Mercedes AMG Petronas

Just four races into the 2014 Formula One season, Mercedes has already opened a 97-point gap to its nearest rival, Red Bull, in the Constructors' Championship.

Powered by the best engine in the field, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg have combined to win all four of those races, with no other team coming within 23 seconds of the lead Mercedes in any race. In fact, the margins between the top Mercedes and top non-Mercedes finishers have remained remarkably consistent all season:

Australia	Malaysia	Bahrain	China
24.525s	24.534s	24.067s	23.604s

But does that mean the other teams are not closing the gap to Mercedes at all?

To answer that, we need to examine some of the other numbers available. Of course, we do not have access to the teams' advanced telemetry, but Rosberg finished second in China without it, so we should be OK.

The main reason that the overall gap between the Silver Arrows and the rest of the field is not a reliable indicator for our purposes is that Mercedes has generally not needed to push their cars to the maximum during the races. Also, safety cars in Australia and Bahrain artificially closed the gaps.

While we can safely assume that the other teams are going as fast as they can, keeping in mind tyre and fuel management, Mercedes is not. Once they have built a comfortable lead in the races, they have been able to back off and manage the gap without stressing their cars.

So, what data can we use to see whether the other teams are getting closer to Mercedes? Two sets of numbers that should demonstrate the cars at, or near, the limits of their performance are the times from Q3, as well as the drivers' fastest laps from the races.

The following charts compare the gaps between the lead Mercedes and the lead car for Red Bull, Force India and Ferrari—the next three teams in the championship. Each of those teams also represent one of the three engine manufacturers this year: Renault, Mercedes and Ferrari, respectively. 

A straight comparison of the differences between the Q3 and fastest lap times at the various grands prix does not work, though. A one-second gap is more significant in a one-and-a-half-minute lap at Sakhir than it is in a two-minute lap at Sepang.

Therefore, for our comparison, the times have been converted to a percentage of the lead Mercedes' time, just like for the 107 percent rule in qualifying.

Here are the Q3 results, based on data from the FIA, from each grand prix ("100" on the vertical axis represents Mercedes' time, so the closer the other teams' times are to 100, the closer they are to Mercedes):

The qualifying pace of all three teams has been up and down, depending in part, on which circuits favour certain cars. Both Ferrari and Red Bull were closest to Mercedes, relatively, in Malaysia, while Force India's best performance was in Bahrain. (Not surprisingly, Sergio Perez scored the team's first podium since 2009 in that race.)

Overall, at least according to the Q3 times, the other teams are not closing the gap to Mercedes, though. And that makes sense. Sure, the teams are developing their cars as quickly as they can, but so is Mercedes.

Also, Mercedes' biggest advantage is their power units. With the ban on in-season engine development, there is only so much Renault and Ferrari can do in terms of matching the Mercs' power.

Here are the comparisons of the fastest laps for the teams at each grand prix, again, using the FIA's timing data:

In race trim, the individual results look somewhat different, but the overall point is the same. No one is really catching Mercedes. If they were, we would see a downward trend for at least one team on the graphs, but that is not the case.

It should also be noted that the worst race for Ferrari and Red Bull (and second-worst for Force India) relative to Mercedes was Bahrain. This is significant because Bahrain was the one race where the Mercedes drivers were pushing their cars for most of the race, as they fought a close battle with each other right to the finish.

That is not good news for the rest of the field. When they want (or need) to be, the Mercedes cars can be much quicker than we have seen on a regular basis this year.

In fact, Rosberg indicated at the FIA post-race press conference last weekend that Mercedes' goal is to pull even further ahead at the Spanish Grand Prix. "We want to go to Barcelona with the biggest step, that’s our ambition," he said. "Barcelona is a chance for us to extend the advantage that we have and that’s the approach that we have going to Barcelona."

Another Mercedes 1-2 in Spain will put them at least 113 points ahead of the second-place team. Red Bull's lead after five races last season—when they eventually won the Constructors' Championship by 236 points—was 14 points.

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The Shanghai International Circuit, the home for the Chinese Grand Prix, has been the venue for some of the most emotional moments of Lewis Hamilton’s Formula One career.

The 2007 event is, of course, the first memory that comes to mind when you think of Hamilton in China. He began that October afternoon expecting to enjoy the evening as F1’s first rookie world champion but a race-ending trip to the gravel trap as his McLaren made its way to the pitlane entry signalled the beginning of the end of his title hopes.

