Discussion: Who Lost the 2018 F1 World Championship?

Lewis Hamilton secured the 2018 Formula 1 World Championship last time out in Mexico, with 4th place being enough for him to end long time rival Sebastian Vettel’s title aspirations. He may have finished behind the German on the road but after a run of 6 wins from the previous 8 races Hamilton had built up a sizable advantage in the standings.

As much as Lewis deserves a large portion of credit for his performances in what people are describing as his greatest ever season, he does need to give a lot of thanks to the many mistakes from Vettel and Ferrari, which took what was once a tightly fought championship and turned it into a walkover for the Silver Arrows man.

A lot of criticism has come the way of Ferrari and Vettel recently with both parties being considered equally responsible for their title failure. Vettel found himself making mistakes as regularly as Hamilton was winning races while Ferrari have made a couple of strategic errors and more crucially failed with supposed upgrades that seemed to take the fastest car on the grid and drop it to half a second a lap off rivals Mercedes.

But is it fair to say both parties are equally at fault?

It has been well documented just how many mistakes Sebastian Vettel has made this year with incidents at Baku, Paul Ricard, Hockenheim, Monza, Suzuka and COTA all costing him vital championship points.

At Baku, Vettel went for a late lunge on Valtteri Bottas after the safety car restart at the end of the main straight, locked up his front left and ran wide. Bottas re-took the position with Hamilton and Raikkonen also slipping past. With his front-left severely flat-spotted Vettel also found himself passed by the Force India of Sergio Perez, this when the Ferrari looked comfortably the fastest car around the streets of Baku and a move with DRS a couple of laps later would have been a more logical option. Even then Bottas ran over a piece of debris which punctured his rear-right tyre and retired from the race.

At Paul Ricard Ferrari found themselves second best, with Mercedes locking out the front row as Pirelli brought their thinner thread tyres to avoid blistering and potential blowouts. Vettel, trying to get in-about the Mercs at the start, got the jump on Bottas in the run to turn 1 but was then out-braked by the Finn. Fighting back, Vettel came off the brakes to try and slide up the inside but carried too much speed into the corner, locked up and careered into the side of Valtteri’s car. With the damage sustained and subsequent penalty for causing a collision Vettel dropped down the order and could only fight his way back up to 5th.

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The four-time World Champ’s next and possibly biggest mistake came in Germany. Vettel was in a buoyant mood going into Sunday’s race, and why shouldn’t he be? A brilliant victory at Silverstone the round before, the lead in the drivers standings, pole position at his home race and Hamilton starting 14th due to a hydraulics issue in qualifying meant that Sebastian was looking good to build on his points advantage. But with rain starting to pour down Vettel found himself crashing out of the race at turn 12 on lap 52 when he braked “a tiny bit too late.”at the time, Vettel had been leading the chasing pack of Bottas, Raikkonen and Hamilton by 9 seconds. Hamilton would ultimately take victory and re-take the lead in the drivers standings.

Fast forward now to Ferrari’s home race in Italy, Monza, and we unlock the first in a trio of spins for Vettel while racing wheel to wheel with another car.

Vettel, already irate at being beaten to pole by teammate Raikkonen, understeered into the side of Hamilton’s Mercedes in the second chicane on lap 1 after Lewis got a mega run on him out of the Curve Grande. Lewis appeared to leave space but it wasn’t enough to avoid a collision and Vettel spun around, dropped to the back of the field and picked up bargeboard damage in the process.

Hamilton and Mercedes were able to pull off a clever strategy with Bottas holding up Raikkonen and destroying his tyres which allowed Hamilton to easily sweep past with superior grip for victory. The likelihood of Vettel and Ferrari working a strategy that would have put Sebastian ahead of Kimi come the end of the race was very high and you must feel that Vettel missed out on another 25 points here.

Then comes spin number two.

Suzuka was a difficult weekend for Vettel that fundamentally see’s the finger pointed more so at Ferrari than the four-time World Champion. Ferrari took a gamble on Intermediate tyres at the start of Q3 with them predicting that the rain would come earlier in the session than it did. This put both red cars under a lot of pressure to come back in, switch tyres and get a lap together before the rain did come down. Both drivers made mistakes with Vettel in particular losing out as he ran wide at Spoon Curve and found himself 9th (he would start 8th due to an Ocon penalty).

