Head To Head Nico Rosberg vs Lewis Hamilton

Two interesting quotes
Rosberg who wants equal strategy to fight Hamilton man to man

Rosberg: Mercedes fight must be 'man against man'

Hamilton who having been told that Mercedes won't change strategy and called the race boring and demanded that the technical regulations be changed to make passing easier

Mercedes will not alter strategy policy despite Hamilton complaints

This is going to seriously haunt Mercedes not just within the team but if the opposition can out think them in the strategy side
 
The thing those stats don't take into account though is how much of an advantage the Merc has over the rest of the field. For all the complaints about Red Bull being dominant they were nowhere near as far in front as the Merc is. At 75% of the tracks this year Rosberg could have a bad day and still finish 2nd which could not be said for Webber.

Once again a reason to judge by watching the racing and not the statistics.

When people say he has 'become Webber and Barrichello' they are refering to the fact he's completely not a match for his team mate and has let it get him on a mental status. Like Webber and Barrichello, Rosberg has a real chip on his shoulder as to how hard done to he is by his team mate. Every little thing that goes in Hamilton's favour gets to him, he's obsessed with what he's doing and how he's doing it. The days he is quick are the days he gets it out of his head. Barrichello and Webber were exactly the same with Schumacher and Vettel.

Having said that I do think Rosberg is superior to Webber and I think on his day he is as quick as anyone (a bit like Felipe Massa used to be) but his day is not very frequent. If you are looking at pure pace then Rosberg probably would be in the top 6 but if your looking for how good a performance a driver puts in over a season then I wouldn't put him top 6.
 
Mercedes race strategy is a creatively challenged and when the other teams get their acts together they plummet into the glaringly public obscurity that Red Bull and McLaren inhabit.
 
Webber struggled to finish 2nd on a good day never mind a bad one, but that was solely down to him.
If we compare Hamilton's 2014+2015 stats to Vettel's 2011+2013 stats then they have actually achieved very similar results.

Hamilton has 747 points, 30 podium finishes, 21 of them are wins and 18 pole positions with one race left to run.
Vettel had 790 points, 33 podiums, 24 of which are wins plus 24 pole positions.

Vettel achieved slightly more, so unless we assume that Vettel is a significantly stronger driver than Hamilton the only conclusion has to be that the Mercedes and Red Bull are fairly close in how dominant they were. Webber achieved 5 poles and only a single victory over the same period.

This is also backed up by a certain mathematical model, which rates the four cars as follows:
2011 Red Bull 8th most dominant car of all time
2015 Mercedes 7th
2013 Red Bull 3rd
2014 Mercedes 2nd

The 2010 and 2012 Red Bulls were clearly not as dominant as this and the 2009 car was arguably not even the fastest on the grid that year, but those three years are the ones Webber was actually closest to Vettel. Likewise Rosberg's best year at Mercedes relative to Hamilton remains 2013.

I think a lot of this is just perception; Vettel had a habit of leaving everyone for dead within the first two laps then maintaining a small gap over his opponents sufficient to cover an undercut, but not much more than that. Mercedes, however, don't do that, they keep that rapid pace up for most of the race so they end up building much bigger gaps to their opponents. This combined with Webber floundering around in the chasing pack makes Red Bull look less dominant.

I would also disagree that Rosberg is 'completely not a match' for Hamilton, there is simply no way to reconcile that claim with the fact that Rosberg is actually very close to Hamilton in the qualifying and race head-to-head tallies. Those two tallies are binary, they are not affected by car performance.
The points tally is affected by car performance, but Rosberg is about as far behind as you would expect given his qualifying and race result head-to-heads. The one that actually seems to have benefited from the car performance masking their poor form is Webber, who is much closer in points to Vettel than his terrible head-to-head tallies would suggest.

I also cannot think of any other driver that is better than Rosberg besides the 5 I mentioned. I guess Kvyat is the best candidate, but several badly timed mechanical failures on Ricciardo's car has masked the quite large advantage he has had over Kvyat so I'm not all that convinced Kvyat is as good as the likes of Rosberg or Button. Raikkonen and Massa are surely out of the question due to their poor results against Alonso and Vettel, whilst Bottas has had only a small edge over Massa meaning he too is surely below Rosberg. Grosjean was thrashed first by Alonso then Raikkonen for 2 years straight whilst Perez and Hulkenberg have been consistently mediocre despite all the hype, so neither is worth serious consideration. It's still too early to say where this year's rookies lie, and in the case of the Toro Rosso pair it is impossible apart from compared to one another.
 
A testament to what lengths this deluded Mercedes team will go to was the first round of pitstops. Having had to hold Nico's release they proceeded to give Lewis a similarly retarded stop.


N. ROSBERG lap13 stationary for 4.4sec
L. HAMILTON lap14 stationary for 3.6sec
N. ROSBERG lap33 Stationary for 2.7sec
L. HAMILTON lap34 stationary for 2.4sec
N. ROSBERG lap48 stationary for 2.6sec
L. HAMILTON lap49 stationary for 2.4sec

Their policy may be fair but it is also retarded.
 
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N. ROSBERG lap13 stationary for 4.4sec
L. HAMILTON lap14 stationary for 3.6sec
N. ROSBERG lap33 Stationary for 2.7sec
L. HAMILTON lap34 stationary for 2.4sec
N. ROSBERG lap48 stationary for 2.6sec
L. HAMILTON lap49 stationary for 2.4sec

Their policy may be fair but it is also retarded.

It is quite obvious from this data that Rosberg was purposefully held back in the second and third stops, firstly by 0.3 seconds then by 0.2 seconds. Alternatively the stops were almost unbelievably fast with only a gnat's hair between them; so little in fact that there is no way that Hamilton could get any meaningful advantage from them.
 
If Hamilton wants to win on a track that you can't pass on, get pole! It's not fucking rocket science.

Out and out racer wanting to win on strategy, really?!
 
Wrong thread I know but Kvyat and Ricciardo have the same number of none finishes or none starts.

Gotta love those stats.
Ricciardo's mechanical DNF's have occurred more recently when the car was more competitive and therefore capable of scoring more points. That is why I specified poorly timed mechanical failures rather than the quantity of them, although Ricciardo has also suffered from more of them anyway; Kvyat's DNF in Texas was driver error not mechanical.

I didn't bother going into the nitty gritty of who lost what due to bad luck and mechanical issues in my Rosberg analysis because it wasn't particularly necessary. It's been done before with Hamilton vs. Button, so I felt no need to repeat the obvious there, but I haven't done or seen an in-depth analysis on Rosberg vs. Hamilton points losses. A rough look I did do suggests they both lost a broadly similar amount of points as each other and doesn't effect which driver came out on top, which is unlike the Button vs. Hamilton, Button vs. Alonso and Kvyat vs. Ricciardo situations.
 
Why didn't Ricciardo score a big haul of points at Hungary when the Red Bull was at its most competitive? Just bringing it back to Nico Rosberg.
 
teabagyokel more than likely, but surely there must be a point where you have to accept the other man is better this season and just look to improve for next time around rather than getting eaten up by what could have been. If you can't let it go then you end up defeating yourself before the next race....
 
canis - That's it though. Rosberg is too much of a competitive animal to ever be happy with being number 2, but not enough of an arrogant bastard that he still believes he's the best when he's having a bad time. When Hamilton was being beaten by Rosberg last year, there was not a flicker of doubt in Hamilton's mind that he would be proved the better.
 
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