Bahrain GP: Hamilton's struggles, Rosberg's 'luck', and qualifying fiasco made for some fun viewing
Nico Rosberg’s dream start to the 2016 Formula One Season continued
in Bahrain as he claimed his second consecutive win of the season. The
Mercedes driver leads the Drivers’ Championship with a perfect 50 points
and crucially, 17 points ahead of his World Champion team-mate Lewis
Hamilton.
While Rosberg’s race form has to be complimented, he
still hasn’t managed to edge out Hamilton in key sessions. In Saturday’s
qualifying, Hamilton clinched his 51st pole despite not
topping any of the free practice sessions. In the race too, it was
Hamilton’s bad start that aided Rosberg’s get-away. One could argue that
Rosberg’s making the most of his luck, but can a World Championship be
won on luck alone?
Rosberg’s World Championship challenge received a boost on the
opening lap of the race when he out-started Hamilton and Raikkonen and
his nearest non-Mercedes rival Vettel ‘did not start’ due to a rare
Ferrari engine failure. This was the second race in succession where
Hamilton lost the lead at the start and Ferrari suffered from
reliability gremlins. Is Hamilton unable to adjust to the newly
introduced single-clutch system? And is Ferrari pushing their
development plan at the cost of reliability? Either way, it makes for
some entertaining viewing for the fans so far.
The other notable
performances in Bahrain were that of Haas’ Romain Grosjean, who bettered
his team’s debut finish of P6 by finishing in P5, Mclaren-Honda’s
Stoffel Vandoorne (who stepped in to replace the recovering Fernando
Alonso), who not only out-qualified his World Champion team-mate Jenson
Button but also scored points on his Formula One debut. Lastly, Manor’s
Pascal Wehrlein, who finished P13, well ahead of both Force Indias and a
Sauber. The American-funded Haas F1 Team is off to a dream start –
they’ve scored 18 points in two races whereas former World Champions
Mclaren have scored only 11 points in 11 races.
Formula One’s
fluke introduction of three tyre compounds per race seems to be the
sport’s biggest savior this season. The racing on Sunday seems to have
fallen in place - although a critic could argue that tyre strategies are
increasingly complex to follow. But if one would compare this
complexity with fuel strategy that the sport offered in the past, the
option of tyre strategy seems far more open and simple to follow given
that fans have knowledge of tyre compounds and their performance. When
it came to following fuel strategy, the ‘fuel level’ was almost always a
guess.
The qualifying fiasco continued in Bahrain as the sport refused to
revert back to the old (2015) format or attempt a hybrid format. The
power struggle of Formula One is impacting the sport at the product
level and it's a common belief that Formula One takes its position as
the pinnacle of Motorsport for granted. It seems that the stalemate
will continue as the organisers have ruled out reverting to the old
system and have instead offered (or forced?) the team two options.
First, sticking to the existing elimination based system and second, an
aggregate qualifying system.
If one was to revisit the objective
of tinkering the qualifying format, it is to have a mixed starting grid
on Sunday that would hopefully offer an interesting race. Basically, the
system relies on faster cars making mistakes, starting in positions
lower than they otherwise should, use DRS and sound tyre strategy to
fight their way up the field. But would all of this be necessary if cars
were able to race each other properly in the first place? Formula One
should but won’t re-think its over-dependence on aerodynamics.
Formula
One is keen on pushing its track-to-road agenda as it innovates on the
new technologies to introduce in the sport on a regular basis. This is
to keep the fans interested and the teams invested by keeping the sport
relevant to their businesses (more so the manufacturer teams). On that
note, it's worth pondering over the match or mis-match of the
just-announced Tesla Model 3.
Maybe, Formula One has overstated its importance in pushing forward the technological ideology in the world of automobiles.
