I thought a lot of the drivers did a really good job. What stood out for Max is how much better he did than Daniel but I think that's more Daniel underperforming probably due to visibility issues he had, confidence is important in these conditions. I'm sure most of the grid would have loved to have a Red Bull car on fresh wet tyres in these conditions too, a car that should really have fought for 1st place rather than battle to get to the podium. What I found most concerning was some of the teams desperate to put Inters on, cars were crashing on the extreme wet tyres and all some teams could think about was putting Inters on even after seeing others struggling with them and weather forecast being not very good. I thought they were crazy like Lewis said, it's like they couldn't see how bad it was in sector 3.
I was not surprised by Max performance, expected him to come through the field quickly as pace advantage was so great and know from F3 he is great in the wet, Norisring comes to mind. Yes he had to pass a lot of cars to get to podium but 13 seconds with new tyres (Something like 25 laps fresher than most of the competition) and 16 laps to make up difference to a Force India. He didn't seem to have much different pace to Lewis even with fresher tyres. The way the media are talking up his peformance, you would think he was driving a Manor and was lapping much quicker than the Mercedes in equal conditions.
Anyway world-class performance by Lewis, seemed to have a big pace advantage over Nico again like Monaco race in the wet. I wonder if there has ever been another F1 race where the top two didn't do a pit stop for tyres. Hopefully it rains in Abu Dhabi to spice things up for title decider.
I don't think we need to put this down to tyres.
The last safety car came out in lap 48 when Massa lost it, than in lap 54 Max went from Inters back to Wets which put him back to last place at 16th position. In lap 55 the safety car went back in, which meant that 7 laps of slow pace on wets. Of course I reckon that the field put fresh wets under in the 2nd red flag period, which was in lap 29, but that restarted back behind the safety car which meant in during round 32. So that's 10 slow laps and 22 laps at pace for the rest of the field at moment of final green flag.
After that they both ran 25 more laps, at least according to live timing on Formula.com Verstappen did 25 laps on his last set of wets. So the rest of the field should be on 47 laps on their wet tyres of which 10 were slow Safety car laps, and that's also what Lewis shows on that same live timing chart... 47 laps on wet tyres, of which thus were 37 at race pace verus 25 for verstappen at race pace. Thus a difference of 17 laps.
Now when I grab the live timing chart again and look at best laps of the entire field, than it shows that both Lewis and Max were an average of 1 second quicker than the rest. Lewis did a 1:25.639 and Max a 1:25.305, thus a mere .334th of a second difference between them.
So that means the wear on the tyres during 17 laps only was able to slow down Lewis for .334th of a second, which totally doesn't explain the full second slower driving of the others on the grid, including Nico Rosberg who was still half a second slower with his fastest lap.
So honestly... how come the others were so much slower if even Lewis was only impacted by .334th of a second per lap?
It could be tyres, but than it's still because of the appaling rain driving skills of all of the others. In this case I saw them all do one thing wrong, and that is to continuously follow the dry racing line. Resulting in them not being able to manage tyre temperature and with that the wear of the tyre, but also since the dry line has rubber ingrained in it over the weekend... it's even more slippery than normal tarmac on the outside of the dry racing line. Hence you saw Max easily overtaking Nico around the outside.
So it's not because of the tyres, it's really all down to the really bad rain driving skills and how the other drivers are not capable of managing their tyres in the wet. Let alone finding the right line that has grip.