He refused to make the same mistake the following year, claiming a victory that is arguably the most underrated of his career. Hamilton arrived in Shanghai that weekend with memories of the previous year still fresh in his mind and only a matter of days after he had suffered an attack of the yips at Fuji, converting his pole position into a 12th place finish. His victory that day, in the penultimate race of the season, gave him an ultimately decisive seven-point lead over Felipe Massa of Ferrari.

His next win in China, in 2011, saw him come through the stress of a pre-race technical problem to pass Sebastian Vettel for the win with only four laps remaining. The range of emotions he experienced during that afternoon led to him uncharacteristically sobbing during the podium ceremony.

Given his history in Shanghai, you would have expected him to react strongly to his third victory at the circuit.

This, after all, was the weekend in which he broke the long-standing record of pole positions for a British driver, with his 34th pole moving Hamilton ahead of Jim Clark, two-time world champion. This was the weekend in which he moved ahead of five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio and alongside Clark and Mercedes colleague Niki Lauda, in the list of all-time grand prix winners. This was the weekend in which he secured the first hat-trick of race wins in his career and regained his title as the most successful driver in China.

But the overwhelming joy of yesteryear has now been replaced by a satisfaction and self-assurance—a sign of his growth in maturity and relaxation, as well as his renewed sense of focus and dedication for the ultimate prize.

Hamilton is now operating at the level that he was expected to make his own ever since he burst onto the scene seven years ago and that some suggested he would never reach again during the darkest days of 2011.  

It is almost as if Hamilton has used the pain (or limited success) of the last five years as fuel to fire his 2014 campaign, the season that was always targeted as the one by both driver and his Mercedes team. And it has certainly felt that way first in Malaysia and then in Shanghai, with Hamilton learning lessons from the Vettel School of Winning by securing a stunning pole position on the Saturday before nestling the win in his back pocket by the end of the first stint on Sunday.

Hamilton had only previously been capable of this type of performance on a once-per-year basis, when he blew the opposition away to such an extent that the result of the race was almost a foregone conclusion even prior to Saturday’s qualification session. That he has embarked upon three consecutive wins, all in such comfortable fashion, is testament to Hamilton’s comfort within Mercedes as well as the team’s stunning W05 car.

Ironically, however, the sheer pace of the W05 could be Hamilton’s biggest hurdle in his quest to claim a second world championship.

After qualifying fourth due to his failure to string a lap together under pressure, colliding with the Williams of Valtteri Bottas at the first corner and driving the entire race without the help of car telemetry, Nico Rosberg—Hamilton’s teammate and closest rival for the title—should have lost his lead of the world championship in Shanghai.

The incompetence of Ferrari and Red Bull, however, turned what should have been a recovery drive for Rosberg—who had dropped to a distant sixth by the end of the opening lap—into a standard 2014 race.

Rosberg, quoted by the official F1 website, bemoaned that it was “not a perfect weekend for me” and how “too many things went wrong,” but the fact that he still claimed second on a “weekend of damage limitation” reflects just how huge Mercedes’ pace advantage is over the rest of the field and how neither Hamilton nor Rosberg can rely on rival teams or drivers to take points away from one another.

And although that will give both drivers the inspiration to know that they stand a chance of claiming a podium from almost any position and any circumstance, it makes the subject of race retirements and no-scores even more crucial than usual. This has already been evident in 2014, with Hamilton still unable to displace Rosberg despite taking 75 points from the last three races after retiring in Australia and will become crucial as the season progresses.

We are safe to assume that a repeat of Sebastian Vettel’s 2010 championship win, which saw the Red Bull driver take the title despite failing to score on four occasions, will not occur.

Prior to the beginning of the season, it was thought that the only thing that could prevent Hamilton from securing the title would be Rosberg’s intellect. Although the former was the faster driver, it was thought, Rosberg’s ability to think outside the box and keep his calm would prove decisive in the inter-team battle.

The bizarre contradiction that took place on Friday at Mercedes, with Rosberg telling Sky Sports that he had held a discussion with Hamilton about the race-long battles they had in the Bahrain Grand Prix before Hamilton denied one had taken place, confirmed that the British driver was winning both on and off track.

Rosberg, despite almost certainly being the one to believe in this situation, was shown to be touchy, vulnerable and in need of assurance, while Hamilton completed the role reversal by appearing unmoved, mature and relaxed—effectively dismissing his teammate’s complaints in a much ado about nothing manner.

