Algeusarieeruurii was .2 off Beumi in his first ever practise session who unlike Bruno was not also a complete rookie. 42 laps of Jaime Vs the 100s if not 1000s of Beumi

There could be dozens if not 100s of drivers out there that could done a better job. I actually believe I know a few of them! The only thing required of Chandhok would be to not crash... which he did do.

Driver rankings however are meaningless because without all the relevant data (and we are talking absolutely huge amounts varying from driving to experience to past results) it's impossible to know who's really good or not.

heard of simulators? hrt dont have one. jaime would have done 100's of laps in the red bull simulator so the performance difference between him and buemi was greatly reduced because they both had track time in virtual and reality. Chandhok had none of this, you can say bruno hadnt had many laps either but at the early stage of driving the laps he had would be invaluable becoz the learning curve is huge at that time. and looking at bruno's first recorded time of 2:06 in practice 2, it was 2 seconds slower than karun's of 2:04.

in my opinion he did a good job

In my opinion he's a driver writing the cheques for HRT and he would have done plenty of simulator work as there's places you can hire. There's a place in Holland ALonso used to frequent as I'd imagine drivers like CHandhock can afford to use as well.. Anyway he didn't do anything that miraculous. The media just over play because it makes a great story and it's suicidal for them to question otherwise. Call me oldskool but i like watching great drivers... I am not a big fan of pay drivers as it just demonstrates how devalued the so called pinnacle motorsports have become.

I guess that's what 25 years being involved in this game does to you lol

thats fair enough but we're rating their performance, not whether they deserve to be there or not. and no he didnt do anything miraculous, he did what he needed to and therefore doesnt deserve to be down the bottom end of the scale, in my opinion ;)

Well my point is driver rankings are pointless not to be taken seriously kidna thing lol

okay, and i agree to be honest, but i was just trying to back up the reasons

Well I know I'm up against it when you have a vested interest in this (emotionally), but let me point out that Massa was on Alonso's tail virtually the whole race, what else did you expect him to be able to do in an identical car? That is called shadowing (you probably mistake that for "shading" or "overshadowing", which have a different meaning). Secondly, your assertion that Vettel pushed too hard on softs is born out of your wishful thinking, as no F1 insider has mentioned such a thing, and you are pulling that out of your ...
Vettel was pretty much flawless, Alonso did fine, but nothing special, he has had much much better victories in the past. I think you believe that because somebody wins (in arguably the best car) they deserve a 10, I don't. It depends very much on the circumstances, otherwise why even bother and just look at the results.


Cooper

Hamilton was commenting about Vettel's engine misfiring, or sounding rough. If you wish to discredit RBR and/or a driver, you have to do a better job.

Not only fair but very easy to see how the ratings were done. Vettel clearly deserved it, close for the next group, etc. The wailing comes from distraught fans - ignore! It's only opinion anyway so why the bile?

Christ, can't you people relax and enjoy F1?

P17 in qualis.

oh right, didnt realise, thanks

you see, you get my point

that rate is crap

not really, he would of got 10 if he'd qualified in pole or better than his team mate, and if he'd won the race without the guy ahead of him losing power.

so no, its not crap unless you have a ferrari avatar of course...

I don't trust clown Horner and Newey.

Don't forget that was the first time Alonso drove a Ferrari in the race and won it. Of course 10. Vettel had a better car but could not create an big advantage ahead Alonso and finally finished 4th,still the best? People like to live in fantasy land and always neglect the fact.

finally finished 4th due to problems... my point is, would u have given him a 10 if he'd finished 2nd...

I would give Vettel 9. Alonso 9.5. 10 means perfect and no one was perfect at that weekend. But the winner Alonso definitely deserves more respect.

Well.. good point, but it's not like there was much to enjoy in Bahrain

There's nearly always a full side and an empty side to any glass. Admittedly, the glass this time was so near-empty that you could barely make out the minority of contents on its bottom, but anyway...

