And yet had the same happened to Hamilton the bollocks of can't look after his tyres, the team makes his decisions etc etc would have spewed out instead. The Kyle & Julius 'LewisHamilton Appreciation Thread' will be up later..........
Well, the strategies were the same in the end, as long as you think that 2 = 3. Basically, Button was used as a Guinea-pig to see how the 3 stop thing worked. If they were seriously running Jenson's race for the sake of Jenson, then they would have left him out in front of Vettel, as it was clear that even though Vettel was faster he was never going to get past, as virtually no one did and he never looked like he would. This is probably the biggest signal yet that McLaren are making Lewis their front runner this season too, as they sacrificed a 3rd or 4th place just to see what might happen with a 3 stop. They tried to get Jenson on to Plan B once, and he asked them to think again, then they told him they were doing plan B and he hardly sounded thrilled, and then it turned out that there was plenty of life in his tyres after he pitted too. Just a bit of a f-up by McLaren in some respects, although the plus side was that it made it clear that there was no value in 3 stopping Lewis which they were thinking about too, helping to get him to the finish in the lead.
Yes, a point well made there Aloonatron. I confess that I found myself bemused by the radio discussion at the time: it made no sense to me, particularly as it was very likely to put him back into difficult traffic. I am not impressed by Sam Michael at the best of times, but his tentative experiments with McLaren this season have further reduced my opinion of him.
The only other front runners to 3 stop were the Red Bulls. To be fair though, Jenson was hardly setting the world on fire with his pace. Although he may have been somewhat disheartened by the end, Alonso managed to pull out a big gap on him in the last few laps when (really) Jenson should have had the advantage if tyre wear was such an issue, but it never seemed like anyone was really suffering all race.
This is perhaps true. However, they brought him in when he was going very well and his tyres had plenty of life – twice! Hindsight is a wonderful thing and such an accusation might appear fair to level at my comments; but I swear to anyone reading this, that I thought it was daft when I heard 'Plan B' being discussed on the radio! Because of his lap times, it seemed obvious to me that all it would achieve was an additional 17 seconds to his total race time (minus just a few seconds for being able to push a little harder on brand new rubber) –even if he didn't hit traffic – but was clearly running two extra and unnecessary risks: a/ getting stuck in traffic; and b/ a guaranteed loss of track position!
I count two mentions of Schumacher on this page, in fact I think you'll find the majority of the discussion here is about Sam Michael and/or Button's race engineer.
Well who do you nominate then? It is a pretty obvious choice............ edit, I guess I could second nominate myself for starting an argument on teh basis that Button & Hamilton both 3 stopped when Hamilton only 2 stopped!
Check the title of this thread, EMSC. Whether an individual or team, the idea is that it is a discussion of who under-performed, isn't it? I think it is also a thread which follows every race, and not something invented because of one poor individual on one occasion. There was a clear loser (ahem: 'winner') this time, which surely should not surprise you as I believe you also nominated him as the worst driver. It is unfortunate that your idolisation of this individual compels you to be so defensive of him and to object to criticism when it is so obviously justified. All it serves to do is highlight the weakness of your man, who was actually my man in the sweepstakes; although I'd have thrown him to anyone, including yourself, as I think you know.
