Four on the trot for Hamilton!
Starting with Austria, then Silverstone, Hungary and his teams' home race in Germany, Lewis won four races on the trot
AAUSTRIAN GRAND PRIX For the second time that I can remember, there was booing of the race winner from the fans during a podium ceremony at the Austrian Grand Prix. Both times, it was precipitated by a last lap lead change. The only difference being that back in 2002 it was Rubens Barrichello who was ordered by his team to give up the lead to his Ferrari teammate Michael Schumacher, and now in 2016 Nico Rosberg defended his race lead on the last lap a bit too aggressively, resulting in a collision with his teammate Lewis Hamilton, damaging his own car, and handing the win over to Lewis. I can understand why the crowd booed Schumacher in 2002. He didn’t deserve that win. I fail to see why the fans at the Red Bull Ring jeered Hamilton. He didn’t do anything unsporting. All he did was prove that he was the better driver on the day.
Everyone loves the Red Bull Ring. It’s a great atmosphere, an awesome setting, and a track, which is quite a challenge. Qualifying was interesting, except for the obvious front row lock-out by the Mercedes duo. However, there were a couple of exceptional performances, from Hulkenberg who qualified 3rd, and Jenson Button who somehow managed to get his underpowered McLaren Honda in to 5th place. Rosberg had a five place penalty due to a gearbox change and so he started 6th, with Hulkenberg’s Force India promoted to a row 1 start, ahead of Vettel’s Ferrari and Button’s McLaren on row 2.
Hamilton led the pack in to the first corner, the first time he’s done that this year, and it seemed as if that was going to be the end of the excitement. Rosberg also got a good start and was up to 3rd place by lap 11, when he came in to the pits for his first stop, in an attempt to jump the Ferraris. Hamilton pitted later, on lap 22, but a slow stop meant that he came back on to the track behind his teammate. Now it was game on!
Then on lap 27, while he was leading the race, Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari had a catastrophic failure of his right rear tyre, ending his race in the gravel trap and bringing out the safety car. The second round of pit stops didn’t change the leaderboard much, with Hamilton making a mistake on his in-lap, losing himself a couple of seconds.
Hamilton started hunting down Rosberg with 15 laps to go. At the start of the last lap he was right on Rosberg’s tail. Nico made a small mistake in turn 1 and Lewis closed in for the kill. He got a run down the outside line going in to turn 2 and was ahead of Rosberg at the turn in to the corner. Rosberg had the inside line, but instead of taking the inside line, he decided to just not turn in, leaving Hamilton with nowhere to go. Hamilton turned in as late as he possibly could, but the two came together,
with Hamilton driving over Rosberg’s front wing. Later, the stewards found Rosberg to be the guilty party in the incident and also penalised him for driving the last lap of the race with the front wing lodged under his car.
The upshot of Rosberg’s overaggressive defence was that he landed himself with a broken front wing, and had to limp around the last lap, finishing only 4th. Lewis won the race, followed home by the young Red Bull superstar Max Verstappen and Kimi Räikkönen’s Ferrari. Daniel Ricciardo came home 5th in the second Red Bull. Jenson Button delivered an unexpected but brilliant 6th for McLaren-Honda, Romain Grosjean got Haas back in the points after a 4-race dry spell, Carlos Sainz Jr. was 8th for Toro Rosso, and Valtteri Bottas 9th for Williams. Pascal Wehrlein finished 10th, scoring Manor's first Championship points since the late Jules Bianchi's 10th place finish for the then-Marussia team in Monaco in 2014.
One thing is quite obvious. Mercedes is still in control of the 2016 season. Their drivers were the quickest guys out there in all conditions. As the season turns in to another two horse race between Rosberg and Hamilton, the ‘silver’ lining seems to be that at least the balance of power seems to shift between them from race to race. BRITISH GRAND PRIX
Lewis Hamilton seems to have a very special relationship with his home race. Many drivers go through entire careers without winning or even doing well at home. Jenson Button is a case in point. He’s never even finished on the podium at his home race. Even in his 2009 championship winning year, he finished 6th at the British Grand Prix. Lewis, in sharp contrast racked up his 4th home GP win at Silverstone this year, also completing a hat-trick of wins, having won there in 2014 and 2015.