Trying to make up for the issues in qualifying and attempting to save any hopes of a 5th World Title in 2018 Sebastian was going out all guns blazing in the race and soon found himself in 4th up behind the Red Bull of Max Verstappen. Vettel found good traction out of the turn 11 hairpin and fancied a lunge down the inside of the Dutchman into Spoon Curve. Vettel went for the move but again found himself carrying too much speed and planted his front right into the side of the Red Bull which caused him to spin out and drop down to the back of the field just as he had in Monza. Vettel this time could only manage to work his way back up to 6th in the order.

Sebastian would complete his hat-trick of spins next time out at the Circuit of the America’s when he collided with another Red Bull but this time the target being Daniel Ricciardo. Sebastian had been trying to recover from a three-place grid penalty that he had received for speeding under red flags in FP1. This penalty had seen him drop from 2nd place alongside Hamilton to 5th alongside Ricciardo.

On the first lap Sebastian would get a good slipstream along the back straight and go down the inside of Ricciardo into turn 12. He then out-broke himself which allowed Daniel to come back up the inside switching to the outside for turn 13. Vettel was still on the inside with Daniel leaving him plenty of room to run side-by-side through down into 14 and 15. But in eerily similar fashion to the previous two spins this season Sebastian would find himself running into the side of Ricciardo and facing the wrong way for the third time this season. Without the grid penalty and then the subsequent spin Ferrari and Vettel looked like they had comfortably the fastest package on Sunday, so victory was very much within his grasp but instead that honour went to teammate Raikkonen and Vettel was resigned to 4th.

All in all Vettel lost an almost certain 62 points through his errors with a further 14 potentially available had he not spun out at Monza and COTA.

Ferrari on the other hand only appear to have given away 14 points from what would have been certain victories.

I have already touched on Suzuka above where had Vettel been given the correct tyres from the start of Q3 he would likely have lined up 3rd on the grid and would have had nothing to do with Verstappen all race long.

The other race where Ferrari should take the blame is in Austria at the Red Bull Ring when Vettel was handed a three-place grid penalty for impeding Carlos Sainz in Q2 when running slowly at turn 1. Now this may sound like another error from Sebastian Vettel but the drivers rely heavily on information from their engineers on where other cars are running on the circuit and if they need to move out the way.

In the stewards meeting it was heard that Ferrari had failed to tell Vettel of Sainz coming up behind him on a flying lap so he had no reason to believe he had to get out of the way of anyone.

With both Mercedes retiring from the race due to mechanical failures Vettel should have been the driver running around in third to inherit victory, but that honour went to Max Verstappen and Vettel would come home in third place.

There after Ferrari didn’t do much wrong in-terms of their strategies with Vettel but they did get it completely wrong with the development of their car.

Going into the Singapore GP Ferrari and Vettel were strong favourites with Mercedes always appearing to be off the pace around the streets of Marina Bay. But much to everyone’s surprise it was Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes who would take a phenomenal pole position and then race victory across the weekend. Ferrari’s pace had seemingly disappeared when qualifying started on Saturday in Singapore and didn’t re-appear until the Saturday in Austin.

It turned out that Ferrari’s updates that were put onto the car in Singapore had actually made the car worse. The McLaren esc rear-wing had significantly increased the cars drag and failed to add any extra downforce while the new bargeboards and floor made the car unbalanced while going through high-speed corners. This because the new slits in the floor were collecting little pieces of rubber from the tyres which rendered them useless. All this took away what was a 0.2s advantage over Mercedes and turned it into a 0.5s deficit.

It took Ferrari three races (Singapore, Russia and Japan) to figure out why their pace had dropped so far away from the Silver Arrows. It is very difficult to work out how many points were lost to Hamilton during this time. It is possible Ferrari could have taken a 1-2 at all three races but it is also possible that they could have still been beaten fair and square by Mercedes.

However, the maximum total combined theoretical points (a mouthful I know) Ferrari cost Vettel against Hamilton in those races only adds up to 23. And when combined with their other errors Ferrari’s total points loss is 40, however only 17 of those are definite.

Compare this with Vettel’s definite point loss of 62 (76 potential) and suddenly it doesn’t seem so bad for Ferrari. The biggest issue for them is that they found a way to make their car slower just as Hamilton was flexing his muscles over at Mercedes which potentially made their situation look worse than it could have been earlier in the season.

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*Potential Points Lost

There are always many factors in play in Formula 1 however which can have an impact on a race weekend and even an entire championship season. Who knows just how much the entire team’s performances were affected by the sudden death of Sergio Marchionne halfway through the season. Ferrari and Vettel must now see out the season as strongly as possible to make sure they carry momentum going into 2019.