F1 Mid-season Review: A two-horse race for the world crown

Matt Majendie 00:52 28/07/2015
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  • Vettel (l) faces an uphill task to break the dominance of Hamilton and Rosberg (c).

    Turn the clock back to this point last season, and the position is all too familiar. With admittedly one race more prior to the mid-season calendar, the 2014 season so far read five wins by Lewis Hamilton to Nico Rosberg’s four.

    But where things have differed is that reliability issues by Hamilton and consistency by Rosberg meant that the German packed his bags for his summer recess with 11 points more than his teammate and six pole positions to Hamilton’s four.

    This time, the season so far has panned out similarly in race wins but few could disagree that the defending world champion, his poor Hungaroring showing aside, is stronger a year on. His points standings read 202 to Rosberg’s 181, while he has a 9-1 lead in the pair’s qualifying head-to-head, a stunning volte face from last year when Rosberg appeared to be the one-lap king.

    However the points and disparity plays out on the grid, the team status quo in 2015 has effectively stayed the same, the reality being that Mercedes will wrap up the title long before the season reaches its finale at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at the end of November and that only one of two drivers will be world champion, namely Hamilton or Rosberg, despite Sebastian Vettel’s strong showing.

    There had been a danger early on of the season turning into a onehorse race but Rosberg, clearly up against it, has refused to be deterred and has been on an even keel since his teammate won three of the first four grands prix of the year.

    Quite how the season will pan out, no one knows but Hamilton is in the ascendancy not just on his form so far but on what lies ahead.

    Of the nine races left, in 2014 Hamilton won four of them, Rosberg one (Brazil) and Daniel Ricciardo (Belgium) plus there is a new race on the calendar in the form of the Mexican Grand Prix so mentally that gives the Briton the edge.

    There is no denying there was a sombre mood to the summer interval, unsurprising with the grid racing just nine days after former Marussia driver Jules Bianchi lost his life nine months after his crash at the Japanese Grand Prix.

    For all the tragedy, the drivers agreed the show must go on, a show that Mercedes look set to continue to dominate.

    That looks likely to be a lone charge by Ferrari, the surprise package of the early season who made a tremendous jump forward from last year to win the second race of the season courtesy of Vettel in Malaysia.

    After that point, either they slipped back or else Williams took a stride forward or there is a third explanation, simply that for the most part the last few races and the conditions have played to the strengths of the Williams of both Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa.

    Hungary once more, though, turned things upside down, the two Williams as disappointing as they had been in Monaco when both drivers finished well outside the points. There are big question marks about what developments Williams have in store and whether they can wrestle back their inconsistency.

    The biggest strugglers have obviously been McLaren, the Honda engine still nowhere near producing the power required to catch up with the rest of the grid but the team still doing its damnedest to paint a rosy PR image around them.

    – Hungarian GP: Rosberg ‘gutted’ after Ricciardo collision
    – Mercedes: Hamilton bemoans ‘bad day at the office’
    – Hungarian GP: Vettel win blows championship wide open

    Budapest was a monstrous beacon of hope with both drivers in the points and the message McLaren want to be heard is that they will get back to the top and dominate F1 once more; the reality is infinitely different, question marks now emerging on whether they can be competitive at all in 2016.

    As for the rest of the season, it has been one marred as ever by the usual politics and infighting.

    A potential power struggle is ongoing over the possible sale of the sport with billions of dollars possibly set to exchange hands with question marks about whether this means the beginning of the end of F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone.

    Then there is the bickering about engines, Renault’s threat to walk away from the sport one minute to potentially ramping up their commitment to returning as a manufacturer. Plus there is the ever irascible Dietrich Mateschitz. His threats to walk away could prove genuine but, for now, the team have a contract in the sport until 2020 which means for now Red Bull are here to stay.

    Maybe everyone just needs a holiday. In the wake of Hungary, the sport has got just that. F1 has shut down, the circus set to resume in Spa in a month’s time.

    How the teams stack up 

    MERCEDES 

    Mercedes.

    Bar the slip-up in Malaysia and last weekend in Hungary where Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari stole a jump to take the race wins, things could barely have gone better for Mercedes, with eight race wins and six one-twos from 10 races. Merc will go into the summer recess safe in the knowledge that the constructors’ title is all but sewn up at the halfway point of the season. There is also the sense that if pushed particularly hard by Ferrari and Williams then Mercedes potentially have more power and pace up their sleeves. Once more they have managed the head-to-head between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg as the pair vie for the title.

    FERRARI 
    Ferrari.

