In the 2014 F1 season opener in Australia, local hero Daniel Ricciardo seemed to have had his own ‘fairytale ending’ when he finished second in a Red Bull car which had barely completed a handful of laps without breaking down in testing. Team-mate Sebastian Vettel, the reigning world champion, was already trying to arrange an early flight home after halting in a cloud of smoke on the third lap.

Somehow, despite all that limited running, Ricciardo had split the dominant Mercedes duo of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in qualifying to start on the front row. While he fell back at the start, he benefitted from Hamilton’s retirement to be running in second at the checkered flag.

Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing, 2nd Position, Nico Rosberg, Mercedes AMG, 1st Position, Andy Cowell, Managing Director, HPP, Mercedes AMG, and Kevin Magnussen, McLaren, 3rd Position, on the podium

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

But just hours after a beaming Ricciardo acknowledged the enthusiastic roars of his home crowd during the podium ceremony, his carriage proverbially reverted to pumpkin form. He was disqualified, his second-place finish was struck from the record, and McLaren inherited what would prove to be its last double podium finish for seven years.

What is fascinating about Ricciardo’s disqualification is that the documentation reveals the FIA knew his car was illegal throughout the race – and not only that, gave Red Bull the opportunity to correct the situation… an instruction the team ignored. You might wonder, then, why it took until after 8pm on the night of the race, long after the ecstatic crowd had filtered out of the gates, to amend the result.

2014 was among the biggest technical resets in the history of the world championship as F1 adopted 1.6-litre V6 turbo engines augmented by complex hybrid electrical systems. The aim was to point the way for future road car technology by massively increasing thermal efficiency – that is, the amount of potential energy in the fuel which is converted into kinetic energy driving the rear wheels.

As part of this regulatory change, the amount of fuel permitted onboard the cars at the start of the race was capped at 100kg, and the maximum permitted fuel flow at any point was limited to 100kg/hour. The difficulty here was the means of measuring fuel flow: while the sensors are standardized, the method of measurement is open to inaccuracies.

In effect, the sensors operate in a similar fashion to the way your smart watch keeps tabs on your heart rate – by firing a beam of light through a flow of liquid and measuring how long it takes to bounce back. During practice in Melbourne, the sensor on Ricciardo’s car had given inaccurate readings, and the replacement installed on Saturday failed during qualifying.

Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull Racing RB10

Photo by: Daniel Kalisz

Red Bull was directed to re-install the original unit and apply an offset to its readings. But during the race it decided that was still wrong, and used the fuel pressure at the injection point as its measure.

So when the FIA told the team it was consistently exceeding the 100kg/hour limit, Red Bull decided to ignore the instruction and argue about it later. But this issue wasn’t just a sporting and technical matter, it had a political dimension as well – because fuel flow was fundamental to the entire concept of the new formula.

It could not be seen to fail.

Ricciardo’s disqualification was therefore inevitable, as was the subsequent throwing-out of Red Bull’s protest. Charlie Whiting, the FIA’s race director and technical delegate, said in the week before the race that there would be a zero-tolerance approach to teams going over the limits.

Again, the question remains: why take hours to nix the result when Ricciardo could have been taken aside immediately, as when Max Verstappen was diplomatically removed from the parc ferme ceremonials in Mexico in 2016? There are those who believe the governing body wanted to inflict maximum pain by allowing Red Bull to enjoy its moment to the full before snatching it away.

A more likely explanation is that it didn’t want to prompt a riot. Australia is a passionate sporting nation and, while just a handful of Aussies have contested grands prix, the country has produced two world champions. The Australian Grand Prix was a fixture on the sporting calendar long before it became a world championship round in 1985 (in fact, pedants may quibble about our podium statistic since John Smith finished third at Calder Park in 1983, but in those days ‘Australian Formula 1’ was a championship for Formula Atlantic cars).

That passion is manifest in the support you can see for Oscar Piastri in Melbourne this weekend – and if he finishes on the podium, you ain’t seen nothing yet…