What are you trying to prove?

Even though Button was stuck behind other drivers for most of the race, he didn't show anything that proved he was on par with Hamilton.

Qualifying is such an important part of the race nowadays, he simply has to improve himself there. A lot.

But there are. I've read that he lost the race on Saturday, I've read that his qualifying was what let him down, that he needs to improve this aspect, etc. That's the most obvious thing that could be stated.
So no problem finding 'experts' stating the obvious.

He was beaten in qualifying. That's where I think LH will continue to have the upper hand, and it looks as though that will be critical this year (if overtaking doesn't get easier / tyre degradation isn't a factor over the season). I'm asking whether any 'experts' have stated the 'obvious'* about Sunday. I don't think they have, and I think that's because it isn't.

*That Lewis drove a better race on the Sunday, whether because he spent longer up Nico's chuff, because he had faster laptimes at most points, or for any other reason.

You're confusing evidence with conclusions.

That all the 'Ooh Lewis is great, he was closer to Rosberg, Button was miles behind, he didn't lap as quickly, he's rubbish' is not a view generally held by 'experts' (and you can define that however you like as long as it doesn't mean forum posters you agree with ).

I agree.

And Hamilton didn't show anything that proved he was better than Button. Not in the race.
That's the bit some people seem to be having a problem with.

I don't think anyone's arguing against that. I think he was rubbish on Saturday and drove a decent race.

Well Lewis had more time with the chance of a go at Nico, that was the difference; I feel sure Jense would have closed up quicker to MS if he could have, he had space and reasons, that was the point. Anyway yes I agree with your 'no excuses but not set in stone' conclusion. The Bahrain weekend went to LH, and we'll see more as the season goes on .

Oh here's some evidence Button was told to PUSH...
Please choose to ignore...

1238:LEWIS NINTH AFTER HIS PIT STOP AND FASTEST OF ALL IN THE FIRST SECTOR.
PIT:"OK JENSON PUSH NOW,PUSH NOW."
PIT:"OK LEWIS PACE IS GOOD. THE GUYS IN FRONT OF YOU ARE ON ALONG RUN."

1259:LEWIS AND JENSON SET THEIR FASTEST LAPS THAT TIME AROUND.
PIT:"JENSON YOU'RE SLOWLY CATCHING MICHAEL,KEEP GOING."
PIT:"LEWIS, 20 LAPS TO GO YOU ARE CATCHING THE THREE CARS IN FRONT."


So no more excuses as to Button was not pushing to catch schummy...


http://mclaren.com/home

His engineer told him his pace was good, all the talk before the race was about tyre conservation - so it's not hard to imagine that the plan was to close up gradually.

I've said throughout that Button's problems all stemmed from Saturday. I've since read the same opinion Mark Hughes (a delusional apologist apparently, but what the heck).
Surely there must be one 'expert' out there who's written or said that Lewis drove a better race than Jenson, and explained why they think so?

So because his engineer tells him to push he's rubbish? Wow.

I've asked for a conclusion. Would you like me to explain the difference between evidence (which is what you keep posting) and conclusions?

Dude, that couldn't be more wrong. Yes, he was told to push. Do you see the time above that message? 12:38. That was right before his first pitstop. He had to push a lap to get into the pits as close as possible to Webber.

It doesn't say anything about pushing while behind Schumacher. Just that he was slowly catching Michael and he had to keep doing that. Which was exactly the plan they had in mind.

For the last time, he DID catch MS, so where are you going with this?

"PIT:"JENSON YOU'RE SLOWLY CATCHING MICHAEL,KEEP GOING."

KEEP GOING.

From the horse's mouth :

“It's a fact that Lewis finished in front of me – he did a better job"

http://www.crash.net/f1/news/157763/1/butt..._different.html

On to the next excuse...

Of course he did.
And it was done on Saturday.

In fact...


Next?

It took him nearly 20 laps to catch Michael and it's not conclusive that Michael was slowing down himself having caught up with Niko

So?

If it was wrong that he caught him 'slowly', I'm sure they would have told him to push instead of 'Keep going'. They did not, so what point are you trying to prove here?

