They did touch, and the penalty was ostensibly for moving under braking, but consensus elsewhere was that he really got it for telling Charlie Whiting to fuck off on the radio. Vettel eased him over, but it wasn’t anything so dramatic as to require a 10 (not 5) second penalty.
How do you suppose he’s “abusing his equipment”? It’s not even plausble. There are all shorts of built in safeguards to protect the power unit. If your theory made any sense at all you would have seen a history of unusual power unit/engine failures from Hamilton before this year… But there is no such history.
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Of course it’s plausible. It’s easily the most plausible reason. The only other options are remarkable coincidence or race fixing. As for the safeguards, don’t you suppose that McLaren puts them on their Honda engines? They went through so many they had a 95-place grid penalty earlier this year and they STILL aren’t reliable at full power.
When all incidents have one thing in common it’s almost certainly that thing.
When I watched the telecast, and they played that radio exchange, I heard the bleeps but I couldn’t tell who Vettel was cussing out.
That happens rather frequently, in fact; I often can’t make out quite what the drivers are saying. Anybody else have that problem? I wish the commentators would clarify what was said sometimes, although I can understand why they didn’t in this case.
The probability that 5 failures among 2 drivers should all happen to one driver by pure chance is (1/2)^4 = 1/16. That’s not a particularly remarkable coincidence.
We don’t know that that is the only thing they have in common. Were components for Hamilton produced in batches? did some of the underlying ERS or hydraulic issues cause further problems and give a knock-on effect? Here’s what Toto Wolff said
And the F1 guys are geniuses at root-cause analysis. If it were Lewis’s driving style that was doing it, they’d know.
There have been ERS failures, hydraulic failures, mode failures and a full blow-up. No real pattern and nothing that can be assigned to driving style other than the blow-up happened under a big push from Hamilton (which would make sense in a fundementally flawed engine). Bad luck seems the most likely reason
Didn’t Hamilton take a grid penalty earlier this year for something to do with getting engine upgrades mid-season? If so, doesn’t that mean he had slightly different equipment from Rosberg for part of the season, at least?
Both of Honda’s engines were blowing up last year (and early this year), not just one. The safeguards didn’t matter because the engines themselves were fundamentally flawed. The safeguards are to protect the engine from the driver, not from being shitty. That is not true of the Mercedes engine - that is, it is not fundamentally flawed, but rather is remarkably reliable generally.
And no, those are not the only other options. In fact, I don’t even think race fixing is an option. I suspect Mercedes want Rosberg to win the title this year, but there is no doubt in my mind that Hamilton’s engine problems have anything to do with it. It’s more likely that it is just a remarkable coincidence, or at best that Mercedes is giving Hamilton the worst of each batch yet still providing him with parts that are within their acceptable tolerances.
No. He took a grid penalty because he’d had so many previous power unit failures that he was going to have to take one for each subsequent failure. Each driver gets five of each of the power unit systems - engine, MGU-K, MGU-other thing, gearbox, something else - for the whole season. Hamilton had used up all five of some of them by the fifth or sixth race because his engine kept blowing up in qualifying. So rather than losing 5 spots in four subsequent races, he “banked” lots of extra parts at Spa and went all the way to the back of the grid for that one race.
He was going to have slightly different equipment from Suzuka onwards because Rosberg would have been able to use Mercedes’ late-season engine upgrade and Hamilton wouldn’t (without taking additional grid penalties), but that upgrade never materialized.
I wouldn’t be surprised if as soon as it became clear Mercedes were going to be basically unbeatable this year, Bernie cut some sort of top secret deal with them to have their drivers battle really intensely (possibly including a couple of mechanical failures to keep things interesting), in exchange for which he pays them a huge sum of money, on the basis it’s the only way to keep spectator interest until the other teams catch up.
What, does he smash his helmet over the crankcase every time he steps out of the car or something? As others have said, I don’t buy this. F1 drivers are there to push the car to its limits. They all do this. How would he “abuse” the car? Nutty conspiracy theories aside, I think it is just bad luck on Hamilton’s part. Last year the bad luck evened out, this year he’s just had too much of it to contend with (compounded by a couple of poor starts, but even without those he’d be behind, despite being demonstrably quicker than Rosberg on the majority of the circuits).
Exactly - he made a mistake but ‘got away with it’ by cutting across the grass.
It’s actually 5 failures among 8 drivers - unlike Ferrari, Mercedes’ customer engines are the same ones the works team gets. So AMG-Mercedes, Force India, Williams and Manor are all using the same ones.
I hate the races on NBC. After all the drama at the end of the race, I wanted to watch F1 Extra for the interviews. But no, NBC cuts away to figure skating or some shit. I go to the computer to the live stream webcast, but since I DVR the race, the live stream was just finishing up as I was tuning in. Same thing last week, cut to NASCAR. And Canada showed all of 2 laps because of the Orlando shooting that was already being covered on every channel with a camera.
