2018 Formula One Season ***Possible Spoilers***

I still don't get it.....but that's because you're making no sense, again

 

Can't wait! I saw those videos too.

 

Will this defeat Vettel or spur him on?

https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/hamilton-takes-pride-in-not-making-vettel-like-errors/3178722/

Lewis Hamilton says he feel proud to not have made the kind of costly mistakes that have derailed Sebastian Vettel's season, as he insists Mercedes has not 'lucked in' to its strong title position.

Hamilton's victory in the Singapore Grand Prix has helped him open out a 40-point advantage over Vettel in the drivers' championship.

And on a weekend when a brilliant Hamilton effort in qualifying was in contrast to Vettel putting Ferrari's hopes on the backfoot with a crash in practice, the Mercedes driver is clear about the value of his own performance.

"I don't look at it and think 'we've lucked in'," said Hamilton. "When Vettel hit the wall the other day, damaged the car and lost running on the track, that's not us lucking in. I take a lot of pride in not putting myself in those positions.

"I know my team is relying on me just as his team is relying on him. There's a lot of pressure on us drivers. It's only small percentages that you get wrong and they have bigger ramifications.

"As a team we honestly don't waste any time wondering what they're doing, or if they're feeling pressure, or if they're feeling happy or unhappy. There's nothing we can do about them, all we can do is be the best we can over a weekend."





Hamilton remains steadfast in his belief that Mercedes is continuing to overdeliver this season, with it not having had the fastest car for much of the year.

Despite his sizeable advantage in the standings though, Hamilton says that neither he nor his Mercedes team are getting carried away in thinking the battle is over yet.

"There are still a lot of points available, so as an athlete, as a team, and as competitors, you have to stay positive," he said.

"Hope and belief are two things that you always need to make sure you have. Even when the going gets tough, that's what sport and competition is about.

"So I'm sure they [Ferrari] will go away from this as a difficult weekend, as we've had difficult weekends, and come back stronger for the next one.

"But I can assure you that we as a team, we're not cocky or overly confident. We are being diligent and working as hard as we can. We want to keep hammering away as we are.

"If they've got an answer to that, then we don't mind that battle. And if they don't, then we also don't mind that."

Hamilton is not quite in a situation where he can afford to finish second in every race, nor at the point yet where he can target taking the title early.

That is why he says that for now his approach is still that he needs to try to win every time out.

"There is just no need for me to look at the next few races and think 'OK, I need that there, and that there'. In my mind I need to win every race, simple as that," he said.

"I focus on that and arrive wanting to win. There will be weekends when we know that maybe we'll be comfortably stronger, and there will be weekends like this where we expect to be behind but we still have that belief that we can win.

"I want to win every race, that's the goal. I'm just not looking at the points. It's nice having 40 points, but it's not the end until it's mathematically impossible [to lose]."

 

Funny how all the hamilton fanbois are making hamilton out to be a qualifying god, completely forgetting some of the awesome poles Vettel got this year, but more importantly, the job Max did just to be .3 behind him....HE was the qualifying king of singapore.

 

https://www.news.com.au/sport/motorsport/formula-one/french-formula-1-legend-reveals-expensive-daniel-ricciardo-is-just-the-start-of-renault-plans/news-story/0e5af2a64663c64f320b5150c406203e

 

Just like Hamilton, really. Everyone thought he was mad.

 

As with 2017, Singapore was a potentially decisive race weekend in the championship battle between Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel.

Another race – along with Germany, Hungary and Italy – that should have been won by Ferrari slipped away through a combination of driver and strategy; the balance heavily slanted here towards Hamilton and Mercedes.

Mind the gap

Often in F1 race strategy, it’s all about the gaps between cars and ability to put your car back out into clear air. On many circuits with the combination of tyres brought by Pirelli, this sorts itself out relatively simply as the faster cars pull away from the midfield and large gaps open up for them to pit into, thus not losing too much time when they rejoin.

It’s the biggest advantage top teams have in this so called two-tier F1 where the top three teams are so superior on pace to the midfield. It makes their life so much easier on race strategy 90% of the time.

But on street tracks sometimes finding the gaps is not so easy and the story of the 2018 Singapore Grand Prix was the way the teams worked the concertina effect created by race leader Lewis Hamilton who had the prerogative to control the race as he saw fit; nursing his first set of tyres, the hypersofts, at over ten seconds a lap off qualifying pace before bolting on Lap 12 to cover off the undercut.