With Rosberg rattled and Hamilton currently enjoying the finest run of form of his career, this world championship is now his to lose.     

Every so often in Formula One, a team comes up with a completely revolutionary design which gives them a massive advantage over the competition.

In 2009, Brawn GP developed a double diffuser which significantly increased downforce and allowed Jenson Button to win six of the first seven races before other teams started to catch up. The lead he built in the championship was so large that although Button did not win again that season, he was able to take the Drivers' title.

This year, turbocharged engines have returned to F1, and Mercedes has come up with an innovative design that has given the team (and to a lesser extent, its engine customers) a significant advantage on the track.

The innovation is that the two parts of the turbocharger, the turbine and the compressor, are split rather than packaged together, as per usual. Sky Sports' Martin Brundle explains it well in this video:

In hindsight, this trick seems relatively simple, although it is obviously not—otherwise Mercedes would not be the only manufacturer to come up with it.

In Motor Sport Magazine (via Sky Sports) Mark Hughes detailed the numerous advantages of this turbocharger design, including less turbo lag, more power available from the Energy Recovery Systems and greater fuel efficiency.

He also notes ancillary benefits such as smaller sidepods—meaning improved aerodynamic efficiency, since the air going from the turbocharger to the engine does not require as much cooling—as well as a better centre of gravity for the car.

I wrote before the season that teams designing their own engines and chassis would have a significant advantage this season. While that has not been the case for Ferrari, it certainly has for Mercedes.

Force India, Williams and McLaren all have the same Mercedes power unit, and all have improved significantly relative to last season. However, they had access to the power units much later than the Mercedes design team and so were not able to find all the same aerodynamic advantages that the Silver Arrows have.

The biggest advantage for Mercedes, though, might be the engine homologation rules. From February 28, engine development has been frozen, aside from fixing reliability issues or generating cost savings (and then only with the approval of the FIA).

This means that Renault and Ferrari will be unable to copy the Mercedes design until next season.

While some fans may be worried that Mercedes' running away with the championship will be as uninteresting as Sebastian Vettel's winning streak at the end of last season, the 1988 season is probably a much better comparison.

That year, McLaren had the best car by far—the MP4/4 won 15 of 16 races—but the championship battle was anything but boring. Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost duelled back and forth and the Drivers' title was not decided until the second-to-last race of the season.

With any luck, we will see a similar tilt between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg this year—even if Mercedes does have the Constructors' Championship wrapped up by the summer break.

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The 2014 Formula One season is already shaping up to be a two-horse race. Mercedes have produced a car which is so far ahead of the competition that Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg look set to be the only contenders for the crown.

It won't be the first time they've been involved in a title race.

They met in 1997 and are first recorded by driverdb.com as competing regularly against each other in 1999, in the European Championship ICA Junior karting class.

In 2000 they both moved up to the European Formula A championship. This was the season they became team-mates for the first time—and they finished the year first and second, Hamilton edging out Rosberg.

Fast forward to 2014, and they're together again, looking for all the world like the future champion and runner-up on a far greater stage.

This forthcoming title fight is made all the more interesting because Hamilton and Rosberg are, by F1 standards, friends—and have been since their days in karting.

Hamilton told The Guardian in 2013 about their early years:

We always had great competition, whether on the racetrack or computer games or playing football. We always had that. It was a really good period of time in my career and in my life and I look forward to making some more great memories.

I have never laughed so much than when we were racing together. Nico was kicking everyone's butt at that time. We had some great races together and built a great relationship.

But there has been a lot of talk, such as in The Mirror, The Telegraph and givemesport.com, suggesting that the relationship cannot survive a title battle.

F1 isn't karting. The stakes are massively higher, the style of racing is totally different and the pressure to come out on top will surely turn this long-standing friendship sour.

Right?

It's true that, historically, when a title fight has been between team-mates they haven't usually got on.

Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet in the 1980s is a fine example, and it was followed closely by the famous rivalry between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost from 1988 onwards. Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber in 2010 was another which was less than friendly.

We can also count Hamilton's 2007 fight with Fernando Alonso as an ill-tempered affair.

The exceptions to the rule are mostly from the distant past, but there are two relatively recent examples of team-mates who got on well during a title fight.

Niki Lauda and Alain Prost in 1984 had a good-natured battle, and there was no backstabbing and infighting during the 1996 season, when Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve finished a close first and second.

