Originally Posted by Assa2:
“Excellent result as far as neutrals are concenrned. This is shaping up to be one of the most competative seasons for a long time. Farrari can't be complacent, though. They won through the dogged determination of their No1 driver, the weather and the inexperience of the fastest driver on the track and despite still having a bad car and there being plenty of other faster cars out there. The win papers over the cracks, nothing more.
No idea where Mclaren's race pace went. Hamilton is very lucky that despite having two bad races he's still managed two podiums and to be a close 2nd in the DC. That's the kind of luck you need to with the championship. However he needs to get his race head together quickly. Button race was a weird one. Very silly mistake then no pace at all.”
I think Alonso is well aware of this, even if nobody else is.
Despite all his cheering in the car and on the podium, in the interview afterwards he was VERY downbeat, saying stuff like "This changes nothing. We still have a lot of work to do and we cannot be complacent" etc.
I suppose it's also worth pointing out that, for those who said Hamilton was a "miserable sod" after his 3rd in Melbourne, Alonso was even more miserable after his win in Sepang. I think he has a right to be though cos he knows his car is hard work to drive and it's probably going to eat tyres in warmer weather if it stays as it is.
I don't think Hamilton was "lucky". Quite the opposite in fact. He seems to be driving very much "within himself" at the moment and under-achieving somewhat.
It really is as if he's made a conscious decision to always take the "bird in the hand" rather than go after the "bird in the bush" and I suppose I can see why, after last year, but it's not the sort of driving that earned him his fans.
In general, I do kinda worry that F1 cars are becoming too specialised.
I first thought this with the Brawn car back in 2009.
It was like they deliberately built a car that was designed to go well at, say, 9 out of 16 races and they just knew it would suck at the other 7 races but they figured that winning more than half the races would be enough to grab the championship.
This worries me because it creates the possibility that teams will end up deliberately choosing to build cars designed to win at a subset of races and, as a result, you'll rarely see drivers really able to battle with each other.
It
shouldn't be a big problem because, in theory, all teams will want to build a car that can win at the majority of circuits but a team might decide, for example, to build a car that only works well in cold weather (as Ferrari seem to have accidentally done tis year) and then hope that the other teams will take points off each other in hot races.