East Londoner wrote:Honourable mention to
David Coulthard for still going along with the "Mercedes have a difficult car" line. Yes, because 10 (now 11) wins this season is evidence of a difficult car.
![Badoer :badoer:](./images/smilies/icon_badoer.png)
Well, it should be said that Coulthard was talking about the Bottas's relative performance at the time - and he might be more inclined to agree with that viewpoint as he seems to be finding things much more difficult on his side of the garage.
Equally, to be fair to Magnussen I would say that the incident between himself and Ericsson was more of a racing incident, and I wouldn't blame Magnussen entirely - Ericsson was coming from a reasonable way back, and Magnussen was probably distracted by Vettel moving back across to the racing line in front of him.
That said, overall he was already not doing great given the earlier clash and the generally poor pace he'd had - the fact that he was struggling to beat Sauber, a team that hasn't developed their car for months whilst Haas were introducing their latest (and final) upgrade package this weekend, whilst Grosjean was little better in terms of performance and his rant over the radio did feel a bit childish (and reminiscent of some of Grosjean's less attractive character traits that I had hoped he'd stopped with).
In that case, the first nomination would be both Haas drivers whilst for the second I would go with Hulkenberg and his car - partly the car, since it was plagued by problems, but partly Hulkenberg himself as he had been driving rather poorly during the practise sessions (making an unusual number of errors), as if he'd let Sainz's move to the team affect his performance.
I guess that the stewards will be getting a lot of nominations, but looking at some of the screenshots it has to be said that Verstappen does seem to have cut the corner by a fairly sizeable margin in the process of passing Kimi. It might not be popular, but I can see why the stewards did take the decision that they did (even if it may not be entirely palatable).