We’ve seen this before in Monaco, a famous Rosberg/Hamilton encounter in 2013 springs to mind. But in Singapore it was the desire to make the race a one-stop that necessitated getting the hypersofts to last to around Lap 15 or 16 where a switch to softs would take you to the end.
Everyone knew this as they sat in the train behind Hamilton. To undercut you need to be within around three seconds of the car in front. This depends however on what tyre you switch onto.

In Singapore the soft tyre was slow relative to the two softer compounds, but the warm up of the tyre on the outlap was the real problem when attempting an undercut. This tactic would only work if you could switch the tyre on straight away. The soft was at least two seconds slower on warm up than ultra soft.

So having initially lost second place at the start to Verstappen, but regained its milliseconds before the Safety Car was deployed for the accident involving Esteban Ocon – the second time recently that Vettel has squeaked in a move under the wire as the Race Director was reaching for the “Deploy Safety Car” button – Vettel was in a position to look at a strategy attack on Hamilton.

Hamilton was playing with the concertina, lapping in the high 1m47s until Lap 11, when he suddenly bolted and pulled a gap of 2.2 seconds on Vettel over two laps. On tyres that had not suffered from following another car, Hamilton had more pace, so Ferrari had to act even though they did not have the gap they required back to Perez in the Force India.

There was a nice five second gap between Ricciardo and Perez – and growing fast – but Ferrari knew that they had to try to bring Vettel in and fit the ultrasoft to attack Perez and hope that their driver could get the job done quickly enough that when Hamilton reacted on the next lap and pitted, he would come out behind Vettel.

Pitting a lap or two earlier and fitting the soft would not have won the game.

This was a high-risk strategy for Ferrari because if Vettel was not able to pass Perez, who was in a pugnacious mood that night, having hit his team mate at the start and later slammed into Sirotkin, then he risked losing second place to Verstappen. This is exactly what happened as Perez held up Vettel for two laps, costing him a further three championship points.

On top of that Ferrari were fitting a tyre where the gamble on faster warm up on the out lap had to pay off, otherwise the risk of the tyre performance dropping off later in the race would outweigh the upside.

It is easy in hindsight to criticise Ferrari’s strategy in Singapore, but on the pit wall you have to make a decision in the heat of the moment; they had few other options, as they could feel their grip on the world championship fading away.

The longer it had gone on, Hamilton would have pitted without challenge and the chance to undercut would have gone. Stay out too long and Vettel risked being undercut by Verstappen.

The danger for Maranello is the damage to morale of losing a championship every single team member knows they should have won, having done such a wonderful job in the last year to turn the team around and build a dominant car. It would lead to questions about the driver, the leadership and much else besides.

Hence the willingness to take a risk to try to make something happen in Singapore.

 

Alonso gives a reminder of his class in the midfield

A little further back in the field was a driver who left Maranello in 2014 having lost belief that they could perform the technical turnaround that they have subsequently done.

Fernando Alonso got the maximum out of his car and the reverse strategy that he was given by the McLaren team, starting on the more durable ultrasoft tyre. He was able to take advantage of the concertina and the fact that the midfield cars that qualified in the Top ten ahead of him were all on hypersofts and had to stop early into traffic. Behind him his fellow Spaniard did the same thing and followed his mentor.

It meant that the likes of Perez and Grosjean got stuck behind Sergey Sirotkin, who had stopped on lap 3 under the Safety Car and who held them up significantly and it opened up a nice gap for Alonso and Sainz to pit into, yielding seventh and eight places.

Charles Leclerc was another beneficiary of this strategy in the Sauber, although he had to pull off an overtaking move on the Toro Rosso of Pierre Gasly, to get into position to benefit. He pitted on the same lap as Alonso, Lap 38 and picked up a very handy ninth place –his sixth points scoring race from 15 starts in F1.

A couple of other interesting details; Magnussen was on the right tyre but did not do what Alonso, Sainz and Leclerc did and instead he pitted early from Ultrasoft tyres behind the train – which shows that they had modelled the race very differently to the other three teams (and on this occasion incorrectly).

Meanwhile Toro Rosso chose to start both cars on hypersoft, which suggests that they also modelled the race incorrectly as they believed it would be an aggressive undercut race and/or they could extend longer on the hyper.