After not particularly looking forward to the new teams contribution I found much of the interest down around P20! All the same whether a driver finishes 15th or 17th is of little consequence other than to their closest fans. Hard to pick right now but I would say we have to give all the rookies at least a pass mark.

Wow, a post from another galaxy. How's the weather over there?

The problem with that theory is that reportedly Vettel's car was sounding very odd. Gené commented live for the Spanish television that as if with a broken exhaust. I don't know whether or not still they are compatible.

However, I tend to think there was something wrong or quite risky with Vettel's car fuel load. That bit about they were saving fuel from lap #3 is disconcerting.

Like neglecting the fact that Vettel was driving round on 7 cylinders


Lo and behold that anyone should show the merest sign of disrepect to Alonso

Why do you think RBR's car is "better" than Ferrari? Going into Bahrain, I thought that most thought Ferrari was ahead of them all. Was qualifying deciding factor in your determination that if Alonso is down, it has to be due to a lesser car then? How about a proposition that RBR is on the par with Ferrari (at the moment), and show in Bahrain is just due to a RBR's driver qualification effort?

And Tom Kristensen commenting on danish TV, also mentioned several times that Vettel's car sounded "sick" as it went past the pits. So this fuel conspiracy is not very likely, unless of course Red Bull can make their car misfire to cover up a fuel calculating error.

The list seems pretty good to me, except i don't understand how Senna and Chandhook got so high ratings. Sure they could have done a lot worse, but they didn't cover themselfes in glory either. To put them ahead of Schumacher, Barrichello and so on, means that the HRT drivers are rated on a very generous scale.

Well , at the end the rating that really matter is this :

Alonso 25
Massa 18
Hamilton 12
VETTEL 12
Rosberg 10
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autosport ratinsg is irrelevant ...

I think the suggestion is that the ECU, when in fuel saving mode, would make the engine sound sick.

I don't know whether it's true, but it maybe shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

It would be then interesting to hear Ferrari's engine, because I think it is reasonable to assume that as soon Seb slid backwards, Alonso must have gone on cruise control. There was no way he was worrying about Massa (team orders not to take each other out, and Massa didn't have enough speed anyway to take Alonso on, unless he would make a mistake). In such conditions I think their engine should sound similar to Renault's(?).

I think in this case they're talking about fuel saving mode being an emergency map rather than just a lower fuel setting you might use at any point in the race.

It can be ture. Vettel stopped the car immediately after he crossed the line. Redbull was hiding something.

Its not normal to go in fuel safe mode halfway through a race


Vettel ran the car rich which helped to get back some power because of the misfire, its possible he ran out of fuel because of this

This is very interesting article, especially this part:

""Die Rundenzeiten sind so rapide gesunken, dass man sich vorstellen kann, dass die elektronische Steuerung auf ein konservatives Programm umgeschaltet hat, um Benzin zu sparen“, sagt Dennis bei der Enthüllung seines Supersportwagens MP4-12C. Das würde aus seiner Sicht erklären, warum Vettel erst drei Sekunden langsamer als die Spitze war, aber in den letzten Runden wieder Top-Zeiten gefahren sei und Platz vier gegen Rosberg verteidigen konnte."

A more simple explanation is that if something is wrong with the engine you stop it as soon as possible in order to prevent secondary damage.

The whole fuel saving saga is sounding improbable to me. First of all, why should the ECU detect a possible fuel shortage and not the RBR engineers? And then, the ECU should have switched into an emergency map completely by herself and on lap 33 when merely two thirds of the race distance had been run? And then the radio exchange between Seb and the engineers when he reported loss of power - that should have been staged only in order to hide a design flaw by Adrian Newey?

Conspiracy theorists, over to you!

There are precedents to Bahrain 2010 when driver had to stop as soon as they have crossed a finish line because of fear from secondary damage, and it makes sense for him to do exactly that, regardless of root cause for his lost of power.

I don't think that you can just stop the car on the finish line if your car is able to continue.

Not in the middle, but in a safe zone. Cars do stop on the track all the time.

