Hamilton Vs Rosberg 2014

[Kingshark]

Both were struck by the same technical problem. I am assuming that without that problem, their pace wouldn't have been much different relative to each other.

[iotar__]

Quite fair =D> but IMO pointless exercise. Australia is a very big assumption and not equalised by Silverstone, theoretical win for NR was much closer there, lead after first corner/lap and after first pitstop. Just to nitpick and if we're talking fairness and driver's performance:
- Hamilton's dirty chop in Bahrain - without Rosberg stopping on track (not 50/50 more like 100-0) it's double DNF -7 LH, or something random
- Car's advantage helped more Hamilton after inexcusably poor qualifying in Austria and GB
- China - telemetry

[aral]

770 posts all on one is better than the other....all going round in circles! sounds like school kids saying that their dad is bigger than your dad!
it is all immaterial. just let the two race each other and wait to see who comes out top at the end of the year.

[SidSidney]

It is a bit unfortunate that, like many of my friends, you probably only watch newspaper to see who won and who has how many points. For most of the other people who follow F1, follow every inch the car is moving, the reality is different.

Hmm. I have raced several F1 and Indycar champions in FF and F3 championships. They beat me by a country mile, but I still have a lot more driving experience in single seaters than most people. What have you done?

1) What do you call it, when the Best Driver of the grid has been stuck with a team that is producing dogs for the last 5 seasons?

Could be several reasons. Bad driver management. Bad input from the driver team to the engineering team for 5 seasons. Choosing money over performance. Choosing prestige over performance. Perhaps not being the "Best Driver". Whatever the reasons, after 5 seasons it is not "luck", it's "choice".

2) What do you call, when engine fails before the race starts, when MGU-K fails when chasing for top position and when break fails when challenging for pole, when the team mate causes yellow flag and denies an opportunity to try for a crucial pole, and most of pit stops takes more time than his partner?

Could be several reasons. Bad preparation. Lack of testing. Marginal technical choices. Weak race engineering. Poor team management. Garage politics. Making enemies when you need friends. Whatever the reasons, probably not "luck" if it is happening over and over again to one car. My mate H at Joest would probably say it is all preparation.

On the other hand Nico has been doing a great and consistent job, with only one DNF. The net result is still a 14 point deficit for Lewis.

I don't deny (and never have) that Lewis is talented. But as Allan McNish says, and I agree, there is no such thing as luck in motorsport:-

"I, personally, do not believe in luck. I think luck is an excuse for people that have failed in their mission to do something. If you do your preparation correct, if you do the work, if you think about things, if you make the correct judgments on the risks that you take and if you stay out of the pits, then you win the race... and that's not luck, that's hard work."

[Pierce89]

770 posts all on one is better than the other....all going round in circles! sounds like school kids saying that their dad is bigger than your dad!
it is all immaterial. just let the two race each other and wait to see who comes out top at the end of the year.

Unfortunately that seems to be the standard MO in the Ros/Ham argument. Nobody wants to hear this, but its been fairly clear that the drivers are fairly equal.

[Miguel]

Luck exists. It is the pixelation caused by the necessarily finite size of a statistical sample. Tolerances exist. It is perfectly feasible that, over one season, a driver may be hit with more reliability issues than his teammate through no fault of his own. Expecting a perfectly balanced list of mishaps between teammates shows a lack of knowledge of statistics.

[SidSidney]

Luck exists. It is the pixelation caused by the necessarily finite size of a statistical sample. Tolerances exist. It is perfectly feasible that, over one season, a driver may be hit with more reliability issues than his teammate through no fault of his own. Expecting a perfectly balanced list of mishaps between teammates shows a lack of knowledge of statistics.

I don't think that is called luck. In poker and stats that is what you call "variance", assuming a random distribution. And each outcome is an independent result.

But in motorsport, it is very unlikely that you depend on a very pure, random distribution, or that both drivers and cars have identical settings, parts, talent, strategies, experience, work ethics, driver management, engineers, skill, styles, attitudes, education, patience, specifications.

So we are not really talking about variance in the pure sense, as I suspect each car/driver would have a different SD as it was actually a diifernt set of starting conditions. I might try to calculate it for LH and NR one night.

