F1 GRAND PRIX DE MONACO 2015: RACE *** SPOILERS ***

Awful race to end that way but that's the way things go. Lewis has overcome much more and nico is now in a great place to launch a new challenge. At least we will see more competitive racing from here on out.

 

I left on lap 20. I reckon without this Mercedes drama, it would have been a boring race?

 

Makes me wish he had gotten a penalty for that...and ended up in P4 or lower. Destroying signs is no laughing matter!

 

lewis kept it cool because f1 is a gentlemans sport.

 

I came on here expecting more vitriol about how the world was ending due to Mercedes' making a complete mess of strategy. After all that's what the British sporting media will be saying, before calling for the UN to have an inquiry with any Mercedes crew sent to the International criminal court. The vitriol is quite tame compared to what I was expecting. Lewis should have won but Rosberg did, neither of whom looked happy afterwards which left us with a bit grim face from Hambone, slightly bashful from Nico and only Seb looked truly pleased to be on the podium.

What gets me is that Hambone acted like it was game over, championship lost and surely this is not the case considering we are roughly a third of the way through the year and he has a 10 point lead in the championship. Further he is both 10 points ahead and according to the fan-boys so much better than ANYONE else that why should he be so upset, surely he will win next time? Or is it that he is really very insecure? whatever, I loved Seb's reaction to his second place. Forza Ferrari

 

Well its hard to say which is more insipid...Hami or the British Press!

 

They tie for their sheer ignorance and bias. During the last twelve laps, the ONLY discussion the commentary team had was about hamboner, and how disgusting it was he had to put up with this, whose fault was it, who would get fired, Nico should let him through, Nico doesn't deserve it, Vettel will be easy meat but what will Nico do. They had the **** lapping the field on his fresh new tyres as of course 'we all know how much faster he is' according to the pillocks

The British commentary team are the worst thing about the coverage, they are biased all the time and the mistakes they make are getting worse. For five laps yesterday, they were talking about verstappen chasing down raikonnen and gaining places, but of course, as they drew up to grosjean, they suddenly realised it was actually Vettel, a quick adjustment, and on they went. Fools

 

Not sure whether this stuff is available in English somewhere.
They interview Toto on the race and he manages to say NOTHING for the entire interview. Any political party must be after him now.

It was a team decision, no one made a mistake. We win and lose as a team. The same gibberish for the entire interview... People seem very concerned about not publicly scratching on Hambone's mental stability.

Poor Rosy, he must feel like Webber did at Red Bull. Well Merc was commited to Hamilton for three years now... They can't watch him fold the next race I guess... If Rosberg ever truly comes back from this all I'd be hugely surprised.

Gespräch: Mercedes-Sportchef Wolff erklärt Hamilton-Panne - Formel1.de-F1-News

 

Yeah, right. I'm sure he was told in no uncertain terms that he better not make a tantrum like the many others he's made. I was pretty happy it happened to him; just don't like the guy. But he was part of the decision; can't blame it on the team alone. Plus he could have ignored the order to pit. He wanted the advantage of the supersoft tire for the restart. Stupid mistake. No need for anybody to acknowledge it; it's stupid not to, however, as it's absolutely obvious somebody f***ed up bigtime.

 

I was so happy for us today! Forza Ferrari! I do think it was a shame for Hamilton and his team considering he'd led the race, but Ferrari with Sebastian making 2nd place made our household jubilant. We celebrated with Seb, who was the only one who looked happy today and he should have.

I am hoping we continue this trend into Canada and leave two upset Merc drivers in our wake - but on complete merit!

I was disappointed in Verstappen. That young man has made some pretty kamikaze moves which can bite back. But hopefully he learned from his rash driving today and will do better. He is super talented so I expect great things and a bit more maturity as he gets older.

I was quite upset with Dan Riccardo for knocking Kimi about. I don't know what he was thinking. He looked like a complete novice making that move. The gap was too small and you don't just fork your way through. Very disappointed in his driving because he is usually better.

