Dude, spoilers! Gah! I usually dont watch qualy or the race until Sunday night! Bah!
Without the ppl at the factory and engineers, the pit crew has nothing work on.
Without sponsors, [del]nobody[/del] very few have the money to hire anybody to design and build and drive.
Lewis has never had a ‘dog of a car’ in his career. A McLaren prodigy, brought right into the team at one of their peaks. Jumped ship to Mercedes at the perfect time. Multiple championships.
Compare that to Alonso and Button (as described above). Right car, Champion. Wrong car, also-ran. Also, see Raikkonen, Kimi. World Champion, Ferrari. Also-ran with whoever he drives for now.
Some of those mclarens weren’t exactly top rate yet he still got wins.
Sorry. I got carried away. F1 is one of the few real ‘passions’ in my life anymore. I’ve missed maybe 2 races in the last 35 years.
Disagree. All Hamilton’s cars have been the class of the field. Not to take away from his incredible skill, but he’s had the shit from day one. Day one being from when he was about 6 years old.
We should argue about this in an F1 thread. 
Simply not the case. 2009 was a dreadful car and he still managed to win. The Merc last year was not the best car and he won the championship. The Maclaren was not the best car in 2008 and he won the championship. Only the third time in the last thirty years that the champion driver has not had the champion car and was within a whisker of doing the same in 2007.
He is as good as it gets and we shouldn’t be surprised that he now finds himself in a great car but everyone in the sport knows that it isn’t the car that makes him great. Everyone still knows Alonso is a great even when he was racing bad cars.
For the benefit of people who aren’t familiar with the sport, it probably should be noted that F1 is unique in that for the most part, each F1 team is required to design and build its own cars (there are certain things they are allowed to buy or contract out to third parties). That’s why the team competition is called the “Constructors Championship”. This makes the series an engineering competition as much as a driver competition, and is a major reason for the performance disparity between teams. The top teams with the deepest pockets have the resources to build better cars than less well-funded teams (though even the smallest teams have budgets that would make a top NASCAR or Indycar team’s eyes water). The competitive teams also either build their own engines or are closely partnered with an engine manufacturer.
A big budget is no guarantee though. Witness Toyota F1 in the 2000’s, which reportedly had one of the largest budgets in F1 yet never won a single race.
The car, the driver, and the team. All three are essential to win consistently, you cannot separate them.
I don’t follow it too closely, but iirc, in NASCAR, the cars are pretty much identical. The teams can tweak them before the race, but can’t make wholesale changes. Success is down mostly to the driver, but also the pit crew and observers.
Nah, then you have the Daytona 500 marathon. It takes a while, and the crashes aren’t as spectacular. They also don’t film the pit stops.
Yes, but see my post #6 above. Even in NASCAR, the bigger / wealthier teams still have a distinct advantage.
This is the real answer. There are too many variables to say one leg is more important than the other.
but, given that:
In drag racing, give two competitors identical cars, and the driver with the faster reaction time will win. Second to that is keeping the car in the right lane. Deciding factor: driver
In stock car racing, given identical cars and pit crews, the driver that has the better feel for how the car is performing, how the setup changes as the tires wear and the track gets hotter, who can communicate that to the pit crew, and the driver with more skill at not hitting everyone else, will win. Deciding factor: driver.
Then you should be all over that Netflix series “Formula One: Drive To Survive”. It’s epic. And I don’t even like car racing all that much (although I like sports cars and such VERY much).
Don’t have Netflix. 
Football coach Bum Phillips once said of Bear Bryant that “Bryant can take his’n and beat your’n, and then he can turn around and take your’n and beat his’n.”
So could a champion driver in his car beat his rival and the rival’s car and then turn around, switch cars, then beat his rival again? Like in all sports it depends how big the gap is between the skills of the athletes and the quality of their equipment (or coaching, or quarterback, or team mates, or whatever two factors you want to compare).