[astracrazy]

Quite fair =D> but IMO pointless exercise. Australia is a very big assumption and not equalised by Silverstone, theoretical win for NR was much closer there, lead after first corner/lap and after first pitstop. Just to nitpick and if we're talking fairness and driver's performance:
- Hamilton's dirty chop in Bahrain - without Rosberg stopping on track (not 50/50 more like 100-0) it's double DNF -7 LH, or something random
- Car's advantage helped more Hamilton after inexcusably poor qualifying in Austria and GB
- China - telemetry

Whatever argument you use against one then it can be used against the other. For example you say car advantage has helped Lewis, but you have just given an example of how car advantage helped Nico - in china he had a poor start and dropped to 6th then managed to get 2nd with no telemetry.

You also mention Lewis' "dirty" chop but at the same time Nico was playing just as dirty because he was using an engine map which he wasn't allowed to. Without that then Nico may never of been in that position.

Do you see where i'm coming from.

The best answer is with all this that basically they are both equal overall. Close the thread.

[iotar__]

Aaarg - He had a poor start because he had NO TELEMETRY. Nothing to do with a driver. Similarly you can say Hamilton had poor braking in Germany because his brakes fell apart.

BTW Why non-story safety car is an issue but preferential treatment that allowed Hamilton to start from the grid after changing car's specification is not considered conspiracy? Safety? Of course you can change it but start from the pitlane, it's your problem you chose component that's falling apart.

[Stradivarius]

Luck exists. It is the pixelation caused by the necessarily finite size of a statistical sample. Tolerances exist. It is perfectly feasible that, over one season, a driver may be hit with more reliability issues than his teammate through no fault of his own. Expecting a perfectly balanced list of mishaps between teammates shows a lack of knowledge of statistics.

I don't think that is called luck.

It is called luck! There is no reason you need to assume identical behaviour from the two cars in order to conclude that one driver has had more luck than the other if he has had less DNFs. In racing there are a lot of circumstances that you can't control yourself and if these circumstances favour one driver more than another, luck is the appropriate word to use.

I fully agree that when you see a big difference between drivers, it is probably not a result of luck, as there is no such thing as systematic luck. If one driver has 10 engine failures during a season, and his team mate has none, it is highly unlikely that this is due to luck. The driver or his engineers must be doing something wrong if his engine keeps failing more frequently over time than then his team mate's. But if a driver has one engine failure and his team mate has none, this could very well be purely coincidential and not be a result of different usage between the drivers.

I think we can safely conclude here that Hamilton and Rosberg are equally matched to the extent that the championship may be decided on pure luck. I don't think any of the measurements of the effect of misfortune made here are accurate. You can't say that without the failure in Australia, Hamilton would have scored 25 points, while Rosberg would have scored 18 points. My point is perhaps more clear if we look at Button and Hamilton. Hamilton is an aggressive driver who often qualifies well and runs close to the front of the field during the race. Button doesn't qualify as well and usually runs a bit further behind in the field. This is true now as well as when they were both at McLarren. The consequence of this difference is that Hamilton must expect to loose more points than Button due to technical failures and other things outside his control. At the same time, Button can expect to gain more places due to other driver's misfortune. So if you see that they both have lost 30 points this way, you can't say that they have been equally unlucky. Actually, this would indicate that Hamilton has been more lucky than Button, since you must consider the outcome and compare it to the expectancy.

[marcush.]

call it luck or lack of it , call it variance but I fail to see how you can be sure the efffects we see are either one or the other or None of them.
How many People work at AMG-Mercedes GP ? you have a damn big Chance that more than one of them does have a bad day or Moment once in a while and due to negligeance or whatever a potentially perfect part is dented enough to not fail examination but Fails prematurely compared to the average .
Who receives the part and when the Thing Fails is another story but to assume the product Nico and Lewis are receiving sunday morning is 100% the same is simply not possible.
Braking things down to single component Level you will have one or another bit -like capacitors in electronics which have their guaranted Service life measured in minutes at certain elevated temperatures not hours --and if the component Fails at those temps within 1 Minute or one hour is just what it is :random .The original fault was to run the bit at those temps at all....as a proper design would run the part within useful temperature ranges where guaranteed component life is basically no issue at all.

