By Ben Anderson | |
Grand Prix Editor |
Nico Rosberg has finally done it. He has conquered Formula 1 and become its world champion at last, 34 years after his father Keke did likewise. Rosberg Sr's world championship victory of 1982 was achieved in somewhat fortuitous circumstances, owing as much to the devastation wrought at Ferrari by Didier Pironi's career-ending accident and Gilles Villeneuve's death, Renault and Brabham-BMW unreliability, and the inconsistency of McLaren drivers Niki Lauda and John Watson, as to Rosberg's sheer dazzling brilliance behind the wheel of his Williams. Rosberg won only one race in 16 starts. But his was a virtuoso performance for Frank Williams's team. Derek Daly was Rosberg's team-mate for most of '82; he managed no better than a handful of fifth places as Rosberg took the crown. Rosberg went from Fittipaldi midfield toiler to world champion in the space of a single season, quite the turnaround in personal fortunes for a driver who could be absolutely stunning on his day. However the circumstances arose, the statistics don't lie. No one can take away this momentous achievement - from either Keke or Nico Rosberg. But whether either unquestionably deserves to be champion based on their pure performance is a very different question. Pironi, Watson, Alain Prost, probably even then-reigning champion Nelson Piquet, could all have argued they drove well enough to take the title in 1982. It is also doubtful that Rosberg Jr can be called the absolute best driver on the grid this year, even though he is ultimately its champion. Nico's battle has been rather different to his father's. For the past three seasons he's duelled exclusively with team-mate Lewis Hamilton for the ultimate prize, thanks to the way Mercedes has dominated F1 technically. Rosberg Jr looked to have blown his best shot in the first of those campaigns, when he led the title race early on before fading in the face of a Hamilton charge during the run-in. The Rosberg camp argued unreliability made the difference in 2014, but in actual fact each Mercedes driver suffered car failures at crucial times, and ultimately it was Hamilton's capacity to overturn repeated qualifying deficits with superior racecraft that made the difference in the end. Last season Rosberg focused on improving his own racecraft, specifically how to tune his car to perform more consistently through a grand prix distance, to help reduce the sort of pressure under which he cracked regularly in the closing stages of 2014. This strategy backfired. Rosberg lost his Saturday edge as a consequence, and Hamilton destroyed him in qualifying, scoring pole for 11 of the first 12 races. But for a tyre blanket error in Spain Hamilton reckoned it would have been a clean sweep. The whole thing was over with three races to spare, Rosberg defeated again - and more comprehensively than before, his run of six poles over the final six races of 2015, and winning the last three grands prix in succession, coming too late to save the day. Rosberg could again point to certain key pieces of misfortune derailing his title bid - a penalty for colliding with Daniel Ricciardo in Hungary, on a weekend when Hamilton went off on the first lap and Rosberg could have won - or the throttle damper problem that robbed him of victory in Russia. But in actual fact Rosberg was outperformed by Hamilton for much of last season. That's why he lost the championship. This season he hasn't lost. He's taken more pole positions (eight) than in 2015, and won more races (nine) in a single season then ever before. These numbers suggest he's finally struck the right balance between qualifying speed and relentless race pace, and consequently managed to finally release Hamilton's vice-like grip on F1's championship trophy. But the truth is this picture would look very different had Hamilton not suffered severe unreliability in his Mercedes. Rosberg has suffered no terminal technical failures in any qualifying sessions or races this year - though he did receive a grid penalty for a gearbox change in Austria, after a suspension failure and crash in practice; Hamilton has encountered several. Hamilton used one more internal combustion engine than Rosberg this year, three extra turbochargers and MGU-Hs, and an extra MGU-K, energy store, and control electronics system compared to his team-mate. Even with the setbacks Hamilton suffered in qualifying in China and Russia, and the knock-on effect those had for Belgium, he can still point to September's Malaysian Grand Prix as the pivotal moment his title defence fell apart through no fault of his own. He had that race sewn up, but a sudden failure of the big-end bearing on his new engine's crankshaft took 25 nailed-on points off Hamilton's total. Had he won that race - as he deserved to - this title battle would have headed to the