Hamilton was dominant all weekend. He was fastest in all three practice sessions and broke the all-time lap record for this new circuit layout in Q2, and then again in Q3, on his way to securing the 55th pole position of his career. The only hiccup was when his first lap from Q3 was deleted by the stewards, for running foul of the very strict track limit rules being imposed by the FIA these days.
The race was not without its challenges, especially with the ever-changing weather conditions, for which Britain is so famous. The first googly was in the form of a mega rain shower, which enveloped the circuit with less than 15 minutes to go for the race. This meant a start behind the safety car, which does have its safety advantages, but it robbed the spectators of a real race start. Hamilton led the field once the safety car pulled in to the pits, and was straight away pulling away from his teammate Rosberg, with Verstappen biting at Rosberg’s heels in 3rd. Behind them, however, a whole gaggle of cars dived in to the pits for intermediate tyres, causing quite a bit of pit-lane mayhem, and at least one very near-miss between two cars, both of whom were in a frantic hurry to get back out on to the circuit.
Then came the defining moment of the race. Pascal Wehrlein spun at turn 1 on lap 7, bringing out the virtual safety car. It was at this moment that the three leaders jumped in to the pits to change to intermediates, and because of the virtual safety car, they all came out of the pits in their original top-3 places. From then on, Hamilton maintained his cushion over Rosberg, and drove a well calculated pace all the way to the chequered flag. Behind him, however, Rosberg was not finding it so easy on the intermediate tyres. Verstappen was gaining on him, and made a simply stunning overtaking move on Rosberg, around the outside of Chapel curve, which is a super-fast 200kph high lateral-g corner.
Rosberg got his 2nd place back once the cars had done their second stops and switched to slicks. By the end of lap 38, the podium positions seemed to be pretty much set in stone, but there was one last googly yet to be played. With just about 5 laps to
go, Rosberg was on the radio complaining to his team about a ‘gearbox problem’. The team confirmed his diagnosis and instructed him on the radio to do two things. “Chassis default zero one. Avoid 7th gear.” This immediately caught the attention of the race stewards and the much talked about radio communication ban. After much post-race investigation, the stewards adjudged that the instruction to make the chassis setting change was acceptable, but the instruction to avoid 7th gear was in contravention of the FIA rule which states that the “driver must drive the car alone and unaided”. This meant a postrace penalty of 10 seconds and consequently Rosberg lost his 2nd place finish, ending up 3rd. Initially Mercedes indicated their intention to appeal this sanction, but have later decided against appeal.
So now, with almost half of the season done and dusted, the points gap between the two Mercedes drivers is just one single point (the gap once being as large as 43 points). Who would have guessed that when we were 4 races in to the season and Rosberg had a perfect score of 100 points against Hamiltons 57? Let the best man/ Mercedes win! But who will be the best of the rest behind the German manufacturer? HUNGARIAN GRAND PRIX
The 30th anniversary weekend of the Hungarian Grand Prix started with quite a promise of things to come, with qualifying being a wet-dry-wet-dry kind of affair. The Q1 segment which is supposed to be 18 minutes, took over an hour, with four red flags caused by cars crashing out because of massive amounts of standing water on the track. Can you imagine the chaos that would have been caused by this, had we still been following the crazy knock-out format introduced at the beginning of this season?
By Q3 however, the track was drying out, and there was a very clear dry line on the track surface. Rosberg managed to steal pole position away from Hamilton, but under some very controversial circumstances. Hamilton was quickest after their first runs in Q3 and was on his way to improving his time during his second run when Alonso spun his McLaren on track in sector 3, just ahead of Hamilton, causing the double-yellow flags to be brought out.
That ruined Hamilton’s lap as he had to back off. Rosberg was still in sector 1 at the time, and by the time he reached the scene, Alonso had already rejoined. Rosberg set the fastest time in that sector, even though the double-yellow flags were still shown. There was a steward’s inquiry into the matter, but Rosberg displayed to the stewards (with the help of on-board telemetry) that he had lifted off the throttle and had reduced his speed by 20kph. The rulebook states that under double-waved yellow situations a driver must "reduce... speed significantly, not overtake, and be prepared to change direction or stop". Needless to say, the stewards’ decision not to penalise Rosberg caused some concern for many of the other competitors, and the debate over the matter will continue for a long time.