Cant help but think this is how it all started with Heikki - little bit behind pretty much most of the time. Excuses forthcoming on every occasion, but behind all the same.

Look at the transcript:

When he leaves the pits they say push, push. Then they say he is SLOWLY catching Michael - what else can they say? surely using the word SLOWLY is the same as saying speed up or try to catch Michael QUICKLY

Simples

If it's so simples there'll no doubt be numerous experts* who have picked up on it, and talked about or written about it. Could you point me in the direction of one?

*Not forum experts.

No, it surely isn't the same. Just means you're over-analyzing the sentences.

When he leaves the pits they told him to push, but they said the same to Lewis, so that's irrelevant.

Laps later they said slowly, because that was the fact, he was slowly catching Michael.

Spot the difference;

PIT:"JENSON YOU'RE SLOWLY CATCHING MICHAEL,KEEP GOING."
PIT:"LEWIS, 20 LAPS TO GO YOU ARE CATCHING THE THREE CARS IN FRONT."

You could do without the rolling eyes.

Again, all you do is show some selected sentences from the pit radio. And again, they don't mean half of what you think they mean.

They're just telling the facts, Button was slowly catching Michael (at that point only like a tenth a lap, which is slowly) and Lewis was catching the leaders.

What is your actually point?

So, now you're putting words into Jenson's mouth to prove your point? Jenson has given you your "give it up"
orders and you're still at it. Would you like him to come in here and personally tell you to calm down? What exactly would Jenson have to say for you to accept he didn't do as well as Lewis in the race, and for you to stop flogging the proverbial and just move onto the next race?

What?

I've quoted what Jenson said. Please point out the words that I've put in his mouth. I used quotation marks and everything, just to make it clear.




EDIT:
My apologies, I actually used the forum quote function to show his actual words. Please believe me when I say I didn't make them up. I hope it's clear enough for you on a second read-through.

Lap 23 : OK Jenson, pace is good, you are catching Michael ahead, but we need a full race distance on this set, look after the tyres

Dude...

Again, he wasn't pushing during all those laps. He said he started pushing with about 20 laps to go, which is exactly what the chart shows. As you can see he quickly caught up Shumi when he started pushing.

This is about the second stint:

It's a clear win for Hamilton on round 1. Button's race pace was masked because of traffic but I think LH would still be faster. Button said he wasn't happy with the car in qualy, he said they changed something in qualifying it was the wrong direction and they carried it over to the race, so I think Hamilton would still be faster (if Button wasn't stuck in traffic).

I actually posted this yesterday.

But it's not a bad idea posting it again, in fact maybe it needs to be posted every couple of pages, for the benefit of those who are not paying attention.

Hi BillBald & Forum

Sorry for posting info that has already been published but some people are selecive in what they want to beleive, I don't want to get involved in some of the endless arguments, I think the season will be great between Jenson & Lewis, I hope Jenson will pick up his game in qualy, hopefully Jenson & Lewis will complement each other

Cheers

:-)

So the conclusion from some Button fans after this interminable discussion is that Button was 0.4 seconds slower than Hamilton in qualifying because of a gust of wind making him think something was wrong with the car, but that's a good thing as he is so sensitive to the feel of his environment, that he gives excellent feedback to his engineers about the car.

And he was 0.4 seconds slower per lap in the race because his engineers told him to slow down and conserve his tyres/his engineers pulled him in for a pit stop too early/he mistakenly was trying to conserve his tyres/he was stuck behind Webber/Schumacher.

Re. the 0.4 seconds slower in Practices 1-3, haven't found an explanation for that yet.

On to Australia!

The simple answer is yes, I did think they were in the same ballpark before 2007. I’ve always regarded Raikkonen as overrated. Despite being a hardcore McLaren fan, he never struck me during his entire tenure as having the magic of his Finnish predecessor. Time after time I would wait for him to show me that he had it, to pull out one of those mega stints that Mika could reel off seemingly in his sleep, in which he was pulling away from the competition at over a second a lap, and time after time he disappointed me. The very first time I saw Alonso race I understood he was better than Raikkonen. Not “more complete”; quicker. Even correcting for his lack of experience, his first couple of seasons against Heidfeld and Coulthard suggested he was quicker than those guys—but not so much quicker as to be Schumacher or Hakkinen special.