wire in Abu Dhabi with Hamilton, not Rosberg, in the driving seat. But luck swings both ways. Hamilton can count himself fortunate to have survived getting tagged by Valtteri Bottas's Williams at Turn 1 in Bahrain; to have taken victory in Monaco (where a struggling Rosberg let him past under team instructions) thanks to Red Bull's blunder at Ricciardo's pitstop; to have survived last-lap contact with Rosberg to win in Austria; to have recovered to the podium from a back-of-the-grid start in Belgium; and to have avoided sanction (or a crash) for locking up and running off track at Turn 1 in Mexico. Nevertheless, in pure performance terms Hamilton has still been better than Rosberg this season. He has taken more pole positions (12) than Rosberg, and won 10 races to his team-mate's nine. Over the balance of the season Hamilton has been 0.107% faster in qualifying than Rosberg on average, excluding the three races (China, Russia and Belgium) in which Hamilton took no meaningful part in qualifying due to those engine dramas. That also means he won the intra-team qualifying battle a convincing 12-6, rather than 12-9 as the pure numbers suggest. Arguably only in Azerbaijan (where Hamilton crashed trying to match Rosberg in qualifying), Singapore (Rosberg's most dominant display of the season), and Japan (where Rosberg pipped Hamilton to pole and won) has Rosberg decisively held the upper hand over his team-mate. Rosberg qualified ahead in Monaco, Hungary, and Germany too. But Hamilton suffered a brief engine problem before his Q3 run in Monaco, while Rosberg grabbed pole at the Hungaroring as most rivals (including Hamilton) were abandoning laps on a rapidly improving track because of Fernando Alonso's spun McLaren-Honda. Rosberg's 0.107s edge at Hockenheim was overturned convincingly by Hamilton in the race. Rosberg has narrowed last year's pace deficit (0.157%) to Hamilton, but nevertheless he has been behind his team-mate again more often than not. If you also consider Monaco and Hungary unrepresentative, that gap increases to 0.144% in Hamilton's favour - a very similar figure to last year. The strange thing is, Hamilton has not been able to capitalise on this advantage often enough this season, and that's where the picture shifts slightly, suggesting Hamilton has also been a significant architect in his own downfall, as much as Rosberg has been the chief beneficiary of Hamilton's obvious technical misfortune. This all boils down to race starts, and specifically how each Mercedes driver has coped with the new rules introduced for 2016, which returned F1 to using single clutches, and (early on at least) limited the communication permitted between teams and drivers before races got under way. Hamilton made poor getaways in Australia, Bahrain (pictured), Spain, Canada, Italy, and Japan, which in all likelihood cost him at least three race victories (discounting Spain because the two Mercedes took each other off, therefore negating the disadvantage), and a runner-up spot to Rosberg in Japan. Only in Canada was Hamilton able to recover back to the head of the field after slipping behind Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari off the line. Mercedes puts these difficulties down to a blend of inconsistent technology, driver error, and the sheer fact that starts are and always have been immensely difficult to get right. If you give Hamilton back the 27 points he has most likely lost to these startline setbacks, he would have headed to Abu Dhabi needing just 10 to clinch the championship, even with his Malaysia engine failure factored in. Mercedes went to extraordinary lengths to make the W07's clutch easier to handle, even altering the way the drivers' gloves were sewn, according to team boss Toto Wolff. Channel 4 F1 analyst Karun Chandhok also reckons Rosberg spent more time than Hamilton practicing starts during pre-season testing, to prepare himself for the challenge of operating the new trickier clutch: "Obviously Pirelli has all the data from the runs, and one of the tyre engineers told me Rosberg did a lot more starts than Lewis, knowing that it was a different type of clutch and new start procedure, sort of pre-empting the change." How many bad starts has Rosberg made this year? They are difficult to recall. He's enjoyed a definitive edge over Hamilton in this regard, and on balance of evidence it seems this advantage has been earned by Rosberg rather than bestowed on him by any particular misfortune for Hamilton. Mercedes non-executive chairman Niki Lauda claims Rosberg "changed" after Hamilton won the championship in 2015. He feels they are even in terms of pure driving ability, but that Hamilton previously gained the edge by being more aggressive. Lauda says Rosberg has evened the score by upping his own intensity this year, and certainly the way he has driven in