Hmm... This is exception from the FORMULA ONE SPORTING REGULATIONS:

"43.3 After receiving the end-of-race signal all cars must proceed on the circuit directly to the post race parc fermé without any unnecessary delay, without receiving any object whatsoever and without any assistance (except that of the marshals if necessary)".

Have you people lost your minds? Of course there is possibility to park your car right after the finish-line, if the need arises. You don´t have to break your engine after flag by driving it one more lap if there is something wrong. It wasn´t the first time and it wont be the last time that some driver parks his car after crossing the line. FFS, some common sense, please.

Megan, I do understand your point, however we do not know much about state of his machinery at the end of the race. I can only assume it was legitimate situation, and he had to be towed away, otherwise we would be reading about it by now, that RBR/Seb. are getting penalised in next race. (I could not find any ref. about it, and our TV carier cut it off).

The whole point of "rating" drivers after the race, is to separate pure driving from car-advantage/pitstops/mech.failures etc. We all know who won the race, who came second and so on, but in motorsports your finishing position reflects as much your team and your car as it reflects your own ability. Alonso/Ferrari was the best driver/chassis/engine/team combo...Felipe had next best same combo etc.... but looking at just pure driving and ignoring other factors, Vettel was best driver of the weekend by Autosport and I tend to agree.

Ok. So sick sounding engine, suddenly dropped pace, conversations between Vettel and team, parking the car just after flag, press release about misfiring plug doesnt convince you that Vettel had mechanical problem, right?

But you are convinced he screwed his race because Ron Dennis thought so in some web site which is like never-heard-before-site, nowhere else - certainly not in any respective sites like Autosport - hasnt been a word about it yet, because its obvious Red Bull wouldnt admit anything like that and they would even go to the lengths of making factored radio conversations between driver and team to cover their screw-up.

Is your tin-foiled hat sitting well on your head now?

It might be if i could read German

A 9 for Rosberg is certainly a tad generous. A tad being worth 1. + Rosbergs loss can be Massa' gain in my book, I thought he turned in a really solid drive (apart from 1st corner shenanigans) especially if he did turn it down/coast a bit toward the end, for whatever reason.

You seem to be getting rather over-excited. I'm not 'convinced' of anything.

I didn't say that I necessarily believe what Ron Dennis was reported to have said. I was just pointing out that the fact that the engine 'sounded sick' did not prove that it wasn't the ECU, which is what some people seemed to be claiming. We have heard engines sounding rather strange when we had traction control, and also when running on the pitlane speed limiter.

I don't know how the ECU works, and I suspect that you don't either. I don't know under what circumstances it might switch to 'fuel-saving' mode, and what that might involve.

Vettel might not know much about it, so he could well have been surprised by a loss of power and change of engine note, and assumed he had an engine or exhaust problem.

Ron Dennis possibly does know more about it than any of us, although of course he could have his own agenda for making these remarks.

Really we don't know, at this point.

Vettel most likely stopped due to running out of fuel which was a result of poor fuel economy as a result of his engine problem.

Like ive said previously they found that by running rich the engine ran a bit better

Good idea if only to evaluate Autosport's evaluation methodology come the end of the year.

Its not fair to equate these ratings to driver points though. Vettel got a 10 for his personal performance but his car let him down and lost him championship points.

EDIT 1 LMAO at you guys for arguing over Seb running out of fuel. The commentators could here the engine note sounding rough the first time he went past slower. And do you really think he wouldve saved much fuel by slowing down as much as he did?

EDIT 2 Read the article now thanks to built in google translate. Rons opinion must carry at least some weight given McLaren make everyones ECU. And Red Bulls problem rectifying itself on further thought does seem strange. Hmm...

PS this was the best part of the translation:

"Dennis knows from ten years together, that star designer Adrian Newey like tailors (too) narrow metal clothes:"

Nice words , but still the "rating" that really matters is the one I posted .... The rest is irrelevant

I guess Alonso must have been quite abysmal last year then?