Sunday, April 12, 2015

Five things we learnt in China

Lewis Hamilton Nico Rosberg
Lewis Hamilton Nico Rosberg
Rosberg needs to know when he is beaten
Watch the extraordinary footage from the post-race press conference as Nico Rosberg lets rip at Lewis Hamilton and there’s one tell-tale glimpse of emotion that speaks loudest of all.
No, not the visible fury of the cold-eyed Rosberg, hard enough though his simmering anger is to ignore. Look instead at the smirk of Hamilton when he is asked to respond to his team-mate’s accusations. It's all he can do not to laugh out loud.
Rosberg hasn’t merely made himself sound absurd, accusing the actual race victor, i.e. the driver who reached the chequered flag quickest of all, of driving too slowly, but he has also made the cardinal sin of effectively admitting in public that Hamilton has got inside his head. The spiky defiance of 2014 has crumbled into what increasingly sounds like a beaten man. On and off the track, Rosberg has taken an absolute thrashing at the start of 2015 - and indeed ever since Hamilton destabilised Rosberg by claiming his rival admitted crashing into him on purpose at Spa in late August. Rosberg has never been quite the same since. 
To use the popular vernacular his head certainly wasn't in the right place this weekend.
It matters not a jot that - and this won’t be a popular view - Rosberg's complaints this weekend may have been valid. Mercedes themselves effectively confirmed as much by immediately heeding his radio call with an instruction to Hamilton to speed up. Unfortunately for Rosberg, who himself knows a thing or two about the dark arts of motor-racing, compromising a rival is a tactic as old as sport itself. Find a driver who says differently and introduce yourself to a serial loser.
As the race leader, Hamilton was fully entitled according to the law of the racing jungle to drive at whatever speed he wanted. And if he succeeded in winning whilst saving up his tyres and compromising his nearest rival in the World Championship then all the more credit to him for his dexterity. 
Game, set, and match to Hamilton.
In a heated post-race press conference Mercedes' Nico Rosberg accused team-mate Lewis Hamilton of compromising his race.In a heated post-race press conference Mercedes' Nico Rosberg accused team-mate Lewis Hamilton of compromising his race.
Mercedes have a car for usual summer seasons
So much for the theory that tyres would be the Achilles heel in the Mercedes package this year then.
Although Ferrari’s ability to make their soft tyres run longer than the W06 could manage in the extreme heat of Malaysia was the Silver Arrows’ undoing two weeks ago, China provided an altogether different perspective on both teams' relative strengths and weaknesses.
Not only were both Hamilton and Rosberg able to run the sort of stint lengths that were expected from Ferrari in order to nullify the threat from Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen, but both W06s seemed far more adept at switching on the harder medium compound at the start of their final stints. Easily missed after the post-race hullaballoo, but Vettel, barely a second behind Rosberg after their final stops, had fallen over five seconds behind before the Safety Car brought proceedings to a rather anti-climatic conclusion. Ferrari's age-old struggle to put heat into their tyres hasn't disappeared just yet.
The narrative may have been slightly distorted by the benefits Hamilton and, to lesser extent, Rosberg exclusively enjoyed from running in clean air, but the picture presented in China was far more nuanced than the straightforward ‘Ferrari are better on their tyres’ conclusion of Malaysia. Ultimately, it would appear that while Ferrari have a car better suited to hot conditions, the Mercedes W06 has the edge in cooler climes.
You win some, you lose some - and a summer heatwave in Europe could be the making or breaking of the title race.
Max Verstappen
Max Verstappen
Verstappen is a star in the making
No, not just a star, but in the words of Martin Brundle, a pundit not given to hyperbole, but "a potential superstar". The Toro Rosso youngster isn’t only super-fast, but, better still, he’s super-exciting. Even after just three races, Verstappen oozes talent and the type of box office aggression that the sport hasn’t born since Lewis Hamilton marked his F1 debut ten years ago by mugging the then-world champion Fernando Alonso into the first corner at Australia. And Hamilton, of course, had a McLaren to play with; Verstappen is ripping through the midfield in a car bereft of straightline speed, finding ways of overtaking where there ought to be none.
Unless his Red Bull contract is watertight, some big hitters will surely be knocking on Verstappen’s door soon, ready and willing to rip up any long-term plans they had for their driver line-up.
Lotus' Pastor Maldonado had a mixed race in China, eventually ending after a collision with McLaren's Jenson Button.Lotus' Pastor Maldonado had a mixed race in China, eventually ending after a collision with McLaren's Jenson Button.
Maldonado may be more expensive than his sponsorship is worth
It was only a matter of time before Lotus broke their points-scoring duck for 2015, although given that he had almost endured a full calendar year without troubling the scorers Romain Grosjean’s seventh-place finish this weekend couldn’t have come a moment too soon for the Frenchman.
It may not have been apparent in the opening two races, when the Lotus appeared to be a magnet for trouble and misfortune, but the Mercedes-powered E23  is very likely the fourth-fastest car on the grid, bettered only by the Mercedes, Ferrari and Williams. If so, that spells further ignominy for Red Bull, reduced to duelling with Sauber and Toro Rosso this weekend at the back end of the midfield pack - or at least it would do if only Pastor Maldonado would stop giving pay drivers a bad name.
In the interests of fairness, it must be acknowledged from the outset that the Venezuelan, whose wheel-perfect victory in Spain two years ago is surely destined to be considered one of the biggest one-off flukes in the history of sport, was the victim rather than perpetrator of his crash with Jenson Button.  But there the mitigation ends and the finger-pointing begins. As Grosjean’s unobserved cruise to seventh in identical machinery testified, Maldonado. shouldn’t have been anywhere near the two McLarens at that stage of the race. Instead, he would have been about ten places up the road but for taking his car for the wrong type of spin having already blown his race by pitting for a cup of tea with a couple of startled marshals rather than entering the pitlane correctly.
When does a pay driver stop paying his way? Right now, the difference between the amount prize money Maldonado may potentially cost Lotus and the sponsorship he brings the team must be an interesting quandary for a bright young thing with a degree in mathematics to grapple with.

