Black_Flag_11 wrote:
I make it that Ferrari have had the better car 10 times, Mercedes 6 times. Two that I found hard to call were Italy and Canada which I gave to Ferrari, so I think you could make the argument that it's 8-6 with two 'draws'. If you were being very generous to Mercedes you could possibly get to 8-8.
It's very clear where Ferrari lost this title though, from Britain to Italy they had the best car and completely failed to capitalise for one reason or another.
Edit: should be 9-7, not 10-6.
While I agree that Ferrari failed to capitalize on their position on more than one occasion, I think Britain to Italy is too broad.
In GB Hamilton got pole and only lost the race because he had such a(n uncharacteristically) poor start. I think there's an argument to say that Hamilton threw that one away, really, and to me the cars looked relatively equal. Germany is a little difficult to draw any conclusions from in qualifying as Hamilton was out of it and Vettel only beat Bottas by 2 tenths. I don't think that's a big enough margin to rule out driver performance and the race conditions made it almost impossible to say. Hamilton didn't look like he was suffering a car disadvantage, that's for sure, and neither did Bottas.
Then we move onto Hungary, where Mercedes enjoyed a front-row lockout helped, admittedly, by the changeable conditions. But Hamilton also outpaced Vettel pretty much the whole race, although it was quite difficult to make a proper comparison due to Hamilton enjoying clear air while Vettel didn't for much of the race. But there wasn't anything in the way of evidence to point to the Ferrari being superior. Spa is one race where Ferrari did look like they had a decent advantage in qualifying at least, but that was again negated by the weather. And Hamilton's defeat from pole owes as much to him making a mistake in the beginning and allowing Vettel past as it did any advantage Ferrari had. We saw last year just how difficult overtaking was there with these cars and if Hamilton had managed to stay ahead at the start he may have held on for the win. But Ferrari did look the better car, especially in regards to traction.
And at Monza Mercedes appeared to completely overcome their traction issues and Hamilton certainly didn't look any slower than Kimi there. While on paper Ferrari looked quicker in qualifying their margin was very, very small and you can't rule out driver performance. I'd probably give them qualifying on the basis of Hamilton's gap to Bottas, but the race was a different story.
So on the whole I'd say that the cars have been a lot more equal than Mercedes have been making out. There have been a couple of times where Ferrari looked to have a better qualifying package, but in race pace that's not been the case and I really don't see that Ferrari have held any kind of consistent advantage for 5 races. In this I think I'd agree with Vettel:
Vettel said he was not surprised that Mercedes has currently edged ahead, as he believes the advantage Ferrari enjoyed at earlier points in the season had been overstated.
“I think we said many times that we have a strong car but I don’t think, maybe against people’s opinions, that we had a dominant car at any point this year.
“It has been very close all year, but there were too many races from our side where we weren’t close enough.
“A race like last weekend [in Russia], the way they could play with us in a race, usually means they have more pace, and there are other races in the season where we didn’t have the pace they had.”https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/vettel-ferrari-tech-direction-suzuka/3188380/
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