Hamilton Vs Rosberg 2014

[Phil]

It may not be obvious, but if you tally the total points each team mate has gained over their time in the same team as Lewis, every team mate except Kovalainen has scored more points in the same timeframe. At McLaren Button scored 767 points between 2009-2012, while Hamilton scored 706, and this is despite Lewis gaining 11 poles to Button's 4. In the shorter period at Mercedes, Rosberg has scored 336 points to Hamilton's 325, but again Lewis has 9 poles to Nico's 6.

There's a simple reason why I don't put much weight in the whole "pole vs wins" theory: In 2011, when Lewis arguably was the only one to occasionally beat a Redbull in qualifying, he still ended up being in a way inferior car during the race. That he even got his car on pole was remarkable, yet following your analysis goes down as a "pole not converted into a win".

The team-mate comparison is also not very complete too. Hamilton has had a few team-mates:

2007 Alonso - equal (better by podiums)
2008 Kovalainen - better
2009 Kovalainen - better
2010 Button - better
2011 Button - worse
2012 Button - better
2013 Rosberg - better
2014 Rosberg - not complete - at the moment, worse

If you look at it from this angle; From 7 complete seasons across 4 different team mates, he beat his team-mate 6 times out of 7, the anomoly being 2011. If we do as you did and compare team-mates by personalities, it is down to beating his team-mate 3 times to 1, the anomoly again being Button.

You will note that I excluded the 2014 season because as far as I am concerned, it's still an on-going season and a lot can change. Including it isn't entirely fair for that reason and unnecessarely fudges the overal picture.

If anything, selectively looking at numbers, can completely vary the meaning of them, which simply shows how numbers without context are absolutely meaningless.

And I am sure some people will say what about his bad luck at X or Y race - but it doesn't really matter whether it's through his own fault or the car or team; it all counts to his points-scoring record. Some drivers - even team mates - seem able to negotiate those issues better.

I find that a very simplistic way to look at it IMO, given that since the change in point system from 10 to 25, "bad luck" as you call it, effectively got 2.5 times more costly, especially when you are fighting for wins (>18 points), as Lewis did numerous times in 2012 and in 2014.

I'm all for statistics, but I prefer the more detailled kind, rather than just looking at total points tallies.

[stewilkinson]

Lewis may in fact be the "quicker" driver but to win a Championship, a driver must be smart, too. A little luck doesn't hurt either. Nico is definitely the "smarter" driver. If Lewis had maintained a 2-3 second gap in Canada until closer to the end, he probably wouldn't have cooked his rear brakes and might have been able to overtake Nico and won. Lewis has had a bit of bad luck this year as well.

I made a controversial post about this some time ago, about Hamilton's "luck" in converting poles to wins and points.

The simple fact is - for whatever reason - Lewis is consistently less able to convert poles into podiums and points than almost all his team mates, both at McLaren and so far at Mercedes. With the single exception of the 2008 season against Kovalainen, he has consistently underperformed his team mates in points and wins per pole, and by a huge margin.

It may not be obvious, but if you tally the total points each team mate has gained over their time in the same team as Lewis, every team mate except Kovalainen has scored more points in the same timeframe. At McLaren Button scored 767 points between 2009-2012, while Hamilton scored 706, and this is despite Lewis gaining 11 poles to Button's 4. In the shorter period at Mercedes, Rosberg has scored 336 points to Hamilton's 325, but again Lewis has 9 poles to Nico's 6.

And I am sure some people will say what about his bad luck at X or Y race - but it doesn't really matter whether it's through his own fault or the car or team; it all counts to his points-scoring record. Some drivers - even team mates - seem able to negotiate those issues better.

I'm not a Lewis hater, I understand he is quick and talented, and very entertaining. I am just interested in trying to predict where this all goes. My view is that this is something that the multiple-WDC drivers come to understand and work with. They learn to squeeze points out of slower cars or worse starting positions. And because of that I am willing to bet that Rosberg ends up WDC this year, just based on the points/pole number so far this season - he is outscoring Lewis at an almost 55% advantage.

Button wasn't at Mclaren in 2009, so the points tallies are as follows:

Button - 672
Hamilton- 657

Secondly, over this same period Lewis has 12 DNFs compared to buttons 6, the result influenced even more by lewis having the least DNFs in his worst season of the 3 and the most DNFS (several from the lead) in arguable his best season of the 3. If we ignore these DNFS and work out points converted per race over the same period, and then stretch that out to cover the full 58 races for the season they spent as team mates we get:

Button - 748
Hamilton - 828

Regardless, as everyone knows that when it comes to formula 1 you're always going to be trying to compare apples with pears when pulling statistics from historical data. What about non mechanical DNFS (eg. Hamilton vs. Maldonado in valencia)? What about lower positions due to mechanical gremlins? If you argue with staunch Hamilton fans the mention of bad luck is bound to come up, but you can't turn around an use points tally as proof that bad luck does not an underscoring driver make...

