Now is the perfect time to reflect on this year’s Formula 1 action so far, as the sport enters the mid-season summer break. This season has undoubtedly been one of the most exciting in recent years. The racing has been fantastic with some great individual displays and intense intra-team battles all the way through the grid, and, of course, plenty of controversy.
Hamilton v Rosberg
Rosberg is, perhaps, the surprise championship leader going into the summer break. Many people had expected Hamilton to possibly run away with it, especially if he got a strong run of results under his belt. After his initial retirement in Australia, a race which Rosberg won, Hamilton won the following four races in a row to claw back the twenty-five point deficit and convert it into a three point lead. At this stage it seemed a rampant Lewis Hamilton would prove very difficult to catch. Since then, however, a lot of the luck and momentum has been with Rosberg, who is showing himself to be much steelier and tougher than many had expected.
This initial momentum swing came during the final part of qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix when Rosberg locked up and went straight on at Mirabeau. This brought out the yellow flags which meant Hamilton, who was on a lap fast enough for pole, had to slow down. Rosberg took pole and went on to claim victory, putting an end to Hamilton’s dominant start to the season.
Since then Hamilton has had another retirement in Canada, where Rosberg nursed the same mechanical issue to finish second, and Lewis has also had two mechanical failures in qualifying. These problems have come in the last two races where he had a brake failure in Germany and a fuel leak which led to an engine fire in Hungary. These failures left Hamilton at the back of the grid and in the pit-lane whilst Rosberg started both races from pole. Hamilton drove superbly to finish third on each occasion, beating Rosberg into fourth in Hungary and keeping his title hopes alive as a result. Had Hamilton not suffered in qualifying and had the same number of retirements as Rosberg he would undoubtedly be leading this championship, likely by more than the current eleven point lead Rosberg possesses.
It should also not be forgotten that Hamilton defied team orders in the recent Hungarian Grand Prix to let Rosberg past, a tasty bit of controversy for us to feast on during the mid-season break. It was a surprising call by Mercedes under the circumstances, both in the context of the championship and the race itself. Hamilton did the right thing not to let Rosberg through as it would have compromised him at the end of the race and Rosberg wasn’t close enough to be allowed past, but a team order is a team order and surely they should be obeyed if enforced? Mercedes need to rethink their stance on this and be careful when issuing these orders in the future.
It has to be said that despite all this Rosberg has driven impeccably and been very consistent. He hasn’t made many mistakes and is taking advantage of the position he is in. The final eight races of the season will provide a fascinating climax to the fight for the 2014 World Drivers’ Championship I’m sure.
Best of the rest
Red Bull is currently the next best team on the grid and are slowly but surely chipping away at the significant advantage Mercedes have. They are bringing Williams with them, who are having a resurgent season, with Ferrari, Force India and McLaren rounding out the chasing pack.
Within these teams there are yet more fascinating intra-team battles evolving, most notably at Red Bull. Sebastian Vettel has won the last four World Championships in a row and was predicted to wipe the floor with Daniel Ricciardo in the Australian’s first season in the team. How wrong these predictions were. Ricciardo has easily been the number one driver at Red Bull so far, taking a phenomenal podium at the season opening Australian Grand Prix, which he unfortunately had taken away from him, and two brilliant opportunistic drives have allowed to him to claim his first Grand Prix victories in Canada and Hungary. Vettel is yet to win a race and has been on the podium less than the Australian. The German has also had the lions’ share of bad luck but Ricciardo is consistenly out qualifying Vettel as well as scoring more points in races. We are starting to see the Vettel of old, however, as it seems he is starting to rediscover some form.
At Williams the restructuring of the team has paid off, as has the switch to Mercedes engines and they have an emerging star of the sport in Valtteri Bottas. Bottas has claimed three podium finishes so far and is outperforming his experienced teammate Felipe Massa, a driver who has eleven Grand Prix victories to his name. If the Finn can continue his recent run of form he will have a great end to the year. He is a man to watch for the rest of this season and many more to come.
Fernando Alonso is another notable victor over his teammate, Kimi Raikkonen, so far. Both are World Champions and Raikkonen rejoined the team with which he won the title after two years where he drove fantastically well in a pretty average car produced by and under-funded team at Lotus. Raikkonen has struggled to replicate his form of the last two seasons though, and is being consistently outperformed by arguably the world’s finest driver who is very much the driving force of the team. Raikkonen has said he is starting to feel more comfortable and if he is to salvage his season he needs to start performing as soon as the lights go out for the start of Friday practice in Spa in a few weeks time, a circuit which he has already won at four times.
F1 2014 has been excellent so far and the fantastic action looks set to continue.
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