I thought I would add my waffle to the discussion.
1: I still feel Lewis is a better driver than Nico. Nico has always been a bit of a "quali setup bias" kind of driver, and to be fair, track position is often key. However, he has had more luck this season and is "due" some bad luck to even it out.
2: I am firmly in the camp of letting them race, however, some of the moves in the last couple of seasons have got silly. It's school boy behaviour frankly. Moving under braking and just plain waiting for them to pull out to overtake and slamming the door so aggressively. That's not racing. It's cheating. It's the kind of thing I expect to get when I go go-karting on a stag. Waiting until you are pretty much along side and just making a massive movement to block the over take off or force them into an accident or off the track. How can we race, when we are allowed to just chop people off so deliberately with no intent of allowing some actual side by side action.
The Verstappen move on Kimi at Spa is the best example of this, and the Rosberg move on Hamilton in Spain. The latter caused an actual accident as Lewis had no where to go. The former could have been quite literally a death had Kimi touched him at over 200mph.
I think you should be able to hold a defensive line (and stay on that line) from early on approaching a corner, but not to suddenly move totally accross the track when a vast closing speed is occuring from your opponent behind you. It's too dangerous and is leading to people having to lift to avoid an accident, and any decent racing.
3: Blue flags are being ignored and people are taking the biscuit. I firmly believe that blue flags ARE required and should be followed for I hope very obvious reasons. I can only begin to imagine how frustrating the racing would be for the leader to be first up to a back marker and lose 10 seconds totally changing the strategy and race just because someone was too stubborn to move out of the way early enough.
It was much more of a problem here at Japan because the track is narrow and you can't really over take as easily outside of the main and back straight. I think some drivers push the boundaries of what is acceptable and today went over that line. The drivers are right to moan. They are being held up and their races are being interfered with, with people that are not in the/their race. That's not fair. The argument should not be that "if they were fast enough they would overtake without blues" as that is very naive. The argument should be "you are a back marker and so slow that you are now being lapped and have no place to affect my race, get out of the way quickly and efficiently, then carry on with your race, even if you are in the middle of your own battle". The priority should always be to get out of the way.
4: The starts are becoming an issue. It's easy to say that it should all be manual and remain "harder" for the drivers. Yes. "Harder" is good over "automatic". But I would say right now the word that most closely resembles the starts is "lottery". That's not good for fans either when we want fair racing and close battles. Many races are being lost in the first 3 seconds of a race due to inconsistencies with the clutch feel, application and bite. No one clutch is the same supposedly.
Due to tolerance, manufacturing processes and temperature on a given day, one clutch bite point and grip can feel totally different to another. This is why Hamilton has not been able to iron this out. There is no ironing out to do. He could practice 100 starts and it would be meaningless until the actual race start, not to mention very expensive to test!
Right now there is no easy fix or they would have done it. Bit of a shame.
