…and Lewis is still the only driver to have won a race in every F1 season he’s competed in (10 now) – whether he’s had a good car or a shite one!

Thinking about it as a team sport rather than focus on the driver, what would have happened if another team had been given mercs car at the start of the year then left to get on with it?

Redbull – win both titles
Ferrari – possibly drivers but would have made enough mistakes to make the wcc close
Mclaren – definitely wdc, probably wcc
Williams – strong start to the year but would lose relative pace during the year and maybe just squeak wcc.
Force India – no budget to develop enough, probably beaten by Ferrari or RB in the second half of the season, no title
Torro rosso – would’ve given the car to redbull 😉
Haas – good early results but too many newbie errors so lack of consistency, no titles
Sauber – zero progress, drivers too erratic, no titles
Manor – bit better than sauber but fail to win either title

So it’s as much about the team’s ability to develop the car and have “clean” weekends as it is about whoever is driving it.

Not sure that Force India wouldn’t have scored a title tbh, they seem to have an uncanny knack if punching waaaay above their weight! 🙂

Merc have the best car and pretty anyone decent could replace LH and they’d still be winning.

I’ll say it again, alot of people on this topic don’t really know F1.

What did Lauda ask DC?

He asked Lauda to think of when he was last driving competitively, for McLaren and asked him what he’d have done in that exact same situation.

Let’s not forget that a couple of decades ago, three (almost four, if you count 1997) world titles were decided by contact being made between the title contenders. What we saw on Sunday was clean racing. Vettel, Verstappen, Rosberg et al all drove without controversy.

I’ll say it again, alot of people on this topic don’t really know F1.

Go on then, you must be dying to tell us. Which team did you work with? It’s a pretty ballsy statement for someone who hasn’t worked in a team. So don’t be coy. Tell us which.

Toto works in F1 and he doesn’t seem to get how it works at times! 😀

captainsasquatch, go on. Do you work within Mercedes closely on the strategy and personnally with the drivers?

For what its worth, the team bosses ranked LH number 1 driver for this year.
Autosport poll

I don’t think we’ve even seen him peak yet.

captainsasquatch, go on. Do you work within Mercedes closely on the strategy and personnally with the drivers?

I’m not claiming that I have superior knowledge to others on the thread. I’m just enjoying the chat between F1 fans without having to diss them. I say it’s you, who has mentioned several times that people don’t know F1, that should reveal where your expertise comes from and why anyone should listen to you over anyone else posting.
Otherwise stop criticising others who have a different pov to you, question it by all means, but dissing just makes you look a prat.

Provisional calendar is out for 2017, Germany has gone and Brazil is in trouble. Thank god Canada and Belgium are still in otherwise it would be a disaster.

Oh and 11 corners around the world being altered to stop drivers cutting them.

Germany has gone?

🙁

Germany has gone?

Championship wining team has no home race 😐

Hora you don’t need to follow and understand all the details of F1 to see Mercedes is the dominant car and that a whole raft of drivers would win in it and that Rosberg or Hamilton in a different car would be the 100+ points back that everyone else is.

@Pondo I think you are stretching a point, there are plenty of drivers who in the Merc could beat Rosberg from time to time and would finish 1/2 more often than not. Hamilton is a fantastic driver but he has a bad attitude and imo you can’t work with that. He’s worth a lot to Mercedes as they want to change the image of the brand and he is very popular in Asia and of course the UK. Personally I don’t think he’s worth the trouble.

I have a feeling that Lewis thought about it all before the race and thought about what Senna would have done. He wants to be compared to Senna and anyone who knows anything about Senna knows exactly what he’d have done. Along with pretty much the whole grid.

Besides it’s OK. Lewis’ pr people have sorted it out.

https://mobile.twitter.com/LewisHamilton/status/804051998488297472

Not really as it didn’t work, worth a punt yes, but superb hardly.[/quote]

Whether it worked is immaterial, because that wasn’t up to him. I think we covered why he didn’t do it earlier, so within the constraints he had he did everything he possibly could. And yes it was superb to drive so slowly without giving Nico a sniff of a chance of overtaking him (the radio message suggests Nico was well aware he wasn’t going to get past).

The really interesting question is which drivers would have won the WDC if they’d had LH’s car (including all the failures). I’m actually a JB rather than a LH fan, so I’d suggest he would have done – in fact both the Macca drivers would have. Not because either of them are fundamentally superior drivers to LH, but because they’re both still better than Nico whilst being a little better at avoiding silly mistakes.

What does a driver bring to a cars out season development? Why was Nico always asking ‘what is LH doing’?

Do the drivers simply turn up and drive? A gifted driver can bring upto a second a lap to a cars development.

Nico Rosberg has said on Tuesday that continued discussion over Hamilton’s tactics in Abu Dhabi in “pointless”

……. quite so.

Shall we start ‘F1 2017 (Bound to contain spoilers!)’?

I don’t know how you decide who deserves to win the F1 title

I did some research on this. It turns out that the title is awarded to the driver with the most points. That was Rosberg, so he deserves to be champion.

So, Bernie’s gone.
Can’t say I’ll miss him, he was well past his sell-by-date.
I wonder when full season coverage will revert back to free-to-air TV…

Sky’s exclusivity contract is until 2022 so unless Liberty buy it out it’ll be 2023 at the earliest. That’s 5 years of losing the casual watchers to catch up on.