[PlatinumZealot]

Lewis may in fact be the "quicker" driver but to win a Championship, a driver must be smart, too. A little luck doesn't hurt either. Nico is definitely the "smarter" driver. If Lewis had maintained a 2-3 second gap in Canada until closer to the end, he probably wouldn't have cooked his rear brakes and might have been able to overtake Nico and won. Lewis has had a bit of bad luck this year as well.

His team of Engineer's were not smart enough to detect that the KERS will fail. I guess F1 drivers should have 1st class degrees in engineering and 5 years experience now? haha

[LionKing]

The premise of Lewis being the quicker driver has also no basis, just wishful thinking They are pretty much dead equal in speed. Nico has the edge in dry qualis so far and Hamilton in wet qualis. (Nico also sucked big time in wet compared to Schumi so no surprises there...)

This is the data I have:
Nico - Lewis
Quali Head to Head 12-15
Dry Qualis 11 - 8
Wet Quali 1 - 7
Average lap time delta in dry 19 quali sessions 0.0121 sec in favor of Lewis (one hundreds of a second).

As for DNFs of Button and Lewis, we have discussed this a few times before but again the difference in number was coming from the number of accidents of Lewis orherwise the mechanical issues was 6-5 as fas as I remember.

[MercedesAMGSpy]

Still everything to play for. I only read pre-2012/2011 season bias about Hamilton. He just needs to focus on his Q3 lap and then he will be fine. Nothing wrong with his starts or race pace.

[SectorOne]

The premise of Lewis being the quicker driver has also no basis, just wishful thinking

It´s funny because your data proved Hamilton has been the quicker driver so far.
Then you decided to split qualis in wet and dry (like some other guy did) and then make excuses of "he sucks in the wet"

And proceeded to only count laptime delta in dry conditions.
What sort of delta do you get if you....you know....count ALL the quali sessions?


Even if data isn´t your thing, Lauda has said that from his point of view Lewis is 1-2 tenths quicker.
Which funnily enough fits the 2 tenths on average advantage he´s had over Rosberg this year.

And again just to reiterate, the average gap in qualifying between Ham and Ros has increased from last year.

[LionKing]

I know reasoning is not your strong point but anyways not expecting much from you.....
No the data proved what I have said, they are dead equal in speed. That is pretty much what 0.012 sec means...

[SectorOne]

I know reasoning is not your strong point but anyways not expecting much from you.....
No the data proved what I have said, they are dead equal in speed. That is pretty much what 0.012 sec means...

Yea you don´t know what the word reason means.

First of all your data showed that Hamilton has beaten Rosberg more then vice versa.
You then proceeded to cut out all the wet quali-sessions because "Rosberg suck in the wet" and still came up with Hamilton being faster on average in dry conditions.

Do it properly instead. (with reason)

[SidSidney]

1. Schumacher - more wins then poles - 7 titles
2. Fangio - more poles then wins - 5 titles
3. Alain Prost - more wins then poles - 4 titles
3. Sebastian Vettel - more poles then wins - 4 titles

It is all about the ratio. All of those drivers, except Senna and Clark, who you must admit had a somewhat untimely endings at the peak of their careers, have a significantly higher conversion ratio than Lewis.

Driver Wins/Pole
Clark 0.758
Senna 0.631
Prost 1.545
Fangio 0.828
Schumacher 1.338
Vettel 0.867
Hamilton 0.743
Stewart 1.588
Lauda 1.042
Piquet 0.958
Alonso 1.455

All of those drivers, except Hamilton, have won multiple WDC, all of them (as I said except Senna dn Clark who were killed in their primes), have higher conversion rates over a similarly large number of races.

Why does pole conversion matter? A pole position means you have a fast - perhaps dominant - car, in principle capable of getting around faster than anyone else. So you should be able to convert that into a lot of wins, assuming all the usual stuff about reliability, crashing etc, but that is the same for everybody. If your conversion ratio of poles with a dominant car is weak, you will not win or score enough points to win championships even though you are in the best possible position to do so. And that does not bode well for when you have the second or third best car on the grid either. The really great drivers create wins out of bad cars that do not qualify on pole, as well as converting more poles into wins.

