F1

SEASON REVIEW F1

No doubt that this season again was dominated by Mercedes taking both the driver’s title and the constructors title.

Lewis Hamilton started the season in high spirits after signing a new contract that saw him become one of the highest paid F1 Drivers with the deal worth  100 Million Pounds.

Lewis Hamilton did it his way

He played hard, he partied harder, and he made it work.
The irony of Hamilton's late-season struggle to rediscover the 'balance' of his previously-unbeatable W06 car is that the Mercedes driver had built his title success on confounding the critics of his life-work balance. Remember the dire predictions of how single life might affect him? Or the post-summer break fretting about his jet-setting summer frolics?

Ferrari are coming back

Fourth in 2014 but the best of the rest in 2015, Ferrari appear poised to be a genuine match for Mercedes next year. Momentum is on their side, money is no object to a team paid £100m a year just to be in the sport, Sebastian Vettel has rediscovered his mojo and Mercedes are worried.
Why else would they have asked the governing body to have another look at the small print of Ferrari's relationship with Haas and why else would they be considering building a radical successor to a car which gobbled up 86 per cent of the possible points on offer in 2015? The red tide is rising.

Honda returned a year too early
And probably two years too early. McLaren have repeatedly defended their faltering partners by stressing that Mercedes spent three years preparing for the advent of F1's new turbo era, but that reflex response only points to the vast length of road Honda still have to travel before they can expect to spot the front runners.
It's little wonder that a sabbatical for Fernando Alonso was - and perhaps will be again if 2016 pre-season testing goes badly - under consideration. Given McLaren barely made any tangible progress all year, what realistic chance they will be competitive in 2016?

Max Verstappen is a future world champion
But don't overlook the fact that Carlos Sainz out-qualified Verstappen over the course of 2015, albeit by the slenderest of margins. If Verstappen is a future champion, and he surely is, then Sainz very well may be too.

Nico Rosberg is better when the pressure is off
The Mercedes driver may have finished off with three successive wins but the war had already been lost. Given that the last truly meaningful on-track act of 2015 was Rosberg's title-surrendering mistake when leading in the United States, it would have almost been better if Nico had erred in any of the three pressure-free concluding races just to suggest his habit of making critical errors wasn't intimately connected to the importance of the occasion.


Mercedes dominated again this season but Ferrari are coming for them strong next season