Originally Posted by ACU:
“I think Hamiltons problem is when hes in the car, the red mist drops and all he wants to do is drive the car as fast as possible. Which is what a racing driver should be looking to do. However with F1 as it currently is, thats not the smart thing to do - and on occasions you simply cant do that. Which must be frustrating for Hamilton. The key question is, can he adapt and learn to reign in his instincts? If he does, he will have a great chance of winning the WDC.”
Uhuh,
Think I said last year...
Once it'd become obvious that the title was out of reach, somebody should've just given Hamilton the opportunity to run a race exactly how he wanted to.
Let him go nuts, set fastest lap after fastest lap, burn up the tyres as quickly as he wanted, pit whenever he wanted to and use whatever tyres he wanted to.
It seems like, whatever the result, somebody'd have learned something.
Either Hamilton would have learned the real value of restraint or, perhaps, the team would have learned that doing 3 banzai stints
can actually be quicker than doing 2 longer, more measured, stints.
I reckon there's a time and place for both types of driving.
Last season I recall there were a couple of races (Korea springs to mind) where it seems like Merc' stuck to, say, a 3 stop strategy and their cars were lapping horrifically slowly towards the end of each stint whereas it
might've actually been faster if they just let Lewis off the leash and taken an extra stop.
Thing is, as well, there's an element of "follow the leader" about it all.
If the guy in front is looking after his tyres you know you can't go nuts trying to catch him because, even if you do, you'll struggle to complete your own stint and probably end up losing time overall, even if you
do gain track position temporarily.
And, by the same token, you don't
really dare make extra pitstops in case the guy behind
doesn't and ends up jumping you during your extra stop.
Just occurs to me that if somebody decided not to play by the same rules as everybody else then it'd throw all the strategies into chaos and every other team would have to try to figure out how to respond.
Or, on the other hand, if you did that and ended up coming 14th, you'd have learned that there's no real benefit to the whole banzai thing.
But you'd probably have provided a great spectacle in the process.