Hamilton did an excellent job to go from 10th to 2nd, and I generally think that he would have caught and hopefully overtaken Rosberg in the closing stages of the Grand Prix had he not had further gremlins.

I really hope they manage to sort out the issues with Hamilton's car soon though as it is getting a little silly.

Kevin Magnussen would have to be my driver of the day though, he did such a good job to get his car into the points.

Yep, a tie between K-Mag and Grosjean for me, both driving dogs to beyond their ability.

I go with the conspiritists on this one. I think the deal was done last season to stop the two using the opportunity to do the proverbial Vettel Webber/Ricardo situation and as above German Car, German driver is a winner to help push Merc sales and stop a costly constant rebuild and loss of points. Might also account for Hamiltons loss of form at the end of 2015. The only way to keep them apart now is to knobble Hamiltons car 'mechanically' I seriously don't buy their version as 1)what F1 car can do 16 laps with no water? Miraculous but implausible 2)They use the same engineering shop as it were so the base components are the same. So all the failures just happen on one car. The law of averages would rule that out plus as the crème de la crème of automotive engineering excellence Mercedes would have decent quality control over everything 3 Bad start procedure 1st couple of races I can buy that Rosberg adapted quicker....nah no way the just had to dial out a little and after all the practise these guys do it would cause him issues
Rant over

There's another huge anomaly in any German champion conspiracy: Mercedes undoubtedly wants the constructors title. Does anyone seriously think they would risk the chance of this un-necessarily by throwing away masses of points?

It's early in the season and there have been plenty examples over the years of a team making big strides as a season progresses, Any team deliberately throwing away tens of points so early on would be crazy to do so because they could be overtaken by a late-blooming rival.

There's also the risk of unplanned mechanical troubles for Rosberg AND Hamilton. It would just need a bout of unreliability for Mercedes to end up losing both drivers and constructors titles,

That's before we consider a driver being out for several races due to njury. Imagine sabotaging one driver only to find the one you'd promoted at his expense was out for a few races. That's a recipe for losing both titles.

As fun as the conspiracy theories are, this one just doesn't seem plausible to me. I didn't hear too many similarbtheiriesnlastbyear when Rosberg had his share of bad luck.

Bernie is a money grabber who has shown time and time again that he has no passion for the sport.

I would never compare him with Niki, who is a true racer.

Mercedes scored 703 points last year in the Contructor's Championship. Second place was Ferrari with 428 - they can afford to lose points.

Mercedes don't want to completely nobble Hamilton, just a free early setbacks andsome loss of points over his team mate, might just be enough to put the dampers on him and keep Rosberg feeling good and sitting pretty. This approach would avoid the likes of Spa last year where Rosberg was playing dirty on track to gain the upper hand against his team mate. 

As for unplanned failures, yes, there could be a few races where their drivers are taken out like Vettel in Russia, but Mercedes have been very reliable for the last couple of years.

Verstappen Replaces Kvyat


Bloody hell!

There is a part to that story that I have seen discussed in the commentary section on the Guardian and BBC website that caught my attention. Many pointed out that it was partly Vettel's fault because he was slowing down when he was hit the 2nd time in Sochi. It is correct to say that Vettel was slowing down. And that incident and those comments separate the good driver from the rest. A good driver looks at the car ahead of him, and at the car ahead of the one ahead of him. If Kvyatt had done just that he would have noticed that Perez, who was in front of Vettel, was slowing down on the lefthand side of the track. There were also quite a few car left of Vettel, all of them heading straight for the back of Perez. Vettel used caution when seeing Perez slowed down. Perez could have tried to get out of the oncoming traffic by going left or right, which would have been straight into the path of Vettel.
This is the kind of situation that often results in tail gating collisions on the road. Many drivers only look at the car in front of them, and not noticing an impending incident ahead of them. I have seen this many times on the motorways.