certain wheel-to-wheel situations - running Hamilton out of room at Turn 1 in Australia, shutting the door firmly and colliding with his main rival in Spain and Austria, and copping penalties for lunges on Max Verstappen (in Germany) and Kimi Raikkonen (in Malaysia) - suggests Lauda has a point, even if Rosberg has not always channelled this extra aggression productively. Certainly the gap in performance between the two has narrowed slightly this year, which has allowed Rosberg to capitalise fully on Hamilton's mistakes and misfortune. It's also true that Hamilton has not been at his best this year, making more errors than usual, giving him less room for manoeuvre amid the technical maladies he's suffered. Rosberg is still not Hamilton's equal as a driver, but the way he closed out the championship in Abu Dhabi, withstanding the mental strain created by the enormity of the occasion, and dealing with the unique pressure created by Hamilton's go-slow tactics in the race, suggests he is becoming a tougher nut to crack than he used to be. Ultimately it all depends on your point of view. Rosberg will feel he has earned this championship through a methodical and diligent process of self-improvement in the face of repeated defeat. He has won 12 of the last 24 grands prix held, and will feel that alone is enough to make him a worthy world champion. It seems almost obscene that Rosberg had won 23 grands prix without lifting a world title before crossing the finish line in Abu Dhabi. Hamilton will argue, with some justification, that all things being equal he has driven well enough relative to Rosberg throughout the past three seasons to have deserved a championship clean-sweep. But sport rarely delivers resounding verdicts one way or another. It is always the accumulation of various consequences - some controlled, some random. The 2007 world champion Kimi Raikkonen says he can't understand those who doubt Rosberg's worthiness, based on the simple fact Rosberg scored more points than anyone else this season. Raikkonen should know. His sole world title was achieved in fortuitous circumstances too, but few would argue he is a driver not worthy of his championship. Whether Rosberg outperformed Hamilton in 2016 is a matter of genuine debate, but the record books won't care about that. History does not consider luck; the only thing that matters in the end is that Rosberg is champion and Hamilton is not. |
By Ben Anderson | |
Grand Prix Editor |
Nico Rosberg has finally done it. He has conquered Formula 1 and become its world champion at last, 34 years after his father Keke did likewise. Rosberg Sr's world championship victory of 1982 was achieved in somewhat fortuitous circumstances, owing as much to the devastation wrought at Ferrari by Didier Pironi's career-ending accident and Gilles Villeneuve's death, Renault and Brabham-BMW unreliability, and the inconsistency of McLaren drivers Niki Lauda and John Watson, as to Rosberg's sheer dazzling brilliance behind the wheel of his Williams. Rosberg won only one race in 16 starts. But his was a virtuoso performance for Frank Williams's team. Derek Daly was Rosberg's team-mate for most of '82; he managed no better than a handful of fifth places as Rosberg took the crown. Rosberg went from Fittipaldi midfield toiler to world champion in the space of a single season, quite the turnaround in personal fortunes for a driver who could be absolutely stunning on his day. However the circumstances arose, the statistics don't lie. No one can take away this momentous achievement - from either Keke or Nico Rosberg. But whether either unquestionably deserves to be champion based on their pure performance is a very different question. Pironi, Watson, Alain Prost, probably even then-reigning champion Nelson Piquet, could all have argued they drove well enough to take the title in 1982. It is also doubtful that Rosberg Jr can be called the absolute best driver on the grid this year, even though he is ultimately its champion. Nico's battle has been rather different to his father's. For the past three seasons he's duelled exclusively with team-mate Lewis Hamilton for the ultimate prize, thanks to the way Mercedes has dominated F1 technically. Rosberg Jr looked to have blown his best shot in the first of those campaigns, when he led the title race early on before fading in the face of a Hamilton charge during the run-in. The Rosberg camp argued unreliability made the difference in 2014, but in actual fact each Mercedes driver suffered car failures at crucial times, and ultimately it was Hamilton's capacity to overturn repeated qualifying deficits with superior racecraft that made the difference in the end. Last season Rosberg focused on improving his own racecraft, specifically how to tune his car to perform more consistently through a grand prix distance, to help