Who's getting the job done at McLaren? How many cars did recovering Rosberg pass? And just what happened to Toro Rosso?
Thursday 16 October 2014 08:52, UK
Button v Magnussen – Who is getting the job done?
Of all the intra-team duels that will play out to a conclusion over the final three rounds of 2014, arguably the one which might have the longest lasting significance for the careers of the drivers at the heart of it is at McLaren and the battle of experience and youth between Jenson Button and Kevin Magnussen.
As drivers at the opposite ends of their careers, the match-up was always going to be especially fascinating this year, but its significance is now increased by McLaren’s not-so-secret pursuit of Fernando Alonso. Should their attempt to lure the Spaniard succeed, then three into two cars – at least as things stand – certainly wouldn’t go for 2015. With both incumbents therefore being made to sweat over their futures by the delay in McLaren's final decision, Button’s impressive pair of fourth-place finishes over the Japan-Russia double-header undoubtedly proved a timely reminder of the 2009 World Champion’s enduring qualities, particularly in the pressure-cooker of race conditions.
In actual fact, Sochi represented the first time that the 34-year-old had both outqualified and outraced Magnussen in the same weekend since Hungary in July. The Dane, 12 years Button's junior, has increasingly had the legs over a single lap and currently holds a 9-7 Saturday advantage. However, the head-to-head sharply swings around on Sundays. On the 14 occasions both MP4-29s have finished this year, Button has achieved the better result 12 times – although, in fairness to Magnussen, a more accurate score is perhaps 10-4 given the Dane did finish ahead on the road at both Spa and Monza only to drop back behind his team-mate in the final classification after time penalties for driving infringements were applied.
Still, whatever scale you use, Button’s advantage on race day has resulted in a large points advantage in the Drivers’ Championship – the Briton’s 94-point haul nearly double Magnussen’s 49. For what it’s worth, the Dane’s predecessor Sergio Perez, jettisoned after just a single season, scored 67% of Button’s points last year. Comparisons between the two McLaren drivers’ performances last weekend in Sochi are skewed by Magnussen’s five-place grid penalty for a gearbox change, which left him starting 11th. A charging start to the race, in which he passed six cars to run fifth by the end of lap three, gave him a headache later as he was forced to go into fuel-saving mode and he finished up 23 seconds behind his senior team-mate in fifth place. As decision time looms at McLaren, every performance counts for both men perhaps more than ever.
How many cars did recovering Rosberg overtake?
Nico Rosberg recovered from an emergency opening lap pitstop which dropped him to 20th to finish second in Russia, but how many cars did the German actually pass on the way back through the field?
The German had to stay within approximately 30 seconds of the cars that were yet to pit to leap ahead of them when they stopped, but he didn’t just rely on that to work his way to the front. Rosberg passed ten cars on track as he reached second place by lap 31, meaning he only gained eight positions courtesy of others pitting.
And don’t think the passes were all made on slow cars either – Rosberg outbraked Kimi Raikkonen in Turn Two and, more remarkably, repeated the move on Valtteri Bottas at the same corner, despite the Williams driver having tyres which were 25 laps younger.
The German completed a remarkable 52 laps on a set of medium compound Pirelli tyres, in excess of 300km. Whilst degradation levels were unusually low thanks to the brand-new smooth asphalt, the fact that Rosberg set his personal best lap of the race on the penultimate lap shows the fantastic job he did in preserving his tyres, particularly the rears, on Sunday.
How does Mercedes’ dominance stack up – and what records is Hamilton creating?
If new Constructors’ Champions Mercedes win the final three races in 2014 they will set a new record for 16 victories in a single season, surpassing the total of 15 racked up by McLaren in 1988 and Ferrari in 2002 and 2004. However, with more grands prix – 19 – on the 2014 calendar than all three of those seasons, comparing the percentage of race wins is a more accurate way to see which team was the most dominant.
