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I believe they are driving equal cars up to the point where one driver gains an ascendency based upon performance

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This won't happen, but if it did, then yes I and (I suspect) many others would have to revise our opinion of the field.

But I'll say it again: It won't happen.

Rosberg has shown flashes of brilliance, but IMO he hasn't shown enough of them to prove he is top class material. Being paired up with Hamilton is his big chance to show what he's got.

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I don't follow F1 so I don't know what I'm talking about

You really think every pair of cars on the grid in Australia will be identical? The teams won't even know which development parts are best at that point.

What about strategies? What about drivers who have to give up friday practice before any ascendency is even established?

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Yes this is the point if it did happen then i would have to revise my opinion as opposed to looking for excuses which some forumers may resort to as we have seen before

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Don't they have free practice to decide the best way to go with the car?

Who in particular is having to give up FP1?

I would think best strategy will be given to the car running in the best position in the race

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Most recently, Bruno gave up a lot of FP1 time.

Sometimes teams will race development parts on one car and not the other, not just practice with them.

There are two ways to judge strategy: versus that of your teammate, and on the strength of it on its own merits. What if one side of the garage has an inferior engineering team, or your primary strategist isn't very good at multitasking and can only give a hundred percent of his capacity to one car and not the other? Then not only does the lead car have the better strategy in comparison to the teammate, the teammate also has a just plain bad strategy.

What if one driver is required to do more PR work than the other, and that means more travel, less down time, and less capacity to be performing at a hundred percent? What if they have equal commitments but at different parts of the year, where one is stacked at the beginning of the season, ruining his chance to stick his nose out and earn the team's full support for the remainder of the season?

There are endless possibilities for discrepancy in performance between teammates OUTSIDE of literal driving skill on an event weekend, so there is no true and fair way to compare - which is why I say being successful over a season is about more than just how good you are at driving the car.

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Obviously i'm aware of Senna losing free practice time but when does this happen at the top teams?

I question how often drivers are running different parts from one another apart from personal choice, i know this happened during the end of last season at Ferrari but this certainly didn't seem to be to the detriment of Massa.

As far as different strategies are concerned as far as i can see certainly with the leading teams, drivers from the same team in the main stop within a couple of laps of one another and tend to run the same tyre strategies, performance between the teammates is dictacted more often than not by who is fastest.

Clearly when one drivers falls out on contention then he starts to help his teammate and his own personal strategies can start to become compromised, but other than that i find it hard to believe that a faster driver is being constantly being beaten by his slower teammate just by strategy.

As far as PR commitments affecting driver performance, if this is true then McLaren need to take a look at the PR their drivers have to do, but then again i'm doubtful of the affect anyways on ontrack performance.

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Surely the team wants to win the constructors so it would be in there interest to make sure both cars have a good strategy?

I read multiple times here that Jenson would never come anywhere near Lewis, well on his second season in McLaren he beat him.

All this ranking a driver by one seasons is all wrong, look over a whole career.
And yes by the way, Lewis is not "regards as the outright fastest man in F1" that's Sebastian.
(If you read anything else than British media)

I'm gonna get shot for this but reading the Hamilton interviews I've noted a comment on the number of buttons on the steering wheel and how he reduced them at his time of McLaren.

My theory is maybe Lewis suffered so many failures because the switches to put systems into safe modes or alternative settings had been removed at his request

Many times over the years we've heard driver radio calls reporting issues and the pitwall telling the driver to click a switch or press a button!

It's just a theory guys!!!

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Multi 21 or Catch 22?!

It ain't hating just 'cause it's not love

How do we know that McLaren didn't provide less buttons but more turny knob things to do the job instead? Or buttons that had more than one function?

What you are suggesting is an awfully big guess.

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1994 1995 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

I'm going on the bit of his statement where he said he reduced things and yes it's a guess I never said it was fact!

Bloody hell Laura what happened to you? You've changed this last week or so!

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Multi 21 or Catch 22?!

It ain't hating just 'cause it's not love

Nothing happened to me. This forum has just become a war zone between Hamilton fans and non Hamilton fans and I'm fed up of it. Both sides are making silly excuses and leaps about things that make barely any sense.

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1994 1995 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

Ok here's how mine could

Gear box issue... Change gear setting from 3 to 5

Driver: oooops I asked for that dial switch to be removed
BOOOOOOOM!!

That working for ya?!

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Multi 21 or Catch 22?!

It ain't hating just 'cause it's not love

Not really. For such an issue the team would probably have stuck it on one of the dials instead. Perhaps Lewis prefers dials instead of buttons. We don't have the first idea really.

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1994 1995 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

I assume you are actually referring to this quote from Lewis:

Lewis Hamilton : “It is a bit like starting all over again. I remember in 2006, going into 2007, just having to learn all these new controls, all these different procedures that you had to do. It’s all fresh and new again in this car. On the steering wheel I think I’ve got at least double the amount of buttons and switches that I had on my previous one. I’ve already got rid of quite a few of the buttons as soon as I got here. But I still have way more than I had before. And the engineers and just the way the team works is different to what I’ve experienced so it is like starting from fresh.”