reduce the sort of pressure under which he cracked regularly in the closing stages of 2014. This strategy backfired. Rosberg lost his Saturday edge as a consequence, and Hamilton destroyed him in qualifying, scoring pole for 11 of the first 12 races. But for a tyre blanket error in Spain Hamilton reckoned it would have been a clean sweep. The whole thing was over with three races to spare, Rosberg defeated again - and more comprehensively than before, his run of six poles over the final six races of 2015, and winning the last three grands prix in succession, coming too late to save the day. Rosberg could again point to certain key pieces of misfortune derailing his title bid - a penalty for colliding with Daniel Ricciardo in Hungary, on a weekend when Hamilton went off on the first lap and Rosberg could have won - or the throttle damper problem that robbed him of victory in Russia. But in actual fact Rosberg was outperformed by Hamilton for much of last season. That's why he lost the championship. This season he hasn't lost. He's taken more pole positions (eight) than in 2015, and won more races (nine) in a single season then ever before. These numbers suggest he's finally struck the right balance between qualifying speed and relentless race pace, and consequently managed to finally release Hamilton's vice-like grip on F1's championship trophy. But the truth is this picture would look very different had Hamilton not suffered severe unreliability in his Mercedes. Rosberg has suffered no terminal technical failures in any qualifying sessions or races this year - though he did receive a grid penalty for a gearbox change in Austria, after a suspension failure and crash in practice; Hamilton has encountered several. Hamilton used one more internal combustion engine than Rosberg this year, three extra turbochargers and MGU-Hs, and an extra MGU-K, energy store, and control electronics system compared to his team-mate. Even with the setbacks Hamilton suffered in qualifying in China and Russia, and the knock-on effect those had for Belgium, he can still point to September's Malaysian Grand Prix as the pivotal moment his title defence fell apart through no fault of his own. He had that race sewn up, but a sudden failure of the big-end bearing on his new engine's crankshaft took 25 nailed-on points off Hamilton's total. Had he won that race - as he deserved to - this title battle would have headed to the wire in Abu Dhabi with Hamilton, not Rosberg, in the driving seat. But luck swings both ways. Hamilton can count himself fortunate to have survived getting tagged by Valtteri Bottas's Williams at Turn 1 in Bahrain; to have taken victory in Monaco (where a struggling Rosberg let him past under team instructions) thanks to Red Bull's blunder at Ricciardo's pitstop; to have survived last-lap contact with Rosberg to win in Austria; to have recovered to the podium from a back-of-the-grid start in Belgium; and to have avoided sanction (or a crash) for locking up and running off track at Turn 1 in Mexico. Nevertheless, in pure performance terms Hamilton has still been better than Rosberg this season. He has taken more pole positions (12) than Rosberg, and won 10 races to his team-mate's nine. Over the balance of the season Hamilton has been 0.107% faster in qualifying than Rosberg on average, excluding the three races (China, Russia and Belgium) in which Hamilton took no meaningful part in qualifying due to those engine dramas. That also means he won the intra-team qualifying battle a convincing 12-6, rather than 12-9 as the pure numbers suggest. Arguably only in Azerbaijan (where Hamilton crashed trying to match Rosberg in qualifying), Singapore (Rosberg's most dominant display of the season), and Japan (where Rosberg pipped Hamilton to pole and won) has Rosberg decisively held the upper hand over his team-mate. Rosberg qualified ahead in Monaco, Hungary, and Germany too. But Hamilton suffered a brief engine problem before his Q3 run in Monaco, while Rosberg grabbed pole at the Hungaroring as most rivals (including Hamilton) were abandoning laps on a rapidly improving track because of Fernando Alonso's spun McLaren-Honda. Rosberg's 0.107s edge at Hockenheim was overturned convincingly by Hamilton in the race. Rosberg has narrowed last year's pace deficit (0.157%) to Hamilton, but nevertheless he has been behind his team-mate again more often than not. If you also consider Monaco and Hungary unrepresentative, that gap increases to 0.144% in Hamilton's favour - a very similar figure to last year. The strange thing is, Hamilton has not been able to capitalise on this advantage often enough this season, and that's where the picture shifts slightly, suggesting Hamilton has also been a significant architect in his own downfall, as much as Rosberg has been the chief beneficiary of Hamilton's obvious