Nico Rosberg completed his end-of-season hat-trick of victories last night in a less than scintillating Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, in which his Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton once again found himself fruitlessly chasing his elusive 44th triumph.
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He could not savor the desired 44th win on the 44th anniversary of the founding of the United Arab Emirates, and his 50th pole must wait, but that was incidental.
Rosberg then controlled it throughout, and while Hamilton pushed hard to make an offset strategy work – making his second stop late, he was unable to mount a challenge, eventually finishing 8.2 seconds adrift at the chequered flag.
Nico Rosberg turned his pole position in to another win in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at Yas Marina, the final race of the 2015 F1 season. “I’m really excited about how the season went”.
Nico Rosberg brought the curtain down on the 2015 F1 season with a victory in Abu Dhabi on Sunday.
The win was the 16th in 19 races for Mercedes.
Rosberg is using an older engine than Hamilton at the season-ending race, but the German was comfortably quicker than his team-mate.
“If I back off now and look after these tyres to the end, how much time would I need to slow?” “It has just been different for a few races now, but I did my best to get around, with the engineers we tried something completely different”, Hamilton explained.
Prior to the second stops Hamilton had closed the gap to Rosberg to 1.3 seconds, but, having finally made his final tyre change, he re-emerged from the pits with the gap having grown to 12.5 seconds.
“I don’t really understand it, I came out 11 seconds behind and had a mountain to climb”, Hamilton said.
“But I can’t grumble too much”.
The Venezuelan retired while Alonso, who can not end McLaren’s worst-ever season fast enough, was given a drive-through penalty.
“Primarily, I would like to win the race because it’s a great feeling and would give the whole crew a great end to the season and a reason to party”.
“We started better this season but it’s not been an ideal year”, said Raikkonen.
“It generally feels a little bit better in the race, but it’s been a while now I’m struggling on the edge with the auto”.
Vettel’s fightback was assisted by a lot of midfield runners pitting within the first seven laps as the supersoft tyres began to degrade quite quickly in the opening stages.
Grosjean, like Vettel, had started on softs after getting a five-place grid penalty for a gearbox change, and used a set of supersofts right at the end to jump Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz and Red Bull’s Daniil Kvyat, thus departing the team with two final points which ensured that they stayed ahead of Toro Rosso in the standings. Some part of me wishes I just gave it a go.
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“We took some learning on board off that weekend and whether the vehicle has come more towards Nico and gone away from Lewis, it could be a factor but I wouldn’t want to reduce it to one factor, there could be many factors playing a role”.
