Thread by @kobayashicore

The Story of Lewis Hamilton's Most Underrated Championship (2017)

Part I - Setting the Stage

A quick note before I begin:

In this thread I will often express qualifying times expressed as a %, rather than in seconds. This is to better represent qualifying gaps between drivers, as particularly short or long tracks can often distort the true gap between drivers.

Rather than talk about Hamilton, I would actually like to begin by mentioning Sebastian Vettel, Lewis's title rival, who drove a brilliant campaign. 2017 was Vettel at his best, carrying Ferrari on his back at times and destroying the already-damaged reputation of Kimi Raikkonen.

In fact, I'd go as far as to argue that 2017 had one of the highest-quality championship battles in F1 history. Both drivers demolished their highly rated teammates, made almost zero driving errors between them and made up for their teams' errors & blunders with fantastic drives.

Ultimately, Vettel was let down by Ferrari, who failed to produce a car reliable enough to challenge Mercedes over a season.

They also lacked in the engine department, though I still believe the SF70h was underrated, demonstrating superior race pace or tyre wear at many tracks.

Analysing the SF70h in-depth, the car's biggest strength was its versatility. A wide setup range coupled with low tyre wear meant that Ferrari were competitive at most tracks, especially at the start of the season.

The high-rake concept also gave Ferrari greater total downforce.

This allowed Vettel to be highly consistent across the season, leading the championship at every round until Monza (Round 13) and scoring 10 podiums in that time, while Hamilton only managed 8.

The SF70h's biggest weakness was its reliability. Vettel's car held up for most of the season but fell short at a critical period, derailing his campaign.

The SF70h's top speed was also a problem, for reasons I'll delve into later in the thread (or in a Part II).

Onto Mercedes.

I said earlier that the SF70h was "underrated", which I'd like to take back now.

Rather than ignoring the strengths of the SF70h, I think more fans actually aren't aware (or turn a blind eye) to the weaknesses of the Mercedes W08, actually making it *overrated*.

The W08 had two major strengths; one-lap pace and top speed.

The car was dominant in qualifying, taking 15/20 pole positions, mainly thanks to Mercedes's infamous "party modes".

In time, this has led people to believe that the car was dominant on both Saturday AND Sunday.

The reality is that the W08 was rarely able to translate qualifying pace into long-run pace. This was due to a number of reasons.

The simplest is that Mercedes couldn't run their "party modes" for extended periods of time, as it would put far too much strain on the engine.

The non-availability of party modes in the Grand Prix somewhat levelled the playing field between Mercedes and Ferrari when it came to top speed, but the W08 had another trick up its sleeve: aero efficiency.

Mercedes designed the W08 with a low-rake philosophy in mind, contrary to Ferrari (and Red Bull). This minimised drag, as the rear of the car sat much lower to the ground than its counterparts.

This handed Mercedes a crucial advantage at certain tracks across the calendar.

Mercedes's top speed advantage was also aided by a a technical directive published in July.

The TD stated that while any engine introduced thus far could burn oil at 1.2l/100km, any engine introduced AFTER the Belgian Grand Prix had to have a 0.9l/100km limit.

Mercedes was able to introduce their final engine of the season in time for Spa aiding Hamilton to victory before he took the championship lead a week later at Monza.

When Vettel was forced to use old engines after the Malaysia fiasco, that was the final nail in the coffin.

Now I hear you asking, "This is all well and good Mr. Kobayashicore, but you spent a long time praising Mercedes. Didn't you call the W08 overrated just a few moments ago?"

Yes I did and I stick by it. The W08 may have had numerous strengths but there were also BIG weaknesses.

For years Mercedes pioneered the low-rake concept with great success, but the new regulations put more emphasis on the underbody, favouring Ferrari.

Mercedes tried to make up the deficit by lengthening the W08, but this made the car both heavier and more cumbersome.

Running overweight and poorly balanced, the W08 became a nightmare to engineers. A small set-up window meant that the car refused to yield consistent results when exposed to different tyre compounds, temperature changes or dynamic circuits.

A narrative exists that the W08 got better and better as the season went on, and this is partially true due to the new engine at Belgium, but in reality the issues persisted throughout the year. Mercedes were lost at Mexico and Sepang, where they finished 20 seconds off the lead.

There are specific case studies (China, Bahrain, Silverstone, Hungary) where we saw the strengths and weaknesses of the SF70h and W08 play out in real time, but I'll go in-depth when I examine the races themselves more deeply in the next thread.

Finally, I'll touch Mercedes's hydraulic heave damper, an R&D project aimed at eliminating the weaknesses of the low-rake concept while preserving all the advantages.

It looked to be a stroke of genius, but Charlie Whiting chose to ban the system before the start of the season.

Twitter's word count prevents me from illustrating how fab this bit of tech was, because Mercedes used it in the first week of pre-season & blew everyone away.

Without the damper the W08 looked rather ordinary, and Mercedes did well to arrive at Melbourne with a competitive car.

As per Paddy Lowe on the Ferrari inquiry, which led CH to ban the system: "Ferrari has been sending missiles for a while but they hit the aircraft carrier with that one.”

It's unlikely to me that Merc would've designed such an extreme car if they knew their tech would be banned.

If you want a more in-depth summary of Mercedes's and Ferrari's 2017 challengers, I would highly recommend this article by Mark Hughes, written in December after the season finale. The article may be behind a paywall for some of you (sorry).
google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j…

If you got this far, thank you for reading! I'll do my best to post Part II as soon as possible, where I'll delve into the championship battle race-by-race.