Lewis Hamilton absolved of blame for China driving by Sky F1 pundits

Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton says he didn't compromise teammate Nico Rosberg's race in China.Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton says he didn't compromise teammate Nico Rosberg's race in China.
Sky F1’s pundits have absolved Lewis Hamilton of blame following Nico Rosberg’s accusation that the world champion "compromised" his Chinese Grand Prix.
Mercedes found themselves at the centre of a fresh intra-team row amid what would normally have been the jubilation of securing a one-two finish in Sunday’s race.
Having finished behind his team-mate, Rosberg claimed that Hamilton had put him into an “unnecessarily risky position” by not driving fast enough while in the lead approaching the second pit stops and, as a result, pushed him into the clutches of Sebastian Vettel.
Rosberg had already expressed his frustration with Hamilton over the team radio during the race when the German driver was first heard saying: “Lewis is driving very slowly to get him to speed up”, before adding: “If I go closer I destroy my tyres like in the first stint, that’s the problem”.
With a perplexed Hamilton defending his driving and tactics after the race, Sky Sports' F1’s pundits had their say on the matter and could not see what the Briton had done wrong.
“Lewis was leading the race so I think he was entitled to do whatever he wanted. If you want to change that, get in front of him," said Martin Brundle. 
"I think it is perfectly legitimate to back your team-mate and your main championship rival [into a car behind]. He’s got the high ground, he’s got track position, and if Rosberg had done it he would have been entitled to do the same thing as well.”
In a heated post-race press conference Mercedes' Nico Rosberg accused team-mate Lewis Hamilton of compromising his race.In a heated post-race press conference Mercedes' Nico Rosberg accused team-mate Lewis Hamilton of compromising his race.
Former world champion Damon Hill agreed that Hamilton had been fully within his rights to control the pace of the race at the front.
“Another Mercedes driver by the name of Juan Manuel Fangio said famously 'the goal is to win at the slowest possible speed',” Hill recalled.
“So I think he'd be proud of Lewis Hamilton today because he did exactly what he needed to do and he saved, he kept it in hand, he kept it under control and it was masterful. I think twice this weekend Nico has shown his frustrations and his irritation at finding someone else to blame and it is starting to look weak."
After missing out on pole position to Hamilton by less than a 10th of a second on Saturday, Rosberg blamed the Mercedes pitwall for putting him under “unnecessary pressure” ahead of his final Q3 lap by making him rush his out lap.
The German’s failure to overhaul Hamilton on Sunday means he has only once beaten his team-mate and title rival in a race since last July and Hill insists only Rosberg himself can change the narrative at Mercedes.  
“Nico is just shooting himself in the foot by showing the world he’s upset as if the world can do something about it,” the ’96 title winner said. “We can’t do anything about it – Nico has to outqualify Lewis, he has to take the fight and the high ground.”
Mercedes' Nico Rosberg says teammate Lewis Hamilton compromised his race by driving slowly and backing him into Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel. Mercedes' Nico Rosberg says teammate Lewis Hamilton compromised his race by driving slowly and backing him into Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel.
Fellow pundit Johnny Herbert agreed: “It’s the nature of sport. For him to fix this, he needs to beat Hamilton in qualifying. Then you lead it and start to control it. That’s all Lewis was doing, controlling it and looking after the tyres.”
However, while in agreement that Hamilton had done nothing wrong in Shanghai, Brundle admitted it was difficult to be too hard on Rosberg given he appears to have been told by Mercedes' hierachy to start providing his team-mate with stiffer competition again.
“If Nico had scuttled off and said nothing, we’d have said ‘that’s weak – why’s he not fighting back?’” Brundle suggested. “He’s been playing the nice guy in the first two races and we categorically know he’s been told to stop all that, it’s just feeding Lewis’s confidence.
“But he’s got to come out and make as much smell as he can.”
Mercedes' feuding drivers now prepare to return to the scene of the most intense battle in their three seasons as team-mates, Bahrain, for round four of a 2015 season which Hamilton currently controls from out front.