A new era of dominance? Hamilton and his imperious win in Malaysia

Source: motorsport.com

Lewis Hamilton produced a commanding drive to win the Malaysian GP, continuing Mercedes’ stellar start to the 2014 season. The Briton capitalised on his pole position, taking the lead into the first corner and controlling the race from lights to flag. Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg struggled to keep up and finished second seventeen seconds later, whilst Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel maintained the pressure on Rosberg throughout the race to secure the final podium step. Hamilton placed his stamp on victory in the early stages of the race, building up a lead of four seconds by lap 3 and going from there to maintain a steady pace and a comfortable gap to the field. Rosberg made the jump on Vettel at the start to run second, but struggled with excessive rear tyre wear in the first two stints. Vettel kept the limping Rosberg within reach until his second stop on lap 31, from which point the Mercedes driver managed to increase the gap a further 1.7 seconds by lap 37 to secure second place. Ferrari ace Fernando Alonso drove a typically collected race to snatch fourth from Red Bull rookie Daniel Ricciardo, who was running in that position before a calamitous pit-stop on lap 40 allowed the close-running Spaniard to breeze past. Ricciardo’s run of bad luck continued as his front wing failed on lap 43, before being given a ten second stop-and-go penalty for the previous pit-stop disaster and retiring five laps later. The ever-impressive Nico Hulkenburg drove a solid race for Force India, using a bold two-stop strategy to challenge Alonso for fourth place until he was passed by the fresh-tyred Ferrari on lap 53, ultimately settling for fifth.

Despite yielding a number of impressive performances from a number of unexpected places, the Malaysian GP was far from a classic. Low on drama and incident, and even lower on overtaking at the very front of the field, the race merely seemed to confirm what we had all been suspecting anyway: Mercedes are the dominant force in this new era, and no one is even close to touching them. By the end of Friday practice at the Australian GP, after the cars had run with both high and low fuel loads, McLaren’s Jenson Button believed that the Mercedes Silver Arrow had an advantage of a second a lap over the rest of the field on race pace. Thus far, it must be said that the events of this season have done little to suggest that such an assertion was wrong; Mercedes were able to maintain a gap of that magnitude over Red Bull and Ferrari throughout the races in Melbourne and Sepang, even extending it to a second and a half in the closing stages of the latter.

Of course, one can draw too many conclusions from two races at the outset of the season, but the consistency Mercedes exhibited on these vastly different tracks indicates that they have an ominously well-rounded package. Indeed, the long, high-speed areas of Melbourne’s Albert Park circuit could not contrast more with the downforce-heavy turns in Sepang, but Hamilton’s W05 was still able to win by a significant margin, set the fastest lap by one and a half seconds to the next non-Mercedes, and use the least fuel of any car in the top ten. This suggests that the Mercedes is not only brilliant aerodynamically, but also that it is able to produce much more power per unit of fuel than any of its competitors, which is ultimately the crucial measure of performance under Formula 1’s new efficiency-focused rules. Nailing this combination at such an early stage of the season is hugely important for Mercedes, as it will ensure that their package can rise to the different challenges posed by the broad spectrum of tracks for the foreseeable future.

Red Bull and Ferrari, on the other hand, appear to be in a somewhat less stable boat. While they both have good performance in the sort of high-speed corners characteristic of Sepang, their powertrains are uncompetitive compared to those in Rosberg and Hamilton’s Silver Arrows, lacking the fuel efficiency and therefore the horsepower to overawe the Mercedes’ raw speed. The emphasis on downforce in Sepang helped Red Bull and Ferrari negate Mercedes’ power advantage to a certain extent, but they will not be able to mount an effective title challenge based upon such contingent factors. Indeed, the repeated low-speed acceleration zones of the next track in Bahrain will probably not suit them as well as the extended high speed corners of Malaysia, so a slump back down the field is almost inevitable.

As we have seen countless times in recent years, however, Red Bull and Ferrari have been the kings of the long-term development race, so it would be foolish to question their ability to bounce back so early, especially in such a revolutionary era. Indeed, if Red Bull’s dramatic improvement between the woes of pre-season testing and a couple of podiums is anything to go by, there is every possibility that Mercedes will not remain unchallenged for very long. For the sake of everyone who values a bit of variety, we better hope there is.