Originally Posted by gomezz:
“Bearing in mind that it is not his native language I will give him the benefit of the doubt and he meant that they chose a relatively risk averse strategy which they thought still gave them enough in hand to win the race.
I am surprised no-one on the coverage or on this thread has made anything of Hamilton's much reduced amount of running during free practise due to one problem or another. This would explain why they would want to play safe.”
Well, maybe kinda related but I thought it was a bit arrogant the way that, after his car died in FP1 and it
still wasn't in good shape during FP2 (no telemetry and gearbox problems), Merc'
still decided that the best use of their time was to send Hamilton out on a "banzai" lap, just to put him on the top of the timing table for the session.
As I already said, I dunno if it was Hamilton who insisted on doing that, or whether it was Merc' who didn't want to see Ferrari topping the time-sheets, but it really
does look a bit like Merc' (or their drivers) had started to become so confident that they just weren't paying attention to what other teams are doing.
I'm guessing this will be a bit of a wake-up call for everybody in the team.
And, on a related note, it'll be interesting to see what happens now that the Merc' drivers have to compete with somebody from a different team.
I mean, while it's been Hamilton vs Rosberg, they've always know what the competition is going to do.
Neither Hamilton
or Rosberg has had to try and 2nd-guess the competition to decide what strategy or set-up to use.
Will the other guy be doing 2 stops or 3? Is the car optimised for the straights or for the corners?
They've always been in the position where they
know what the other guy is going to do so they never have to risk doing something wacky.
They can just adopt a similar strategy but attempt to do it a bit better than the other guy.
Now that it's starting to look like Ferrari are getting
near Merc', I wonder if we're going to see the Merc' drivers getting their set-up badly wrong, as they attempt to adopt strategies intended to get the better of Ferrari?
Also, if Ferrari are getting close to Merc', I guess Merc' might need to have a think about how/when they're going to adopt some kind of strategy to avoid having either championship stolen from them, as happened to McLaren in 2007.