As most teams outside the top ten believed that this race was quite obviously one to start on ultrasoft, it is strange they committed to hypersoft with both cars. It didn’t pay off.

 

Following their remarkable results at Spa-Francorchamps and Monza, Racing Point Force India now find themselves having to reapply team orders after their two drivers came to blows in Singapore.

The team’s quest to recover lost ground in the constructors’ championship was hampered when Sergio Perez and Esteban Ocon collided on the first lap, sending the latter into the barrier and out of the race.

With both drivers starting in the top ten, Perez initially held seventh place in the opening couple of corners. However, with Ocon challenging around the outside of turn three, the front-right of Perez’s car came together with the front-left of Ocon’s car, which was enough to send the Frenchman into the barrier on the exit of the corner.



Ocon was visibly very frustrated with the incident, but Perez remained adamant that he didn’t see his team-mate when the pair collided.

“It was very unfortunate,” said Perez. “As I’m picking up the power in Turn 3 I just get a contact from another car, on my front tyre. I did not even realise at the time that it was Esteban.

“As I got it through the radio I was quite sorry for the team, because I thought we were on to a great day today, with a lot of points.”

Ocon remained diplomatic after the race and refused to comment on the incident other than saying Perez had apologised to him.

“He apologised to me, in the room he said he apologised,” Ocon told Motorsport.com. “But it’s not because of that that everything’s gone.

“The only thing I look at at the moment is that we come home with no points on a weekend where we should have been both in the points, getting strong results.

“We had the pace for it. And yeah, it’s a terrible situation to be where we are now.

“That’s all I can say, there’s nothing else to comment about. No, it’s not the same situation as last year, we’ve turned the page from there. And that’s it really.”



Szafnauer points finger at Perez, FI drivers not permitted to race each other

With the result costing Force India a chance of gaining more points in the constructors’ championship, team principal Otmar Szafnauer believed that Perez should’ve left more room for Ocon and confirmed that team orders will now be in place for the rest of the season.

“I didn’t remind them here, maybe I should have done, but they know it now, and again they’re not going to race any more if they can’t do it.

“There wasn’t any room, Checo should have given him room, and Checo had plenty of room.

“Esteban put himself in a position where if Checo moved over, he couldn’t do anything about it. But your teammate shouldn’t do that to you.

“If it’s another car, then you shouldn’t have put yourself there. But if it’s your teammate, you’ve got to have that respect.

“It’s just a matter of fact, it is what it is. And next race we’ll tell them the rules, and it won’t happen again, it’s that simple.”



Perez accepts drive-through penalty for Sirotkin collision

The Mexican driver’s day would only get more controversial after a mid-race tangle with Williams’ Sergey Sirotkin.

Whilst the Force India pair qualified in the top ten, they were hindered by having to run the hypersoft tyre in the opening stint of the race.

Perez’s pit stop put him behind Sirotkin, who was running much slower on the soft tyre, and allowed the midfield rivals on ultrasofts to stay out and gain track position.

With Perez stuck behind for several laps, he eventually made a move into turn sixteen. However, Sirotkin fought back into seventeen and still had part of his car alongside Perez.

Perez moved across and collided with the Williams, which damaged both cars and earned the Force India driver a drive-through penalty, which he accepted as a fair punishment.

“In the incident with Sirotkin I closed the line a bit earlier and I got a well-deserved penalty,” conceded Perez.

“It was hard racing, he was defending his position very hard, fighting very hard, moving a lot under braking and a lot of lock-ups under braking.

“And then as I was going through him, I tried to close the door but I think he was too close.”

With Perez running ahead of Renault’s Nico Hulkenberg – who went on to finish in tenth place – it can be assumed that the Force India would’ve been able to take at least a point from the Singapore Grand Prix.

However, their score-less race means that the gap between themselves and McLaren has increased to 26 points, following a seventh-place finish for the Woking team.

By: Luke Murphy

 

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Karun Chandhok

✔@karunchandhok


Lewis’ pole lap was exceptional. Was watching with @AussieGrit (we’ve seen a few special Qualifying laps in our lives). Both our jaws fell open when we saw the laptime... However, when you look at Max’s lap, it was obviously very special too. 0.45 lost on straights, 0.31 off pole