So which way will it go this year?

It's hard to say, and the rivalries of the past aren't much use as a guide because they started from totally different places. Hamilton and Alonso, and Webber and Vettel, didn't really have opinions of each other before they got together.

In the other two cases, a lack of friendliness was already there. Mansell and Piquet didn't like each other even before they were team-mates, while Senna and Prost were by no means buddies before their titanic battle began.

In each case, the most they had for one another was respect. And it was a grudging respect.

With Hamilton and Rosberg, there appears to be genuine warmth. The respect they have for one another is long-standing and sincere, forged as they climbed through the junior ranks and set off on their F1 adventures.

When one has a good race and the other struggles, the "loser" will usually admit his team-mate did a better job on the day.

Then he'll go away, determined to be on the top step at the next race.

There are also indications that both men place value on their relationships and life away from the circuit. Though totally focused when they're on the track, off it they don't come across as men who sit around obsessing too much about F1.

With other things in your life, it can be easier to worry less about the day job.

There will be no team orders causing resentment and bitterness at Mercedes. The drivers are free to race.

But perhaps the most compelling reason the relationship can survive was seen during and after the Bahrain Grand Prix.

When Rosberg attacked Hamilton early in the race, he was clearly displeased at the way the Brit cut back across him at the exit of the hairpin. On the team radio (heard on live TV and quoted by F1Fanatic), he angrily said, "Warn him, that was not on!"

The two men had an epic battle for the lead, which Hamilton eventually won after repeatedly running the German wide at the exit of Turn 4.

Though to the viewer none of the moves Hamilton did looked at all unfair, F1 drivers are a sensitive bunch when someone steals their piece of tarmac. Many drivers would have been somewhat irked.

But not Rosberg. In parc ferme after the race, he didn't complain at all.

Instead, he playfully rugby-tackled Hamilton and both seemed delighted they'd had the opportunity to have a full-on, proper race. In the waiting room before the podium ceremony, their behaviour was that of friends and sportsmen.

Fantastic, close racing between team-mates and good sportsmanship at the end. Thank you @MercedesAMGF1. #F1 pic.twitter.com/xb7y3RMguq

— wtf1.co.uk (@wtf1couk) April 7, 2014

Hamilton later admitted to Sky Sports F1 he wasn't the faster man on the day, and he added:

It was very close, it felt very close—I don't know how close it was, but it felt very close—and I guess the team will decided how close that was. But Nico drove very well and hopefully I drove safe enough to stay in front. Hopefully we have more races like that in the future.

Rosberg told BBC Sport:

I thought I'd got him about nine times but they didn't work. He always got the run back on me and he did a good job, that's it. Lewis is obviously a great driver and made it work and next time I need to do better.

At no time were we at risk of taking both cars out. There was always the necessary margin. It might not have looked like it on TV but there was. It was good racing.

The impression is that these are two men for whom winning, though massively important, isn't everything. The manner in which they win means just as much as the act itself.

A fighting win is worth multiple easy cruises to the flag. If that fighting win is against a friend with whom they have a long history, it's even better.

Crucially, each has the capacity to accept a defeat and admit their team-mate did better.

At the end of the season, there'll be little resentment when, as seems ever more likely, one driver seizes the title and the other second place.

Of course the loser will be disappointed, and as much as the teams' PR people try to convince us otherwise, F1 drivers are not robots. There'll be envy, sadness and an inevitable harking back to key moments as they wonder what might have been.

But most of all—providing it's a close fight—even the loser will feel the pleasure and satisfaction of having been in a tough, draining battle.

The sort of thing you see on Centre Court after an epic Wimbledon final, or at the end of a hard-fought boxing match. Once the initial rush of despair has passed, the loser of any close duel will nearly always have a smile on his face.

That and a burning need to get even next time out.

It would be foolish to suggest there'll be no minor "glitches" along the way. If the rest of the season is as close as Bahrain, they will almost certainly run into each other at least once, and that might provoke a few angry words.

But don't arguments occur between friends the world over every day of the year?

Barring any major mishaps—like a Senna/Prost moment or some Piquet-style verbals—there's no reason Hamilton and Rosberg cannot end the season as close as they started it.

Not quite best buddies, but as friendly as two F1 drivers are ever likely to get.