At the end of Sunday however, none of the above really mattered very much. Hamilton got a better start than his rival,
and led the field in to the first corner, a lead he would not relinquish until the chequered flag fell 70 laps later. The race was one of the most boring of 2016, and that’s saying something, considering the plethora of choices on offer. Rosberg dutifully followed Hamilton across the finish line in second place, never having really challenged for the lead at any point of the race. Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo kept the leading duo honest, but he couldn't put any pressure on the Mercedes duo and finished third. This is the third year in a row for Ricciardo on the Hungary podium.
The pit stops provided a few meagre scraps of entertainment. During a stretch when Ricciardo managed to close up on Rosberg, Mercedes got on the radio to Hamilton and asked him to speed up, to which Hamilton responded that he couldn't go any faster. When Mercedes came back to him with a message that they'd pit second-place Rosberg first during the next pit stop sequence, Hamilton somehow found some extra pace. Ricciardo pitted early for his second stop, hoping that fresh tyres and fast laps could allow him to pass one or both Mercedes drivers when they pitted, but once Hamilton hit the throttle the Red Bull couldn't respond.
Further down the field, Button came in on Lap 5 so McLaren could fix a brake pedal problem. The radio exchange before the stop included one ‘forbidden’ instruction to Button, so he had to return to the pits for a drive-through penalty. This is another example of crazy rules, as the instruction was clearly a safety related one, and should never have been acted upon by the stewards.
Sebastian Vettelbrought his Ferrari home 4th, less than a second behind Ricciardo, and Max Verstappen enacted a replay of the final stages of the Spanish Grand Prix, finishing 5th and holding Ferrari's Kimi Räikkönen behind for 19 laps. Räikkönen didn't like Verstappen's defensive tactics, with one of the Dutchman's moves costing Räikkönen a front wing end plate, and another nearly causing a collision. Alonso put in a strong drive to 7th place, ahead of Sainz’s Toro Rosso, Bottas’ Williams, and Hülkenberg’s Force India claiming the final point for 10th.
With less than a week to go for the German Grand Prix and the half-way point of the championship has just been passed, Hamilton now has a 6-point lead over Rosberg, the first time he has led this year’s championship. So although many of the individual races this season seem to be really boring ones, the championship fight between the top two contenders seems to be developing in to quite a classic.
at Turn 6, Rosberg used the power of his Mercedes power unit and the DRS to pull alongside Verstappen in the braking zone. Rosberg dived down the inside and ran really deep in to the corner, forcing Verstappen off on to the tarmac runoff. He incurred the wrath of the stewards, who deemed the move to be a little more aggressive than acceptable. They meted out a five second time penalty to Rosberg, that he served during his third stop. He lost even more time due to a malfunctioning stopwatch, meaning he was stationary for eight seconds before his crew touched the car. Over the team radio, we heard Rosberg telling his race engineer that he was at "full lock". The in-car video replay however, told a very different story.
Vettel had yet another frustrating race. He took issue with the Ferrari pit wall over strategy, after he was told to pit in order to get the undercut on Verstappen. The German said that he couldn’t see him, and rejected the pit order, as he was happy with the state of his tyres at the time. With the benefit of hindsight after the race, Vettel conceded that he should have listened to the team. He finished 5th, with his teammate Räikkönen following him in 6th. Bottas tried a 2-stopper but in the last couple of laps his tyres just gave up on him, and he gave up two places in the final laps, finishing 9th behind Hulkenberg and Button. Perez was the last of the points finishers in 10th, making it a double points finish for Force India.
Hamilton will now go away in to the long 4-week summer break full of confidence, all charged up to come back and fight for his third successive world title. The other side of the Mercedes garage however would have to get over the gloom and work out as to how Rosberg slipped up a 43-point lead that he had managed to prop up between himself and the rest of the field. It would be a brave man who bets against Lewis becoming champion once again, but even a braver one who would bet on Rosberg fighting back and reclaiming his lost lead.