In 1988, with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost behind the wheel, McLaren came closest to an immaculate season by winning 15 of 16 races, a victory rate of 93.75%. Fourteen years later and Ferrari won all bar two of 17 races in 2002, giving them a percentage of 88.24%. In 2004 Ferrari again won 15 races – but there were 18 rounds that year, giving them a slightly inferior win rate of 83.33%.
Should Mercedes go on to take their win tally to 16 in 2014, they will finish with a percentage of 84.21% - nearly 10% less than McLaren in 1988 and also not quite as good as Ferrari in 2002 either. But by way of a more recent comparison, Red Bull finished 2013 with a win rate of ‘just’ 68.42% after winning 13 of the 19 events. So while Mercedes are likely to finish this season as the most dominant team F1 has seen for a decade, they still can’t match McLaren’s 1988 vintage.
The Mercedes driver with by far and away the most race wins this season, Lewis Hamilton, won’t end the year as F1’s most dominant driver either, but the championship leader is still racking up some rather impressive personal statistics. By winning for the 31st time in his F1 career on Sunday, Hamilton moved level with Nigel Mansell at the head of the 'Grand Prix Wins By A British Driver' charts. With three races remaining and a car which is the class of the field, Hamilton has the chance to move clear of Mansell and above former team-mate Fernando Alonso on 32 wins into fifth in the overall standings.
His tally of nine wins from 16 races also equals Mansell’s result from the 1992 season, but even if Hamilton wins the remaining races in 2014, he will still fall short of the record held by Michael Schumacher (2004) and Sebastian Vettel (2013) of 13 wins in a season. Schumacher’s 2004 record gives him an impressive win rate of 72.22%. Should Hamilton win the remaining three races he would finish with a rate of 63.12%. Hamilton, though, is only the fourth driver in F1 history to win nine races in a season and his Sochi victory moves him ahead of famous names such as his hero Ayrton Senna and Damon Hill.
What went wrong for Toro Rosso?
It’s the painful question that the Italian team will be using the three-week gap between races to get to the bottom of after a 24 hour-period of wildly contrasting fortunes in Sochi. Qualifying had offered hope that the team could be on for one of their best races of the season after Russia’s new star Daniil Kvyat earned yet more plaudits by upstaging their senior Red Bull outfit to take fifth on the grid – just the fourth time in the team’s nine-year history that they have ever started at least that high – while Jean-Eric Vergne also made the top ten. Yet, 53 laps of troubled racing later on Sunday, the team’s two cars trailed home 20 seconds out of the points in 13th and 14th places.
So, in the absence of any technical failures, just what had gone so badly awry? The answer: chronic fuel saving. “After around 20 laps, we had to start saving fuel, so we could no longer use our real potential today. We lost places just because several other cars could easily overtake us, therefore the final result is actually quite disappointing,” was team boss Franz Tost’s sombre post-race assessment. The need to compromise the pace of their cars to get on top of the fuel flow was particularly galling for Vergne, who had vaulted from ninth to fifth on a combative opening lap, only to almost instantly begin to slip back towards where he started. “We were attacking as much as possible but then I had to stop doing it, even though I felt I could really do a great job,” he explained after both Toro Rossos were shuffled out of the top ten through the first pitstops.
While Vergne at least had time to have some fun at the start, Kvyat’s home race proved completely forgettable. The 20-year-old revealed afterwards that he “could not find immediately the right grip” and that certainly had showed on the race track as the rookie was swamped by three cars on the first lap, both Red Bulls on the second and then Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen on lap five. Once Toro Rosso’s fuel concerns took hold, Kvyat continued to fall backwards with his miserable afternoon compounded on lap 37 when a lock-up and resultant flat-spot forced him into an unscheduled second pitstop.
The Russian's fresh rubber actually allowed him to clock the race’s fifth-fastest lap, but that was scant consolation at the end of a weekend that had started with so much promise. “Now we have to analyse why it was possible that, with the same amount of fuel for everybody, we were so far behind,” Tost admitted. “We need to find a solution and prevent this from happening again.”
