The official 2015 ASN Driver Rankings have been updated to reflect the 2015 British Grand Prix – which we are calling the Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix [due to the fact that Brits don’t like any of that bloody mollycoddling]. The Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix is held on the venerable Silverstone circuit – and this being England and all – that means the weather conditions are frequently quite barmy.
As usual, the pair of Mercedes won the race – let’s just cut to the chase on the final result – with Lewis Hamilton finishing ahead of his teammate, Nico Rosberg. But this time, the ongoing 2015 Mercedes Formula One Domination Tour was briefly interrupted by a pair of marauding Williams team members [Felipe Massa and Valtteri Bottas] who jumped the Mercedes at the start of the race to grab an early lead. Now, mind you, both Williams are Mercedes-powered cars, so if anybody’s going to be jumping the Mercedes, it will likely be one of their brethren. Massa and Bottas grabbed a quick lead and may have even extended it had it not been for the usual tomfoolery of the Lotus drivers in the back of the pack on the first lap, who collided into each other and created such a kerfuffle that it forced McLaren’s Fernando Alonso to swerve into his teammate, Jenson Button. The result? Both Lotus drivers [Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado] along with Button, were all knocked out of the race on the first lap.
Along with Sauber’s Felipe Nasr not starting due to a gearbox issue and both Manor-Marussia and McLaren cars being essentially speed bumps – that meant a potential 20-car race field was already whittled down to 12 semi-competitive cars [and 16 overall] on the first lap alone [though Alonso was able to recover]. We made it all the way to the second lap before teenager Max Verstappen decided he had done enough racing for the day and parked his car in the gravel – leaving 15 total cars in the race. After the first pit stop, Mercedes resumed their domination – at least defending champion Lewis Hamilton did – passing Massa for the lead, and it would take a few more laps and some raindrops falling on the track before Rosberg could also get by Massa for second. Meanwhile, during the interim, both Daniel Ricciardo and Carlos Sainz, Jr. exited the race with mechanical issues and they were only 13 cars racing for the final 20 laps. With two of those cars being the Manor-Marussia slugs, that meant only one driver was not going to score a point on the day and that driver happened to be Sauber’s Marcus Ericsson, who finished 11th and was the only one left still standing when the musical chairs ended.
As for the racing, Hamilton won easily by nearly 11 seconds over Rosberg after his pit crew guessed right on the arrival of a squall of rain at the track and he was placed on rain tires at the perfect time, shortly before Rosberg could get his rain tires on. Four-time champion Sebastian Vettel was next to get rain tires on his car and that essentially gave him third place and the final podium spot while the flash-in-the-pan Williams cars faded to fourth and fifth, respectively. Hamilton gets the top driver award this week for the race win while Vettel gets second and Alonso gets third for squeezing out his first point of the season in 10th place in his McLaren with only seven cars able to stay on the lead lap for the Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix.
For the awards, it was looking like the Lotus crash brothers good fortune was coming to an end and we were all set to award them double points for crashing into each other on the first lap of the Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix when it was finally revealed that the instigator of the incident was actually Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo – so it is Ricciardo who grabs his first point of the year in the coveted Pastor Maldonado Driving School Award for this race. However, Maldonado and his Lotus teammate Romain Grosjean still hold the season lead.
Radio transmissions were enjoyable but none were more so than those of the Wiliiams team when they were holding first and second early in the race and Bottas was pleading with his team to let him pass what he figured was a slower Massa – “But I have pace!” he whinged – but when they finally gave him the green light, he couldn’t pull the trigger, so to speak, and that gets him the Kimi Raikkonen “Leave Me Alone, I Know What I’m Doing!” Award. Hamilton maintains a commanding season lead for this award.
The McLaren team is this week’s winner of the Lewis Hamilton Doofus Moment Award for the 2015 Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix – for their current and former team bosses shooting off their mouths afterward with current team boss Ron Dennis calling former team boss Eddie Jordan, the “village idiot”. Hamilton still leads in his signature award category.
The 2015 Formula One season continues with the Hungarian Grand Prix at Budapest at 5 a.m. [PDT] on CNBC on July 26, 2015.
The 2015 ASN Formula One Driver Standings [after the Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix]
1] Sebastian Vettel – 17 points
2] Lewis Hamilton – 11 points
3] Nico Rosberg – six points
4] Valtteri Bottas – five points
5] Kimi Raikkonen – four points
6] Jenson Button/Nico Hulkenberg/Daniil Kvyat/Max Verstappen – two points
10] Fernando Alonso/Romain Grosjean – one point
The 2015 Pastor Maldonado Driving School Award Standings [after the Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix]
1] Grosjean/Maldonado – two points
2] Marcus Ericsson/Hamilton’s pit crew/Raikkonen/Raikkonen’s pit crew/Daniel Ricciardo – one point
The 2015 Kimi Raikkonen Leave Me Alone I Know What I’m Doing Award Standings [after the Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix]
1] Hamilton – four points
2] Rosberg – two points
3] Valtteri Bottas/Daniel Ricciardo pit crew/Will Stevens – one point
The 2015 Lewis Hamilton Doofus Moment Award [after the Good Show Old Bean Grand Prix]
1] Hamilton – three points
2] Bernie Ecclestone – two points
3] Fernando Alonso/Christian Horner/Vettel/Team McLaren – one point