Rosberg leads criticism of Hamilton – but is it justified?

It’s great that we have such an array of ex-Formula 1 drivers around the offer their insight into the current scene. Their views as pundits have weight and have been earned. But there is a hazard which they can very easily fall into – and that’s the instant judgement.

There’s a distinction here between those whose role is to analyse in depth and those who are simply providing snappy summaries of a controversy or a trend. But the temptation to not look beyond the headline in giving a view can lead to them voicing conclusions that a bit of deeper analysis would see them backing away from.

The current pile-in seems to be the form of Lewis Hamilton. Because George Russell is well ahead on points and finished fourth at Imola to Hamilton’s 13th, the rush to judge from many ex-driver pundits was very evident.

Nico Rosberg was the most high-profile of them, as an ex-team mate at Mercedes. Discussing how uncompetitive the Mercedes W13 currently is, he made the following distinction: “Hang on.. let’s remember that Russell is in P4 with that same car. So Lewis definitely had a big role to play in that poor result this weekend.”

In the sense that their respective tyre warm-up laps in Q2 ended up being their qualifying laps because of a red flag and that Russell’s was a few tenths quicker than Hamilton’s, then yes. Because that was the only reason they both failed to graduate into Q3 and why they qualified 11th and 13th respectively. Their lowly positions in the Sprint (11th and 14th) as they were each caught in DRS trains then defined their grid positions for the grand prix. The left-hand-side of the grid was on the racing line and much more of the previous rainfall had been cleared by the preceding F2 race than the right-hand side. Teams were analysing afterwards that difference was worth two-and-a-half car lengths in acceleration in the first 100 metres. So Russell was straight up to seventh (soon to be sixth as Valtteri Bottas hit the spinning Daniel Ricciardo) while Hamilton was only 12th. That was their races defined. For the whole race Hamilton was never behind a car which wasn’t being towed by the car in front around a track which remained damp off line in the braking areas. Russell managed to tow past Kevin Magnussen’s defenceless Haas (which did not have the benefit of a tow). That’s all that happened – a cascading difference between them all going back to their respective Q2 laps which were not even supposed to be their actual qualifying laps.