Now that other new RedBull driver was quite good today and also the other newbie, Sainz. We saw good driving from them.

 

Monaco GP Conclusions

Nice review of the Mercedes Monaco Melt Down GP 2015 here

 

Love the smile on Arrivabene

Mercedes 'too convinced of their own power' in Monaco - Maurizio Arrivabene

 

I'm not a big Nico fan but I don't like Lewis either. However what fair is fair. Nico happened to be at the right place at the time and so and Vettel. It's called racing guys. Someone's mistake is someone else's advantage. It has happened before and it will happen again. F1 is a team sport. We only tend to remember the bad team orders and not the good ones. How many races did Lewis win so far this year because of a good team strategy? Most of them.

 

True enough D...but as I always maintain, whatever he does will never be enough for some in this den of iniquity....

 

Reading posts on here gives me the same feeling, you are one of the top runners Sid..

 

I still can't get wy they stoped hamilton...even if they had calculated the gap to Nico and seb correctly (wich they didn't) why would they risk a pit stop? Anything could go wrong...a stuck wheel, anything that could cost him an extra second or too and all would have been lost, it simply wasn't worth the risk....unless, Hamilton was really marginal on his tires and he really needed a change, because even with tire disadvantage it's relativly easy to defend track position in Monaco, and there were't may laps left anyway....

 

+1

 

Yes all true, it was a rather embarrassing mistake full stop..

 

Yap, let's move along to canada....Hope it will be hot, wanna see those merc brakes burning...lololo

 

Just in case anyone is interested in what really went on, here is the story straight from the team. Hopefully the fanboys and anti-fanboys can now find a way to move on. A team mistake - and one that will definitely make the end of season tv montage! I wonder if anyone will get fired- if they can't get an obvious decision like this right, you have to question the personnels abilities. Ferrari would publicly fire many people and flog a few more just to make sure...

Toto Wolff Q&A: Hamilton won't dwell on Mercedes' error

 

Evidently Grosjean braked later not earlier according to the BBC- "the otherwise impressive Verstappen misjudged his positioning behind Romain Grosjean's Lotus, even though the Frenchman braked five metres later than on the previous lap, smashed into the back of the black car and speared straight on into the barrier. "

BBC Sport - Lewis Hamilton: It's not how you fall, it's how you get up

This article also states the mis-calculation by Merceds has something to do with the lack of GPS data round Monaco.......

 

POSTED BY: JAMES ALLEN | 25 MAY 2015 | 10:44 AM GMT | 0 COMMENTS
It is hard not to feel sorry for Lewis Hamilton, who saw victory in the Monaco Grand Prix slip away from him due to a bad decision to pit for news tyres behind the safety car with 12 laps to go.
Speaking after the race, both team bosses Toto Wolff and Niki Lauda said that the team had let their newly re-signed driver down, but how do they now seek to make it up to him?
On the plane home last night from Nice, all the Mercedes engineers were travelling together, as usual, and you would be hard pressed to guess which side of the garage had lost and which side had won; the very public error they made clearly weighed heavy on a team that has been together many years and they live in each other’s pockets, so they literally do ‘win together and lose together’.
It’s for this reason, primarily, that any talk of Mercedes deliberately sabotaging Hamilton’s race to allow Rosberg to win falls apart. The entire engineering group, which moves about like a team of footballers, eating together, debriefing together, sitting together every day in their office at Brackley, would all have to be in on it and it just doesn’t work like that.
It highlights the curious dynamic in this sport, with two sportsmen in the same team competing against each other, that they had lost the race, but they also won the race and extended their lead in the constructor’s championship.
Rosberg, Hamilton Monaco 2015

