bla bla bla, Merc will fall backwards, I'll eat my Mclaren shirt if they both finish in the top two.
I never remotely said they would finish in the top two, anywhere, I said if they can stay out front, not least because in qualifying they made up ALL their time being faster in the final sector, meaning they get half a second ahead before the DRS zone, that if they can stay out front they would be hard to pass.
The biggest problem was they decided to do a stupid 3 stop strategy which at best if it works out means you come good in the final stint, going long on the first stint would mean being slow and pitting and coming out behind those who pit on a 4 stop. When you have the lead, you pit FIRST to STAY first, Merc should have been on a 4 stop from the start, they may have had a better jump on the cars infront had they pitted first.
Realistically Hamilton should have been first in rather than Webber/Massa, and maybe again got up close to Rosberg and helped keep them back. In reality, the second they went onto the hard tyre the race was lost. The question was how long and how badly they could hold people up and therefore how high they could finish, not if they could finish 1-2.
Second race Merc have tried to go for the "lesser" tyre strategy despite being the worst tyre wear car on the grid(okay excluding the guys right at the back because there is so much **** about this cars, who knows how they are on tyres), and the second time it hurt them by changing strategy after midway through the race.
What surprised me was just how bad it was for Hamilton today. In the first races Hamilton was still able to get on the podium or high points finishes. Today he just looked so so slow.
Well they both fell back badly when they put the hard tyre on, Rosberg had a better race for sure, the three stop worked a little better for him, I think most of the difference was pushing Lewis on to a 4 stop from a 3 stop, ultimately that hurts you this year more than last and happened in the first race IIRC. if you're going around at 3 stop pace and do an extra stop, you're utterly screwed, you can maybe go around at 4 stop pace and then eek out a 3 stop without too many issues but you'll probably end up very slow extending the tyres.
The car was just abysmal, you could see he was getting messages basically in the 2lap out from pits that he hit the tyre temp limit already.
Just a guess here. The Merc was supposedly faster in straight lines which would probably mean its running skinnier wings than the others?
And thus understeering more and placing more emphasis on mechanical grip?
(Just a shot in the dark here really).
THe main reason the car is fastest is simply the merc engine, its got better top speed than the other cars, which is why Force India/Mclaren are also great in straight line speed and quite hard to pass under DRS.
My guess is in getting their awesome high performance they've got an exhaust putting out too much heat around the near tyres, something, they've been worse on tyre wear for 3 years, significantly so, it might be a fundamental flaw with the car which might not be generally possible to be fixed till a new car next year. Thing is, they could be 2 seconds slower in qualifying, never make it to Q3, if that is from a fix that slows the cars ultimate pace dramatically, but lets the tyres heat up significantly less and lets them be 2 seconds faster than currently in the race, they'd be winning races.
Its nice to qualify on pole, but in todays F1, 2 seconds race pace means a hell of a lot more than qualifying in the top 10.
The main issue wasn't the tyre wear itself today though for Merc, if the tyres wore out after 10 laps while everyone else could do 20, but it did that because Merc were awesome stupid fast, that wouldn't be all that bad(not great but not bad). They were simply not at all fast while the tyres were wearing down, they couldn't get the tyres to "turn on", and give them any grip or pace.
I mean, it was embarrassing seeing them go into a sequence of slower corners, forget where, end of sector 2 somewhere I think, where Hamilton first, then Rosberg both had to life off and coast into the corner early to be slow enough to stop because there was simply no grip to brake as late as everyone else.
Last year's qualifying only one car was faster than 1:22.2 in Q3, this year only one car even slightly close to last years second, the entire top 10 was faster than last years second with the top 6 all being a full one second faster than last years 2nd place(all faster than that awesome Hamilton lap last year as well). THe cars are faster yet The race was 7 seconds slower, Bahrain was 50 seconds slower this year.
Why are people complaining about the tyres more, because the cars are 1-2 seconds a lap quicker than the cars last year, but the races are being run slower, because the tyres have slowed them down.
When Bahrain is 50 seconds slower this year, but the cars are a second a lap faster, the tyres have actually slowed the race by at least 2 minutes. There is less driving, less natural overtaking, and there is less speed and less pushing while the tyres still wear out over the same period.
