giantfan10 wrote:Vettel was on used SS and Rosberg was on brand new Mediums after about 5 laps of Vettel pushing the SS fell off and the mediums kept on trucking.....
That set he had on were the brand-new-unused SS he saved during Q3. He pitted on lap 13/14, hence by the time the race restarted after the red-flag, they were 3-5 laps old (lap 14 was an outlap, lap 17 the accident took place and slowed down the field considerably). Yes, Rosberg started the restart on never-used mediums at that point, but the big surprise was still how well that Mercedes kept up, on a tire that was two compounds harder and harder to warm up. Vettels tires were as good as they possibly could be. Vettel did his best lap on those tires on lap 24 - 6 laps after the race restarted and on tires that had done a total of 9~10 laps - a 1.29.951 - on average over that stint he was doing mid 1.30.xxx times. On lap 26, he started to drop consistently into the 1.31. He had driven out a gap of 3-4 seconds. Only on lap 30, after doing 16 laps on those tires did the times start to gradually move into the 1.32. where it remained until he pitted on lap 34.
Rosberg during the entire duration of this stint, was doing consistently somewhere between 1.30 and 1.32 times and continued to do that until the end of the GP, ending lap 57. Note, he did a 1:30.557 on lap 21 (vs Vettel low 1:30s), but the key point is, is that Rosberg was doing 1.30ties (high) around lap 44 too and again lap 51-52. Fantastic pace.
It's not that Vettels times weren't good - they were consistent with what you could expect given the laps he was doing at the start on a heavier car, also on SS tires - it's that the Mercedes pace on mediums was extraordinary, given the compound and the fact he did 39 laps on them.
Now Vettel on new softs, wasn't that impressive IMO. He was doing consistent mid to high ~1.30 - 1.31.5x times between lap 37 (he pitted on 34/35 rememer?) until he closed the gap to Lewis. Lewis on quite old mediums (older than Rosbergs) was also driving in traffic for a substantial time. Yet he was able to retain a pretty consistent pace of 1.31-1.32.
So perhaps before giving advice on
using some statistics, I suggest you do the same and look at the actual data. Here's a good place to start:
http://www.fia.com/events/fia-formula-o ... ormation-5