tommykl wrote:It wasn't a particularly exciting race, though there were enough good moves scattered throughout to make it watchable.
Rosberg controlled the race through and through, thoroughly deserved victory. Hamilton definitely benefited from Ferrari's complete lack of strategical nous, otherwise he may have come third or fourth. As it stands, he keeps the championship lead by two points. The championship is back on.
Like EuroBrun, I think that Hamilton probably would have ended up ahead of the two Ferrari's even if they were on a different strategy.
If you look at the lap times, Ferrari couldn't really stretch their first stint out any longer than they did - whilst Hamilton's times were steadily improving, both Ferrari drivers had seen their lap times beginning to worsen quite noticeably by the time their first stop rolled around. Hamilton was starting to take some very big chunks out of their lead just before their pit stops (1.3s in two laps), so they had to make a stop when they did or Hamilton might well have passed them on track in the next few laps anyway.
However, they were faced with a difficult situation - they would have had to do 37 odd laps on the medium tyres to make a one stop strategy work. Now, that probably would have been achievable - although the most anybody did was 32 laps on a set of mediums - but Ferrari's race pace on the medium tyres during the practise sessions had been quite bad in comparison to Mercedes.
Furthermore, given that Hamilton was going to be going much deeper into the race on his softs, they would have known that they would be vulnerable to him towards the end of the race if they did try a one stop race on the medium tyres, since he'd have a sizeable tyre life advantage.
To a certain extent, it feels as if Ferrari's strategy wasn't really aiming to try and defend against Hamilton, who probably would have passed them anyway. It felt like more of a defensive strategy that was designed to secure them a fairly safe 3rd and 4th place, which it succeeded in doing in this instance.