technical misfortune. This all boils down to race starts, and specifically how each Mercedes driver has coped with the new rules introduced for 2016, which returned F1 to using single clutches, and (early on at least) limited the communication permitted between teams and drivers before races got under way. Hamilton made poor getaways in Australia, Bahrain (pictured), Spain, Canada, Italy, and Japan, which in all likelihood cost him at least three race victories (discounting Spain because the two Mercedes took each other off, therefore negating the disadvantage), and a runner-up spot to Rosberg in Japan. Only in Canada was Hamilton able to recover back to the head of the field after slipping behind Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari off the line. Mercedes puts these difficulties down to a blend of inconsistent technology, driver error, and the sheer fact that starts are and always have been immensely difficult to get right. If you give Hamilton back the 27 points he has most likely lost to these startline setbacks, he would have headed to Abu Dhabi needing just 10 to clinch the championship, even with his Malaysia engine failure factored in. Mercedes went to extraordinary lengths to make the W07's clutch easier to handle, even altering the way the drivers' gloves were sewn, according to team boss Toto Wolff. Channel 4 F1 analyst Karun Chandhok also reckons Rosberg spent more time than Hamilton practicing starts during pre-season testing, to prepare himself for the challenge of operating the new trickier clutch: "Obviously Pirelli has all the data from the runs, and one of the tyre engineers told me Rosberg did a lot more starts than Lewis, knowing that it was a different type of clutch and new start procedure, sort of pre-empting the change." How many bad starts has Rosberg made this year? They are difficult to recall. He's enjoyed a definitive edge over Hamilton in this regard, and on balance of evidence it seems this advantage has been earned by Rosberg rather than bestowed on him by any particular misfortune for Hamilton. Mercedes non-executive chairman Niki Lauda claims Rosberg "changed" after Hamilton won the championship in 2015. He feels they are even in terms of pure driving ability, but that Hamilton previously gained the edge by being more aggressive. Lauda says Rosberg has evened the score by upping his own intensity this year, and certainly the way he has driven in certain wheel-to-wheel situations - running Hamilton out of room at Turn 1 in Australia, shutting the door firmly and colliding with his main rival in Spain and Austria, and copping penalties for lunges on Max Verstappen (in Germany) and Kimi Raikkonen (in Malaysia) - suggests Lauda has a point, even if Rosberg has not always channelled this extra aggression productively. Certainly the gap in performance between the two has narrowed slightly this year, which has allowed Rosberg to capitalise fully on Hamilton's mistakes and misfortune. It's also true that Hamilton has not been at his best this year, making more errors than usual, giving him less room for manoeuvre amid the technical maladies he's suffered. Rosberg is still not Hamilton's equal as a driver, but the way he closed out the championship in Abu Dhabi, withstanding the mental strain created by the enormity of the occasion, and dealing with the unique pressure created by Hamilton's go-slow tactics in the race, suggests he is becoming a tougher nut to crack than he used to be. Ultimately it all depends on your point of view. Rosberg will feel he has earned this championship through a methodical and diligent process of self-improvement in the face of repeated defeat. He has won 12 of the last 24 grands prix held, and will feel that alone is enough to make him a worthy world champion. It seems almost obscene that Rosberg had won 23 grands prix without lifting a world title before crossing the finish line in Abu Dhabi. Hamilton will argue, with some justification, that all things being equal he has driven well enough relative to Rosberg throughout the past three seasons to have deserved a championship clean-sweep. But sport rarely delivers resounding verdicts one way or another. It is always the accumulation of various consequences - some controlled, some random. The 2007 world champion Kimi Raikkonen says he can't understand those who doubt Rosberg's worthiness, based on the simple fact Rosberg scored more points than anyone else this season. Raikkonen should know. His sole world title was achieved in fortuitous circumstances too, but few would argue he is a driver not worthy of his championship. Whether Rosberg outperformed Hamilton in 2016 is a matter of genuine debate, but the record books won't care about that. History does not consider luck; the only thing that matters in the end is that Rosberg is champion and Hamilton is not. |