Well, but there the engine is on an entirely different chassis, with a whole different set of surrounding systems - and, most obviously, they have not figured out how to make the car go as quickly as the Mercedes! It’s pretty easy to imagine that the stress on the engine is significantly different on a different chassis.
I think in the old days, the obvious first suspect would have been Hamilton’s driving style stressing the engine. But there is so much automated engine protection now, plus a vast amount of data that would objectively tell us if Hamilton were constantly (say) thrashing the car in some way more than his teammate, and I don’t think there’s any evidence of that.
So, if this is a problem specific to the Mercedes chassis, systems, setup etc. (quite plausible imo), then the probability that 5 failures would all hit one of the two drivers by chance is not so remarkable, only 1/16. I would go so far as to say that this probably the sensible null hypothesis, and that the burden of proof is to show evidence for something else.
What I found interesting about this race was not one word was said about Lewis cutting the first turn, first lap. Jesus Christ! I think he gained a couple seconds at least! Everybody was looking at Nico and the Kid, and all of a sudden Lewis is half-way down the straight.
Oh well. He woulda won anyway.
Just heard about the Vettel penalty. What Bullshit.
Ricciardo pointed out that Hamilton should have been penalized for that too, but he didn’t gain an advantage in the sense that Rosberg would have passed him, which is what the rule requires. Personally, I don’t think cutting a corner on grass should ever be penalized because you’re taking your chances regarding suspension damage or getting dirt in the intakes. Cutting on a paved runoff area, sure. They should probably put some (soft) barricades on the grass for next year to slow down drivers who go across, like on chicane escape roads.
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They always treat the first lap - and especially the first couple of corners - differently.
There have been words about it, and Charlie Whiting explained himself (can’t find a link at the moment). Basically he said they examined the timing and Lewis was so far ahead by that point that it didn’t matter, whereas when Verstappen did the same thing Vettel was right on his ass so he would have lost the place and therefore “gained an advantage.”
This is, of course, bullshit. I was furious watching Canada 2014 when Nico cut the chicane at full throttle. Sure, he didn’t make a pass that way, and sure, Hamilton was still pretty far back, but Hamilton had been dutifully driving his ass off, chipping away at the gap for lap after lap and then poof all of that hard work was just gone. So what, if you’re out in the lead and nobody’s within a couple seconds of you, you can just cut every corner and chicane and make that lead completely insurmountable and nobody can call that gaining an advantage? On what planet? When these teams kill themselves to gain a tenth of a second on a pit stop, how can you not call every track limit excursion an advantage?
I get that nobody wants to see the stewards meddling with the drivers all the time, but if you’re going to pave every single runoff area for hundreds of yards, you need to make track limits an automatic time penalty. Just do it based on telemetry with a manual review – data says he went 4 wheels over the line, look at it, yep, 1s penalty. Data says a chicane was cut, review it, yep, 2s penalty. You can excuse penalties if another driver forced you off track.
Time penalties do make it hard to sort out who’s actually in what place but I really think it’d be better than this inconsistent track limits BS.
It is a can of worms.
We aren’t going back to the days of hard barriers and zero run-offs on every track so we do have to deal with the situation of track excursions and the penalties that arise.
I’ll side with the stewards here. They’ve set the bar so that if you are having a move put on you and you leave the track in order to keep your place then a penalty will result. If not…you won’t.
That certainly left Lewis in the clear at the first corner and the same for Nico immediately behind, he cut the corner but that was because he was forced off.
Verstappen? not so much. He had Vettel closing on him, he moved to defend the corner and screwed up his braking then left the track.
I think it was the right decision. What I’d prefer is track design to give a proper time penalty for track cutting, i.e. once you leave the best you can do is rejoin a few seconds down on your original position.
If pit stops were banned, this might be enough. But with pit strategies being what they are, a well timed “oops I outbraked myself, guess I have to cut this corner” can result in a gaining of track position without anyone being around. It might not even manifest itself right away, if the car you’re following pits 3 laps before you and somewhere in there you cut a corner and gain a couple seconds, nobody will know about the track position change until you come out of the pits ahead of him.
The counterargument is that this doesn’t seem to be a major issue. Yet.
The ideal solution would be something in these chicane-cutting run-off areas that’s slows cars down without dangerously destabilizing them. Given the amount of money in F1, presumably money is no object. A coating of molasses? Seriously, is there no material that could do this better than grass? It seems to me that an uncertain surface like bumpy grass is a really poor idea, because it may let you through undamaged (so the drivers will go as fast as they can across it), or it may cause unknown damage that could precipitate an accident, and that’s pretty much a crapshoot. A more certain rate of non-damaging retardation is what’s needed.
It is tricky, Gravel gives the potential for “beaching” a car or if not, debris gets pulled onto the track. You can’t seek to cause any damage through rough surface or kerbs because, as you say, that can lead to catastrophic failures.
Perhaps at the key areas you’d have to negotiate a “soft barrier” chicane off track in order to rejoin and that could be set-up in order to give a time penalty.
It wouldn’t work in each case but maybe enough incidents could be penalised automatically through that method so that the stewards could deal with the rest.