Still some People have what one has to call mechanical empathy .Those type of humans can carry a wounded machine very very Long indeed at considerable Speed and others seem to have a Talent for breaking bits you always thought of as bulletproof. It´s hard for those to accept their lack of feel and sympathy for the mechanical side of things and as an engineer you´d better Beef up the car instead of trying to convince your hero he Needs to sharpen his Manual skills..

[SidSidney]

It is called luck! There is no reason you need to assume identical behaviour from the two cars in order to conclude that one driver has had more luck than the other if he has had less DNFs. In racing there are a lot of circumstances that you can't control yourself and if these circumstances favour one driver more than another, luck is the appropriate word to use.

People choose to call it luck. I think Sam Goldwyn got it right.

My point is perhaps more clear if we look at Button and Hamilton. Hamilton is an aggressive driver who often qualifies well and runs close to the front of the field during the race. Button doesn't qualify as well and usually runs a bit further behind in the field. This is true now as well as when they were both at McLarren. The consequence of this difference is that Hamilton must expect to loose more points than Button due to technical failures and other things outside his control."

Here we are at the crux. My view is it is precisely in Hamilton's control, because he chose to drive that way, while Button did not. He choose a path, a setup, a style, a strategy - whatever - that is inherently more risky, and that almost by definition will lead to more failures of one kind or another. So what is "lucky" about that outcome, with luck being defined as an outcome decided by pure chance rather than ones actions?

At the same time, Button can expect to gain more places due to other driver's misfortune. So if you see that they both have lost 30 points this way, you can't say that they have been equally unlucky. Actually, this would indicate that Hamilton has been more lucky than Button, since you must consider the outcome and compare it to the expectancy.

I agree you have to look at EV and ρ to determine likely outcomes. I may well spend a few minutes looking at it one day. I just don't agree it is luck/pure chance. If that were true then he was equally lucky winning 4 in a row, right? No, that was skill....

[dans79]

I would call a brand new break disc exploding bad "luck".......................

[SidSidney]

Who receives the part and when the Thing Fails is another story but to assume the product Nico and Lewis are receiving sunday morning is 100% the same is simply not possible.

I agree with that, and I also think the attitude of the end user to mistakes has impact on the end-to-end process. If a driver cares, follows up mistakes, finds out why they were happening, perhaps even shows up in that dept. one day to ask about what happened, the process - a large part of which is attitude - adapts. I have seen this on my own race cars. I once drove in the same team as a young hotshoe who was always having mechanicals and came back to the pits moaning and bitching then went off with his girlfriend for lunch. I usually hung about the garage, and quite often I would spot a junior missing something simple, like not torquing nuts, leaving cables astray where they might rub or melt. I would just ask him - did you notice xyz? - and when he noticed me noticing he at first got the hump then started to double check himself. It didn't make me any faster but I rarely stopped through car failures, whereas the young chappie in the other car kept having basic failures, his wealthy dad who was stumping up 25K a weekend stepped in, blamed the team, it all got messy, blah blah blah, usual motorsport horror story. Last time I saw that mechanic he was working on a Williams on TV, that was several years ago.

Still some People have what one has to call mechanical empathy .Those type of humans can carry a wounded machine very very Long indeed at considerable Speed and others seem to have a Talent for breaking bits you always thought of as bulletproof. It´s hard for those to accept their lack of feel and sympathy for the mechanical side of things and as an engineer you´d better Beef up the car instead of trying to convince your hero he Needs to sharpen his Manual skills..

Yep. Some drivers just push a car harder. Some times they get away with it, sometimes not.

[SidSidney]

I would call a brand new break disc exploding bad "luck".......................

Let me ask you this:

Do you think Brembo called it bad luck, and if they did, do you think Mercedes would trust them as a supplier?

Do you think the engineers at Mercedes shrugged their shoulders, said "unlucky, bad batch", and left it at that?

They know it wasn't luck. Somewhere, in the specification, making and running of that disc, a process failed. Their job is to find and fix that so they solve a fundamental issue.

And by the way, Rosberg also had a Brembo front disc failure earlier this year - his was in testing at Barca. Brembo upgraded the spec. after that failure.

Was it luck that NR had his failure in testing and not a race, whereas Hamilton was the opposite? Now that is maybe pure chance. But also maybe there is a reason Hamilton runs those discs and Nico doesn't:

"Hamilton uses Brembo brakes all round ... while Rosberg prefers Carbon Industrie fronts and Brembo rears"