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The Bahrain Grand Prix witnessed Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, the Mercedes teammates and overwhelming world title favourites, go head-to-head for the first time in the 2014 Formula One season.

We were robbed of a close battle at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, when an engine failure ended Hamilton’s race after two troublesome laps, leaving Rosberg to claim a straightforward, dominant victory.

Hamilton enjoyed a similarly convincing victory a fortnight later in Malaysia, proving his critics—who claimed that he was unsuited to the demands of F1’s new era—completely and utterly wrong on a weekend when he was the class of the field by a distance.

It had been something of a cold war between the Mercedes drivers so far in 2014, with Rosberg and Hamilton taking points off one another and claiming minor moral victories along the way. That suited the former—the supposed cunning, silent assassin—fine.

But in Sakhir, the tables turned to play into the hands of the street fighter, Hamilton, to produce a series of battles that were not too dissimilar to the last time a pair of teammates fought for the lead of a race.

Back then, at the Malaysian Grand Prix of 2013, we saw the difference between a world champion and a mere grand prix winner. Sebastian Vettel played the role of the opportunistic aggressor, defying the orders of his Red Bull team to take the lead and win the race as Mark Webber fought in vain to resist the German.

Webber’s defence on that Sepang afternoon was as robust as you would expect but not convincing in the slightest; you always felt that it was a matter of time until Vettel got past and scampered into the distance. And Vettel did eventually get past at Turn 4 of the Kuala Lumpur circuit when Webber, presumably fearful of a race-ending collision, compromised by leaving a gap the size of a bus on the exit. This allowed Vettel to complete a relatively simple, anticlimactic overtaking manoeuvre, ending a scrap that deserved a more thrilling conclusion.      

They keyword here is, of course, “compromise.” The great champions of sport, and particularly F1, deal on a no-compromise-basis. Refusing to give an inch has seen them—Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, to name just three—cross the line and end up looking foolish on occasion, but such ruthlessness is almost certain to see you succeed more often than you fail.

And Hamilton refused to give an inch when under attack by Rosberg in Bahrain with a stunning display of defensive driving. The former McLaren driver covered every base, running his teammate out of road when he needed to and making his Mercedes W05 as wide as the track surface.

Hamilton’s protection of the lead, however, was undoubtedly aided by Rosberg’s predictable, half-hearted attempts to overtake. If there is such a thing as “cautious attacking,” the German perfected it here.

Perhaps it was due to the fact that he was racing against his teammate, but you never got the feeling that Rosberg—even when side by side with Hamilton in the middle of a corner—was truly committed to, nor confident in, pulling off a move.

For someone who is regarded by many as the most intelligent driver on the grid, Rosberg displayed an alarming lack of imagination and invention in Bahrain.

His persistence in attempting to pass Hamilton on the outside of the exit of Turn 4 was bizarre when you consider the vast amount of run-off area which surrounds that point of the Sakhir circuit, making it easy for defending drivers to simply push their aggressors off the circuit to retain their position.

The undercut, the tactic which sees drivers straighten their car earlier on the exit of a corner to benefit from better traction, would almost certainly have served Rosberg better, with the extra variety giving Hamilton more to think about and therefore increasing his chances of making a mistake. A mistake under pressure, you will recall, is what saw Hamilton concede pole position to Rosberg little more than 24 hours earlier.

In addition, a successful undercut would have given Rosberg the inside line ahead of the right-left chicane of Turns 6 and 7, meaning he wouldn’t have been edged off the road as he so often was by his teammate.

Yet, time and again Rosberg tried the heroic move around the outside, and time and again Hamilton absorbed and dealt with it.

Rosberg’s occasional looks down the inside of the right-hand hairpin of Turn 1 reeked of utter desperation and controlled recklessness, particularly on the 53rd lap—only five laps from the end of the race—when he broke so late to the point where he delayed Hamilton from turning in.

This gave Rosberg the lead, but what followed was most disappointing. Like Webber before him, Rosberg left too much room and allowed his world champion teammate to counter-attack, squeeze through and regain first place. In that situation, a Vettel- or Hamilton-type of driver would have swept across the circuit and assumed control, effectively dictating the acceleration of the car behind ahead of the sweeping left-hander of Turn 2.

Rosberg, though, appeared to do himself a disservice by allowing Hamilton space, which denied the German another chance to attack at Turn 4. Although, given what had gone before, it needn’t have mattered.