    At the start of the season, Ferrari had quite comfortably made the biggest strides of the chasing pack on pacesetters Mercedes. From the off, Sebastian Vettel showed the sort of pace that had Mercedes at least scratching their heads a little, most notably when he popped up to win in Sepang in what was only his second grand prix in the famous red overalls of the Prancing Horse. While Vettel, backed by his Hungarian Grand Prix win, has comfortably been the best of the rest, Williams have shown they could yet close the gap on Ferrari in the latter half of the season particularly if Kimi Raikkonen continues to blow hot and cold.

    WILLIAMS 
    Williams.

    Williams have been unfairly maligned by some this season for being boring and going for consistent points rather than pushing to the limit and going for the oh-so-close race win that eluded them during their resurgence last season. But the anomaly of the races in Monaco and Hungary aside, when their drivers both finished well outside the points, the past few races have proved a turning of a corner of sorts for the team with two podiums and five of the six results top-five finishes prior to the last race. Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa have proved a close match just a single point separating them.

    RED BULL 
    Red Bull.

    For the previously dominant team of F1, the 2015 season has very much been one to forget for Red Bull. The team have made more headlines off the track than on it from the threats of team owner Dietrich Mateschitz to quit F1 altogether to the public rows with engine supplier Renault to even the celebrity wedding of team principal Christian Horner to former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell. On the track, there have not been the sneaked wins of Daniel Ricciardo from a year ago and not a single podium, their longest run without a podium since the 2007 season, until Ricciardo barged his way to one last weekend.

    FORCE INDIA 
    Force India.

    At the start of the year, Force India boss Vijay Mallya made it clear the team’s target was to finish in the top five. The team, though, have exceeded expectations to the extent that the often ostentatious Indian team principal has let it be known that the target has been revised and he has his sights set on catching Red Bull in fourth spot, which seems a hard ask after double retirements at the weekend. There is reason to be positive with a B-spec car introduced at the British Grand Prix with the quirk of its ’nostril’ nose which led to double points finishes by Nico Hulkenberg and Sergio Perez but matching Red Bull is a tough ask.

    LOTUS 

    Lotus.

    Lotus, like many a midfield F1 team, has been struggling to pay the bills as highlighted by a recent winding-up petition in the High Court which came to nothing. On the track, the teams form has ebbed and flowed. The Canadian Grand Prix was the first time the team had managed to get both cars in the points since the Indian Grand Prix in October 2013 and, with the Mercedes engine, it was hoped that Austria and Silverstone would play to their strengths but Romain Grosjean suffered a double race retirement while Pastor Maldonado failed to see the chequered flag in Britain.

    SAUBER 
    Sauber.

    There was an unwavering level of hope and expectation after the opening grand prix weekend of the season in Australia which had started with a court case over who their driver line-up would be and ended with a double points finish. The latter has only been repeated twice at round three of the 2015 campaign in China and things don’t look rosy at the team. Mark Smith, formerly of Red Bull, Caterham and Force India, though, has been brought in as the team’s first technical director since James Key left in 2012, with much of the focus now geared towards next season.

    TORO ROSSO 
    Toro Rosso.

    The form of the Red Bull ‘B’ team has been curious to say the least. At times, they have looked to have the pace to match much of the grid in qualifying and at certain points during a race, Max Verstappen’s stunning fourth place a case in point. But with a full tank of fuel, the wheels all but tend to fall off the two Red Bulls for whatever reason. In rookies Verstappen and Carlos Sainz, they have one of the most inexperienced but also exciting driver line-up. The pair have showed flashes of brilliance and led to Red Bull No1 Ricciardo to admit they had given his team a wake-up call with their occasionally strong showings.

    McLAREN 
    McLaren.

    How do you solve a problem like McLaren? On the evidence of the first part of the season then not particularly easily. Throughout the team from the bosses to the drivers they have tried to put a positive spin on a season when they have been woefully down on pace and also struggled with reliability– the Chinese Grand Prix is the only race in which both drivers have managed to finish. But the team has argued that some first-lap mishaps have not allowed it to show the rest of the grid how much of a difference its inseason upgrades have made. Whether Hungary where Fernando Alonso was fifth and Jenson Button was ninth proves an anomaly remains to be seen.

    MANOR 
    Manor.

    Very much the backmarkers of the sport, the team formerly known as Marussia have done well to cling on to their place at the forefront of motorsport. Rebranded as Manor, it has been an emotional roller coaster in the past week or so since the death of Jules Bianchi in the wake of his crash nine months ago at the Japanese Grand Prix while at the wheel of a Marussia. The team’s current driver pairing of Roberto Merhi and Will Stevens are not quite in the same ballpark as Bianchi but have done their best to finish the majority of races this season albeit at the back.

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