Opinion: Why Hamilton's Baku blunders could cost him title
Despite his sluggish start to the 2016 season, Lewis Hamilton had seemed an overwhelming favourite for the title - until Baku.
The Mercedes AMG F1 W07 Hybrid of Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes AMG F1 is recovered back to the pits on the back of a truck after he crashed in qualifying
XPB Images
Lewis Hamilton has yet to lead the Formula 1 drivers' championship standings in 2016, but that particular stat seemed of little importance heading into Baku – not after he slashed Nico Rosberg's once unassailable-looking lead of 43 points to nine in a blink of an eye, with back-to-back wins.
The oft-quoted stat that the driver who won the first three races of the season – and Rosberg won more than that – always became champion? That was quickly brushed aside.
It was more or less back to square one, with Rosberg holding a slender points advantage to Hamilton's serious form advantage.
And while the Baku venue certainly had the potential to be a massive wild-card, the reigning champion did not sound at all concerned by that possibility.
The track was unimpressive and ordinary, Hamilton said in the build-up. It wasn't "massively challenging", he said on Friday. It wasn't going to catch many people out, and those complaining about it being potentially dangerous weren't worth listening to.
Add to that Hamilton's showy dismissal of both track walks and simulator use, and you got the set-up for the sport's easiest joke.
And Baku's Turn 10 was only too happy to supply the punchline, wrecking Hamilton's suspension in Q3.
Worst moment of season
Even the very best drivers in Formula 1 aren't immune from occasional mistakes. But in the context of Hamilton's season, this was no ordinary fumble.
Every other time he dropped points to Rosberg, there was something mitigating the impact of the defeat. Melbourne? Sure, the start was bad, but Hamilton recovered nicely enough to finish second.
Bahrain? Tapped into a spin by Valtteri Bottas, for which the latter was penalised.
China and Russia? Mechanical issues in qualifying, denying Hamilton a chance at a fair fight which, if he is at all like any other other racing driver in the world, he will believe he should've won.
This was different – a massive flub of Hamilton's doing and his doing alone, coming as a shock after a practice sweep yet foreshadowed heavily by mistakes in Q1 and Q2.
Most damningly, it was at a track where Mercedes was basically in its own class, a pair of LMP1 cars in a field of LMP2s. A single clean lap, even if it ended up thoroughly subpar compared to Rosberg, should've been enough for a front row start.
And Hamilton, despite his assurances that the car had gone in a wrong direction between Friday and Saturday, knew what was possible. "It didn't feel the same as yesterday," he said after qualifying. "Still good enough for pole."
Engine mode
The good news for Hamilton was that, from that point onwards, he'd stay away from the wall and generally run the rest of the weekend without any major glaring mistakes.
The bad news? As the mistakes vanished, the blistering pace was nowhere to be found. For, while going 10th to fifth in race trim is fine enough on paper, the Mercedes W07 was much better than that around the streets of Baku.
Of course, it wasn't cut and dry like that, not when taking into account Hamilton's audible frustrations with an engine mode problem that plagued him through the race – and the fact his team was not allowed to advise him on the issue.
But as far as excuses go, that's not a great one – not when the team has provided two very contradictory answers to just how costly the engine issue was, with Hamilton estimating it at around a second per lap, while two senior officials – Toto Wolff and Paddy Lowe – both insisted it was a loss of just two tenths.
It was also suggested that Rosberg had a similar issue and fixed it much, much quicker, creating a memorable narrative for the first-ever Baku race – that in which, whatever Lewis Hamilton did, Nico Rosberg did better.
Title ramifications
Would it be fair, then, to suggest that Hamilton has left himself with only an outside chance of the title? Of course not.
No, that would be obviously, demonstrably wrong – wrong from a mathematical perspective, wrong from a historical perspective and wrong from the point of view of basic common sense.
But if any individual grand prix this season has the potential to change the momentum of the title battle, it's this one.
In Baku, Rosberg outplayed Hamilton without having to do anything extraordinary. The brunt of that task was accomplished by Hamilton himself and the outcomes for the Brit were plentiful – an almost neverending amount of jabs and jokes regarding track walks and simulator use, another butting of heads with his team that's probably getting weary of the complaints and 15 points lost.
Rosberg's gap has been almost twice as big earlier in 2016, but in no round had he defeated Hamilton overwhelmingly, convincingly, no two ways about it and no excuses for it.
He's done so now. And while the German has looked under pressure after the disasters of Monaco and Montreal, the pressure is now all on his teammate.
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