SectorOne wrote:After a painful 2012 AUS i think Hamilton will bring this home with Rosberg completing the 1-2.
Despite getting poles galore, Hamilton has a bit of a habit of stuffing it up strategically/tactically during the race, then being mystified at what happened. That costs him dearly in the annual WDC hunt and ultimately his full career achievement.
I always like to look at what I call "pole conversion" to gauge if a guy has a the goods for multiple WDCs: what fraction of pole positions convert to victories?
It's not a hard rule but drivers like Lauda, Prost, Schumacher, & Alonso convert better than unity i.e. more than one victory per pole. That implies something other than just having the fastest car for single lap qualifying speed - they can create victories through some other in-race strategy than just having the fastest car on the day.
Vettel converts at 87%, but I believe that will strongly rise over his full career. The easiest way to change that stat positively is to stop getting poles at the races you win
. That sounds stupid, I know, but I think he has started to figure out why that matters, as I will explain below, and Hamilton has not yet done so.
Hamilton is converting at something like 70% right now. Again that could rise, but he's already behind the curve: even gaining pole and winning all 19 races this year only improves him to 82%. Over a full career, that's probably inadequate for a multiple WDC winner. Again, if he could hold off winning poles, and maybe work on his race strategy, he would improve that ratio drastically - just defocussing the qualifying effort, by winning only 4 poles, but re-focussing on the strategy to win half the races, pushes him into an entirely different orbit, close to unity. More importantly it would indicate a new, more mature way of thinking.
You could easily argue this is just a BS ratio, but I think it indicates another level of thinking, somebody who has matured from pure hotshoe single lap speed to thinking a race through from beginning to end - the tortoise, not the hare. Hamilton in my opinion is still the hare. But look at the last couple of season and you will see that Vettel is starting to think like a wise old turtle: 144% conversion in 2013, compared to 83% in 2012, and just 73% in 2011...
Of course this is not foolproof - you can easily find examples like Button who have low numbers in both categories but staggering percentages, like 200%+. But again, as someone who raced Jenson back in the day, I think that number still indicates an ability to take a slower car and hump it into first place at a strike rate that is probably signifcantly better than pure luck.
This signature is encrypted to avoid complaints, but it makes me laugh out loud:-
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