The German’s reaction in parc ferme and during the podium ceremony was reflective of his driving: a little too nice, too kind and too congratulatory.

Although he played an instrumental role in providing the most thrilling grand prix for some time, Rosberg’s courteous, polite persona toward Hamilton after such an intense battle suggests that—in a week which saw his own team boss predict inter-team fireworks—he might, strangely for someone with a champion’s DNA, lack the selfishness that a Formula One title winner needs in his repertoire.

This season could represent Rosberg’s one and only chance of claiming the crown. It is, therefore, imperative that he extracts the most out of every opportunity, no matter how small.

If Mercedes’ dominance continues to last all season, it is highly likely that the championship will be decided by the smallest of margins. And the seven points he lost to Hamilton in Bahrain, which could so easily have been seven points gained, may be decisive when the chequered flag falls for Rosberg in Abu Dhabi in November.  

Nice guys, after all, finish last.

There can be no doubt that Mercedes is the class of the Formula One field so far in 2014.

Two utterly commanding victories in the first two races have led to comparisons with Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull's dominance in the second half of last season. And while the template of qualifying near the front, sprinting out to a large early lead and then controlling the race is familiar from 2013, this season is actually more reminiscent of 2009.

That year, Brawn GP exploited a new technical development—the double diffuser—to allow Jenson Button to build an early lead in the Drivers' Championship that proved insurmountable even once the other teams caught up. 

This year, Mercedes seems to have the total package under the new regulations, but when asked the best part of his car, Nico Rosberg told the official F1 website, "My power unit."  

The Mercedes PU106A Hybrid power unit does seem to be responsible for the majority of the team's advantage so far. In fact, four of the top five teams in the Constructors' Championship right now are Mercedes-powered.

Meanwhile, teams using the underpowered and unreliable Renault and the merely underpowered Ferrari engines are struggling.

But exactly how big is Mercedes' current advantage over their rivals?

Even Renault's head of track operations, Remi Taffin, cannot pinpoint an exact number, telling Autosport's Ben Anderson that, "Saying it is one second is difficult, but it is not one tenth. It is closer to a second than a tenth or a hundredth." 

Let's have a look at some of the data from the Malaysian Grand Prix to help give us an idea. 

First, here are the fastest laps for each of the top six teams in the current Constructors' standings:

Team	Driver	Lap Time	Gap
Mercedes	Lewis Hamilton	1:43.066	–
Ferrari	Fernando Alonso	1:44.165	+1.099
Red Bull	Sebastian Vettel	1:44.289	+1.223
Williams	Felipe Massa	1:44.897	+1.831
McLaren	Kevin Magnussen	1:45.373	+2.307
Force India	Nico Hulkenberg	1:45.982	+2.916

No one is within one second of Lewis Hamilton's fastest time. However, Hamilton also made the last pit stop in the race, so he had fresher tyres than anyone else when he set the fastest lap.

On the other hand, Hamilton set that lap on hard compound tyres, whereas Fernando Alonso's fastest lap—the only non-Mercedes lap even close to one second from Hamilton's—was set on quicker medium tyres.

Of course, one fast lap can be the product of a number of different variables and does not necessarily tell the whole story. Over the entire race, here is Hamilton's average lap time, and the gap to the averages of the next five highest finishers in the race (excluding his teammate, Rosberg):

Driver	Team	Average Lap Time
Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	1:47.607
Sebastian Vettel	Red Bull	+0.438
Fernando Alonso	Ferrari	+0.643
Nico Hulkenberg	Force India	+0.843
Jenson Button	McLaren	+1.494
Felipe Massa	Ferrari	+1.519

Again, the gap is significant, although Sebastian Vettel's and Alonso's times are significantly closer over the full race than over a single, quick lap.

McLaren, in particular, will be disheartened. After predicting a half-second-per-lap improvement from Australia, Button's average lap time was still 1.5 seconds slower than Hamilton's.  

Even more discouraging—for all of Mercedes' rivals—is the message Hamilton received from his race engineer on Lap 22 of the race, per F1 Fanatic, "We’re going to look after this engine. We’re just going to turn it down a little bit. ... That’s for both cars." 

In Melbourne, despite an early safety car, Rosberg also spent most of the race more worried about protecting his engine than his lead, as he cruised to victory.

With the next race this Sunday in Bahrain, there is not much time for any of the teams to do significant development work to close the gap to Mercedes.