Hamilton was part of the decision making process, as he confirmed after the race, telling the team that the soft tyres were losing temperature and pressure behind the safety car and if there was sufficient gap to easily pit and rejoin on new, warm supersofts for the final 12 laps, it would make sense. The team was protecting itself from a possible move by Ferrari to pit Vettel onto supersofts and then have him attack them at the restart, when he would have been right behind on faster tyres.
We will analyse tomorrow in the UBS Race Strategy Report exactly what happened with this decision and why it went wrong, but the top line is that there was a transition from Virtual Safety Car to Safety car; at the end of Sector 1 of the lap on which he pitted, Hamilton had a lead over Rosberg of 26.802 seconds, more than enough to pit with a comfortable margin. A pit stop at racing speeds takes 24 seconds at Monaco and at Safety Car speeds you only need a gap of around 17s to make the stop and retain position.
What happened was that Hamilton’s Sector 2 time was slower than he or the team expected; he took 53.240 secs to complete that sector, while Rosberg took just 44.5 secs. The gap came down from 26 seconds to just 18.
Hamilton lost time behind the Safety Car, in other words, when it picked him up. He then lost another 1.5secs in the pit lane, that’s how much slower his stop was than his first stop (which had been the fastest of the day). Nasr went past in the Sauber just as he was due to be released, which added a little to the end of the stop.
So he came out behind Rosberg and Vettel.
Mercedes

As soon as that happened, everyone realised that the move had been a mistake, but as Toto Wolff says, the calculations didn’t keep up with the eventualities. Alarm bells should have gone off when Hamilton came through the Sector 2 beam and the gap had been reduced to 18 seconds – this made it a risky move to pit Hamilton. There was little time to think; Sector 3 takes 28 secs to complete across the finish line at Safety Car speeds and so they would have up to 20 seconds before he would need to enter the pits.
Wolff says that the decision to pit was taken, “just 50m before the pit entry”, in other words, mindful of the reduced gap. It was risky.
Add in the fact that once again Mercedes’ pit stop execution wasn’t optimum on Hamilton’s car; the same happened with his ‘undercut’ attempt at the first stop in Spain. It’s fine margins, but as Niki Lauda says, Mercedes should be professional enough to cope with the changing picture and the risks outweighed the potential upside in this situation, “A top team should not make mistakes like this. It was the wrong decision to bring him in and I’m upset about this,” he said. “There was no risk to leave him out and I’m really disappointed. We are professionals and they should be able to switch from one (Virtual Safety Car) to another (Safety Car).”
Monaco 2015

Hamilton’s pain is obvious and he’s entitled to ask, ‘Why do these things happen to me?’ Most fair minded people would feel sympathy for him; he’s the driver who had done everything over two days of qualifying and racing to win the Monaco Grand Prix and he deserved it. He was part of a decision making process, but he has to leave the final decision to the team as they have all the data and the timings at their disposal which he does not.
He took it on the chin after the race in his statements, because he has just signed a new three year contract, one of the biggest in the history of F1 and it’s not a time to set himself up in conflict with the team, which had let him down. They have made it up to him in the past; when Rosberg crashed into him at Spa last year they read the riot act to the German and there was clearly some kind of ‘reckoning’, even if it was just an idea, a gesture, which Hamilton took advantage of to go on a winning streak for the rest of the season.There is always a question of ‘trust’ in sports teams, especially ones where the two drivers are in competition with each other within the same team. Nothing is perfect in racing, so absolute trust is hard and his trust of their decision making will have been affected, but if he is to win consistently over the next there years – as he has over the last two – it will be because of their correct decision making on many of those occasions, as much as his brilliance behind the wheel.
That is probably all they can offer him by way of consolation this time, but the pain of losing a race in such a way will take time to get over, for driver and team.

 

The GPS thing was the same for all the teams. No body else had a brain fart. Merc did. If they can't function with data alone and have forgotten to use their own brains, then they have lost the plot.

 

One Ham dnf next race and the championship comes alive. What's not to like?

 

I seriously don't get that talk.
Hamilton admitted he came in despite the team telling him to stay out. What does the team need to make up? All I see them do is protecting their driver from questioning himself too much and being pushed by the media...