Sounds to me like they had a stream-lined steering wheel at Mclaren and now he's moved over to Merc, they've got a wheel with far more buttons than he was used to... Surely it's not him getting rid of useful buttons, but instead pointing out that the wheel could be far more efficient...

Exactly.

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1994 1995 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

You really did not watch 2009 did you?

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The fact that you say things are different at top teams is an indication that using apparent on track performance as an absolute for comparison of teammates is incomplete and no bueno.

They don't always get to choose their own parts, and they don't always use the same strategy (in fact, they usually don't) so again, how can you make an absolute comparison if the conditions are not equal?

And for PR commitments - why do you think some drivers express a desire to do fewer of them? If it were no big deal, they wouldn't mind. But all those who do speak out on it say generally that they affect down time (bad for stress relief) and training schedules. How can those things NOT affect performance?

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I wouldn't be overly surprised to see Rosberg match or even beat Hamilton this season. I'm not saying Rosberg is better, but I do think he's somewhat under-rated and Hamilton has a lot of adjusting to do having been at McLaren for so long.

I am not sure what some people are on about Lewis losing the motivation to drive comparing how he used to when he came. His determination has certainly not diminished just by a few bad cars/setup. I did see quiet a few brilliant drives from him last year and before that as well. You can hardly compare Lewis and Alonso. For the record Ferrari was not exactly slow in race trim. Quali yes. That can hardly be classified a dog of a car. Where Alonso capitalised was the racing strategy. They knew they would not qualify well. So the strategies changed as the race was on. There have been times when their strategy didnt work. Thats where I think the Ferrari kept themselves in contention. Also they had bullet proof reliability. Compare that to Mclaren where they failed big time was reliability and getting the right setup for the tyres.

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Aus13: 2nd
Chi13: 3rd

Kind of contradicting yourself, it was by looking at his whole career and not just the 2009 season that many people concluded that Jenson would struggle against Lewis. I almost think its a bit of a tribute to Lewis that people think Button did so well in getting pretty close to him. Button is a champion after all.

In the case of Rosberg and Lewis I would really like to think Lewis is fast but then again we havent really seen Rosberg in a fast car since his career began. There were some good drives by him earlier. When he did get a chance to let loose he did win the China GP so again flashes of brilliance here and there. So Only time will tell who may trump whom.

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PF1 Pick 10
Aus13: 2nd
Chi13: 3rd

Yes you would think that would be the case

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Well i'm saying as much that the top teams don't employ pay drivers as such as say Senna at Williams, who was signed because of his budget rather than talent, unfortunate to what he agreed to but he had little choice.

I don't really think there is any set strategy to be adhered to at any cost, the race is a fluid thing where sometimes you have to react and change strategies, but no strategy is really going to help if you lack basic race pace.

I can think of one obvious reason why drivers don't like doing PR commitents as in they're boring and they'd rather spend their time doing things that actually interest them. I don't know the levels of PR the drivers have to do but where is the evidence that this affects driver performance relatively between teammates?

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Obviously every individual personality will be affected differently by distractions. It can't be quantified...no outside factors can...which is why comparing drivers isn't science, its guesswork and opinion.

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Well i just go by ontrack performance

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Yes, and as I've been saying, on track performance in hardly the total picture, so judging on that alone is kind of meaningless.

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Well that seems to be how also the teams judge their performances

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Not really no. Money, relationships, opportunities, personality type...all things that influence a team's driver choice.

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Would be a bold man/woman to rate driver A ahead of driver B if driver A is being out raced almost every weekend. Taking other factors into account or not.

How often do you see a team sack the faster driver?

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I think you haven't worded that right?

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PFI Pick 10 Competition

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Edited to make sense

I can reply now

Yep and how often do you see the team replace driver B, but plenty of times you see driver A getting replaced?

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What? By whom? Bollocks.

Difference between the best and the worst driver on the grid is well over second. If someone thinks Hamilton, who is on pure talent 3-4 tenths faster than Button, would have the same margin over Razia, Chilton or van der Garde, then he needs his head examined. Hamilton or Alonso would completely trash these drivers, no matter if they were driving in Ferrari or Marussia, such is disparity between their respective talents.

I'm not too sure about that its very rare nowadays to see such perfomance gaps between drivers, i would say only Karthikeyan would fall into the 1 second plus category. When d'Ambrosio substituted for Grosjean at short notice he was about 7 tenths off Kimi and i don't think that he's shown to be anything special, nothing more than the likes of Razia, Chilton or van der Garde.

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I would say this assessment is about accurate.

I was wondering why more people hadn't picked up on that. WDC winner = career wasted? And now he's the lead driver of the 2nd most successful F1 team of all time (who, unlike Williams, are still title contenders)... career wasted?

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"I am a believer, but I start each Grand Prix with 195 liters of fuel behind me," he explains. "I don't rely entirely on God, I rely on Prost."

How absurd to say that Button has wasted his career. He's been in F1 for 12 years, become a World Champion, scored 15 wins, 49 podiums, 999 points, has been awarded an MBE, made a ton of money and seems more than quite content. Wasted?