raymondu999 wrote:Actually, looking back at the past few years, it seems to me that a driver's influence on wet laptimes now has been diminished. A good wet car, or wet setup, now plays a bigger part.
If you were to look at the past few years, generally it's always been a single car (or two) that has won the wet races for the season, and the same cars tend to perform very badly over and over again. Cars & drivers also seem to fluctuate from season to season.
For example, if you looked at 2011 Canada, Button and Hamilton were very quick (at least until Hamilton's retirement). But this year in Malaysia race, GB or Germany qualifying, the Button/Hamilton-McLaren combo has been lacklustre. The Red Bulls weren't too hot in Malaysia race, but after their upgrade in Valencia, they were competitive in Silverstone and Hockenheim quali, pointing to a trend that those upgrades affected their wet weather competitiveness, meaning that the car still plays a big role, and is by no means equalised
If you were to put everyone in spec cars then IMO we would see bigger laptime differences between the drivers than in the dry (ie the driver makes more difference) but IMO that isn't enough to counter differences in a better wet car/setup nowadays.
That drivers who dominate wet races one year and are nowhere the next year IMO is a big sign of this. Lewis was imperious in the wet in 2008. Then comes 2009 and he wasn't anymore. So while people romanticise the wet as a car equaliser, I don't think that's true nowadays.
Yes ,this logic works nowadays with the exception of Schumacher who has been competitive in rain the last three years with the exception of Malaysia 2012, which, by the way, was a very strange race.
How a car adaptes to rain determines if a driver can be competitive or not but traditionally some drivers haven been competitive under rain conditions with very different cars, apart from Michael, Rubbens or Heidfeld used to be good examples.