In fact, Red Bull team principal Christian Horner thinks, per The Guardian, that, "Their advantage will be bigger than it was in Malaysia as that is quite a power-dominated circuit."

Until the other teams (and engine manufacturers) can catch up, they will have to hope for reliability problems for the Silver Arrows—as Hamilton experienced in Bahrain.

Otherwise, we might be in for quite a few Mercedes one-two finishes. But look on the bright side: At least it's not Red Bull.

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Lewis Hamilton kick-started his title bid for the 2014 season with a fine victory in Sepang at the 2014 Malaysian Grand Prix—and a fan of his celebrated with some carefully crafted nail art.

Twitter user Priscilla sent Hamilton a picture of the finished product and got a retweet from the driver:

My Celebration of @LewisHamilton 's Victory 😍😁 #TeamLH #MalaysianGP #HatTrick pic.twitter.com/l3mcCrQrXV

— Priscilla Hamilton (@Prisci_Hamilton) April 1, 2014

As you can see, there is the Mercedes logo, a chequered flag, the Union Jack, Hamilton's No. 44 and car colours, and "I heart LH." Clearly, no small amount of time went into it.

But while F1 is generally thought of as a male-dominated sport, there was still time for a technical discussion about the art of nail polish.

@sarah_connors with a liner brush ;) and the nail polish for merc is "mavala-blue pacific" :)

— Priscilla Hamilton (@Prisci_Hamilton) April 1, 2014

Which should help you if Hamilton wins in Bahrain this weekend.

For someone supposedly too daft to succeed in Formula One in 2014, Lewis Hamilton didn’t do too badly in winning the Malaysian Grand Prix.

Ahead of the season, it was thought that the only thing that could deny Hamilton a second world championship title was himself. He had the car. He had the team. He had the structure. But did he have the discipline, the composure, the sense and even the willingness to make the sport’s new regulations work for him?

Those regulations, of course, require a driver to pace himself over the course of a race distance, conserving the fuel, eking out the tyres—the type of demands that Hamilton has never seemed truly comfortable with but are tailor-made for Nico Rosberg, his teammate.

Even in the early stages of this race, at first glance at least, it appeared as though Hamilton was blindly driving toward his own downfall. He ended the first lap two seconds clear of second-placed Rosberg, a gap which was stretched to 3.2 seconds by the second lap, according to AutoSport Live.

That became four seconds after three laps. Then 4.3. Then 4.7 after the Mercedes drivers had briefly traded fastest lap times. The gap was 5.2 seconds after eight laps, and when Rosberg became the first of the pair to pit after 14 laps, the distance between them was 6.6 seconds.

In his first flying lap on new tyres after pitting on Lap 15, only one lap later than Rosberg, Hamilton set what was then the fastest lap of the race, 1 minute, 46.190 seconds—a second faster than his teammate—and extended his lead to 9.4 seconds.

This looked for all the world how a standard 2014 race was always set to play out: Hamilton bursts out of the blocks from pole, builds a strong, early but misleading lead while Rosberg craftily, carefully holds back and waits for the perfect moment to pounce, ideally when Hamilton reaches the point of no return on either fuel or tyres.

Staggeringly, however, this was the new, improved Lewis Hamilton in action.

On the 15th lap, seconds after a call for Hamilton to “box” had been broadcast to the globe, a graphic appeared on the FOM live television feed detailing the fuel-flow rate of each car. Of the drivers in the top 10—five of whom were using Mercedes powertrains—only the ninth-placed Williams of Felipe Massa had used less fuel than Hamilton.  

Compared to Rosberg, who had used 25.06 per cent of his fuel at that stage, Hamilton had consumed only 24.53 per cent of his allotted fuel—a remarkable difference of 0.53 per cent.

Hamilton had been driving a heavier car in contrast to Rosberg and was therefore driving well within his limits, yet he still managed to lap over a second quicker than the German, who had looked unstoppable in Australia only a fortnight earlier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZN3RMacENg

Among the most impressive aspects of Rosberg’s victory in Melbourne two weeks ago was his ability to assess the race from the cockpit. In particular, his radio messages on Lap 15, when he told the team he would be positioning his car at an angle during his second stop to drive out of the pitbox more easily, and on Lap 42, when he asked his crew for extra suggestions to ensure perfect reliability, were of exceptional note.