Don't agree with me? No problem. But I am fairly sure Lewis Hamilton will end his career, in 3-4 years time, as the man who should have done better, given his speed and talent. I am pretty certain he will not win 3-4-5 WDC; the average number of races in the combined careers of the modern drivers above is 182, with Hamilton already on his 138th, so he is running out of time to get in another 4-5 championships, let alone 4-5 WDC victories, even if he had a competitive car for the next 4-5 seasons, he is running out of runway to make it happen.

[SectorOne]

All of those drivers, except Senna and Clark, who you must admit had a somewhat untimely endings at the peak of their careers, have a significantly higher conversion ratio than Lewis.

I´m looking at Vettel and Hamilton with near identical conversion rates (0.1 difference), yet one has four titles.
Quite obviously the ratio has no relation to how many titles you have or will get.

I also don´t think Senna´s and Clark´s death has anything to do with their conversation ratio.
Regardless if Senna would have died or not in Imola, his conversion ratio would still be negative at the end of the year.

So you should be able to convert that into a lot of wins, assuming all the usual stuff about reliability, crashing etc, but that is the same for everybody.

But that´s the thing, it´s not the same for everybody, it´s not even the same for the driver depending on the year.
Sebastian Vettel is living proof of someone who can have some relatively smooth years then experience the worst bad luck there is.

Then let´s look at Austria, Massa takes pole. Why? obviously it was a quick car but what happened?
Hamilton messed up his laps completely which more or less gifted the pole to Massa.

So how does that now look for Massa? Hamilton´s mistake will serve as a negative thing in your data because of stuff he had no control over, he simply went as fast as the car could go but the next day it was still a Williams trying to fight a Mercedes which was never going to happen.

[SectorOne]

The reason your system doesn´t work is because championships are not won with Pole Positions or Wins.
What wins titles is having the most points at the end of the season, not how many wins or poles you converted.
Your own data even proves this with the conversion ratio going from 0.6 to 1.5

And if 0.6 and 1,5 is actually very close then what is 0.7 and 0.8 with Hamilton and Vettel despite a 3 title difference between the two.

I can fully say i have no idea how many titles Hamilton will have, and so far nobody else can as well, regardless of theories.
we dropped this theory a while back so we might as well do it again this time.

[mrluke]

Why does pole conversion matter? A pole position means you have a fast - perhaps dominant - car, in principle capable of getting around faster than anyone else. So you should be able to convert that into a lot of wins, assuming all the usual stuff about reliability, crashing etc, but that is the same for everybody.

Are we ignoring last season where mercedes had a fast qualy car that got lapped during the race? Or are we just saying that is down to LH incompetence?

[SidSidney]

Are we ignoring last season where mercedes had a fast qualy car that got lapped during the race? Or are we just saying that is down to LH incompetence?

Are we saying that driver skill is solely being able to drive one lap quickly, or does it also involve picking the right team at the right time, insisting on certain team members and team mates, leading/motivating/forcing the team to find solutions to issues, managing weak cars into points-scoring positions, sacrificing pole speed to get reliability, and so on?

I don't think he is an incompetent driver, but I do think he is missing some aspects that make others more complete. There are no points for pole.

[SidSidney]

I´m looking at Vettel and Hamilton with near identical conversion rates (0.1 difference), yet one has four titles. Quite obviously the ratio has no relation to how many titles you have or will get.

That delta is massive. 0.1 delta in that ratio is equivalant to a relative 16% higher chance of conversion between those two drivers.

If Hamilton had the same ratio as Vettel he would have scored 4.5 (on average) more victories in his career. And if he can convert poles at that rate, he should also be scoring points in other positions at a higher rate.

He lost 2007 by 1 point. Improving by half that margin, 8% (0.05 delta) would have given him 6 more and a 2nd WDC.
He lost 2010 by 16 points. Again 8% (0.05 delta) improvement would have given him 19 more and a 3rd WDC.

I think this year will be similar. He will be behind the curve on Rosberg and miss his WDC shot by less than 8%.

[WaikeCU]

Maybe LH knows how to make a car fast based on setup and feedbacks during testing on circuit and in simulator. With that they've made a very competitive W04. Perhaps with the experience and knowledge gained with the W04, they have developed the W05, which is fast thanks to feedback from LH, but the car could be more suitable to Rosberg's driving style.

Thinking of LH struggling with his brakes this season. It's not a coincident tbh, because LH struggled with the brakes too last season.