East Londoner wrote:Where to start here?
Force India's Strategist - Brought Sutil in far too early for his final stop, costing him 5th,
The Reverend Maldolan - Picking up where he left 2012.
Pirelli - Clearly those super softs were made out of cheese.
But ROTR has to go to:
McLaren - Absolutely nowhere in the race. A grand total of two points.
I'd have to agree with your nomination of McLaren, as they were somewhat lucky to get those two points too - Grosjean spent a large chunk of the final stint right behind Button and finished barely a second behind him. Equally, although Perez was equally close to Grosjean - just 0.6s behind - Vergne nearly passed Perez too, as he finished just 0.5s behind Perez, so to a certain extent it looks like Button was backing those three drivers up into each other as the car simply wasn't fast enough. Whitmarsh has been persistently talking up the development potential of this car, but it's no good talking up the development potential when you're lucky to finish on the lead lap and scrape into the top 10.
To be fair to the Force India strategists, I can see why they thought that it was worth sending Sutil out on the super soft tyres for his final stint - in the opening stages of the race, the super soft tyres were able to last for a reasonable stretch of time (the Mercedes pair managed to get 13-14 laps out of their tyres on a fairly heavy fuel load), so it might not have seemed unreasonable to expect that, on lower fuel and with a rubbered in track, the tyres might have lasted for 15 laps. It's a shame that the tyres faded so quickly though, because it undercut what had been up until then had been a very impressive drive - still, it's a promising sign for Sutil (and one that should give Di Resta plenty to think about).
As a secondary nomination, I'd have to agree with the poor flag marshalling - why were the marshals persistently trying to blue flag Sutil when he was racing for position? Given that the drivers would have been relying more heavily than before on the marshals because of the persistent problems with the FIA's telemetry systems (which deserves an honorary mention for ROTR), that was rather poor form by the marshals for giving misleading information to the drivers.
Honourable mentions should also go out to the Williams duo - Maldonado ended up in the gravel trap, but despite a trouble free race Bottas was a very distant 14th and going nowhere fast. Sauber, too, deserve a mention - Hulkenberg didn't even start the race because of his car breaking down, whilst Gutierrez's pace was fairly dismal.
(Tony Jardine, 1988)