Both instances were used as evidence to suggest exactly why Rosberg’s intelligence and spare capacity would lead to him having the edge over Hamilton in 2014. The latter, however, took a leaf out of his teammate’s book in Sepang, asking Mercedes: 

Anything more I can do to look after this engine?

Hamilton’s concerns were valid, with the race-winning power unit being the very same one which failed only a matter of laps into the Australian Grand Prix. The fact that he asked the team was promising enough, but the timing of the request—only halfway through the grand prix, with the threat of rain lingering—highlighted just how comfortable an afternoon the No. 44 car had enjoyed.  

Hamilton was eager to dismiss claims of an easy win, however, telling Mercedes’ official website:

The race was tougher than it perhaps looked today and the conditions here always make it a great challenge. But I was able to look after the car, the tyres and the fuel and still keep a bit of pace in hand which made my job that little bit easier.

Though, in terms of his final gap to the second-placed car, Hamilton’s victory was less convincing than Rosberg’s in Melbourne, the Malaysian Grand Prix has provided greater clues over Mercedes’ performance advantage and efficiency as well as Hamilton’s championship prospects.

If he does go on to claim this year’s title, his win in Sepang—only behind the 2008 Chinese Grand Prix as the finest, most assured win of his career—will come to be remembered the day which Hamilton enhanced his repertoire and completed that long and sometimes painfully difficult transition from boy to man.

For now, though, Hamilton will have to settle for it being the day he finally passed the intelligence test.

The standard PR talk coming from team bosses and drivers alike after the opening race of any Formula One season is that a clear picture of how the season will develop will not emerge until the European races.

Despite the apparent dominance of Mercedes in Australia, with Nico Rosberg winning by a whopping 26.777 seconds from Kevin Magnusson, team boss Toto Wolff remained cautious when quoted on Autosport.com.

An advantage can quickly turn into a disadvantage within a couple of races. We had the first race weekend, we won the race and pace-wise it looked OK, but speaking about us being favourites after the first race would be a bit over the top.

And yet if we look back over the race winners from the opening grands prix from the last 10 seasons or so and how the subsequent season developed, a clear pattern of dominance emerges pretty quickly.

Year	Aus GP winner	World Champion
2013	Kimi Raikkonen	Sebastian Vettel
2012	Jenson Button	Sebastian Vettel
2011	Sebastian Vettel	Sebastian Vettel
2010	Jenson Button	Sebastian Vettel
2009	Jenson Button	Jenson Button

From 2000-2013, seven drivers who have won in Australia have gone on to take the title. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that going on those statistics, there’s a 50 percent chance that the winner in Australia will go on to be champion. So why all the Mercedes caution?

Well, for starters, 50 percent of the time it doesn’t happen. Kimi Raikkonen won in Australia last year and enjoyed a competitive half dozen races, and there were an unprecedented seven different winners in the opening seven races in 2012 before Sebastian Vettel eventually clinched a hard-fought title.

Wolff will also be wary that at the start of a season which has seen the most radical regulation changes in a generation, things could turn around very quickly. No teams stand still waiting for their rivals to disappear into the distance, and Mercedes’ rivals will have looked very closely at what they are doing right and adjust accordingly.

After an abject display in pre-season testing, who could have predicted that Red Bull, petty fuel-flow sensor readings notwithstanding, could have finished second in Australia?

And McLaren team boss Eric Boullier has already targeted the Spanish Grand Prix as the race in which his team gains parity with Mercedes.

"Our target is to catch up by Barcelona, and then build up over the first few races in Europe," he is quoted on Autosport.com.

The fact that it is also difficult to develop cars over the opening fly-away races may mask Mercedes’ early advantage, but McLaren Group CEO Ron Dennis still thinks they will have made significant progress by Malaysia.

"We are confident that we will be half a second quicker at the next grand prix, for a variety of reasons,” he told Autosport.com. “That will not be enough to achieve our goal but it will keep the pressure on those teams that are chasing us."

Then, of course, there’s the Lewis Hamilton factor. Despite the fact that Rosberg has opened up a 25-point advantage on his major rival, many bookmakers still have the Briton as a fairly strong favourite for the title.

Even when Brawn GP so utterly dominated the opening half of the season in 2009 with the advantage of their double diffuser, the biggest winning margin was 22.722 seconds in Malaysia. Mercedes have already eclipsed that.

So while the opening race of the season doesn't always show who will win the title, there are strong reasons to believe that this year, more than ever before, the driver will be wearing Mercedes overalls.