When Montoya joined McLaren I expected Kimi to make short work of the tubby flaky Colombian, who at Williams proved that he could beat Ralf in qualy but didn’t have much success converting poles to wins. Overall, I was actually disappointed in the end with Raikkonen’s performance against JPM. I expected him to dominate JPM even more than he did because I never really rated the Colombian and when you look at the cold hard facts of his time at Williams it wasn’t possible to say that he proved himself to be definitively better than Ralf.

I hadn't paid much attention to Massa before 2007, and he had not done much to inspire me with confidence, but I remembered that he'd showed pretty good pace towards the end of 2006. As I said, I had seen nothing to suggest that Kimi was in a different league to him as many journalists assumed. Going into 2007 I had Raikkonen as slight favourite but certainly was alive to the threat of Massa beating him. I had noticed that Massa had been generally a bit faster in pre-season testing. Some paddock insiders like Webber were as skeptical as I was of the “fastest man in F1” myth attaching to Kimi and were also saying on the back of what they had seen in testing that Massa would give Kimi a good run for his money.

With respect to the challenge you have issued for those who disagree with your views to come up with ‘experts’ that support our views, I think this highlights the difference between our respective approaches. I prefer to make up my mind about the relative merits of different drivers based on what I see on track and to ignore the white noise of pundits and hacks peddling their lazy sound bites“fastest man in F1”; “most complete driver”—and half baked theories: “Jenson’s silky smooth style will help him preserve his tyres better than Lewis in the races”; “Kimi will really benefit from the banning of driver aids whilst Massa will suffer”.

You seem to accept the mere opinions of hack journalists as final authority—as if the mere fact that they are billed as “respected commentators” by others gives their opinions more weight than those of other people. It doesn’t! Conventional wisdom is generally wrong. 90 per cent of what these journalists do in their columns and articles is to echo conventional wisdom. They generally have neither the time nor the inclination to think for themselves—which makes it doubly frustrating when people like you put them on a pedestal. The other 10 per cent of the time they turn conventional wisdom on its head, not from conviction, and not because they have any data to back up their revised views, but to alleviate their boredom by playing Devil’s Advocate. If you think the opinions of those on this thread that do not agree with you necessarily require validation by such ‘experts’, you’re sorely mistaken.

Word.

The first part (your rationale re Massa) was an interesting read, thankyou for that.


You misunderstand me. Whether that's deliberate or not I don't know, but I imagine we'll soon find out.
I also prefer to make up my own mind on the evidence of my own eyes. I recognise, however, that there are plenty of people out there who do have insights or knowledge or expertise that are unavailable to me. I also recognise that a lot of the punditry is mere filling, or stories-to-order, or downright daft. How to sort the wheat from the chaff? There's the rub. But claiming for yourself the superiority of judgement on the basis that you're not interested in (ignore?) what commentators, some of whom are presumably (even to your mind) more knowledgeable than you seems somewhat perverse.

No, I don't. Maybe I haven't been clear enough, so I'll elaborate further.
There's a wide range of views / opinions on this forum, on all sorts of subjects. Much of them are reasonable, and justifiable, some are neither. Now it may be that a poster has a view that is at the same time reasonable, justifiable and so insightful, or possibly so abstruse, that none of the outside 'experts' have noticed it or commented on it. I'm sure that happens reasonably frequently. On the other hand it seems to me that if a point of view is independently held by a relatively large number of posters then it can't be described as insightful. It may be reasonable and justifiable, but if no outside 'expert' holds that view, and several hold the opposite view, that would tend to suggest that it's neither.
In this case then (my opinion)...

It's reasonable and justifiable to think Lewis is faster than Jenson (I think that's the case, personally).
It's reasonable and justifiable to think Lewis will out-qualify him this season, and beat him convincingly (I think he'll beat him, but I think the margin will be nothing like that between Lewis and Heikki).
However it's also reasonable and justifiable to think that neither of the above are true.
It's reasonable and justifiable to think that Lewis probably had more pace in the race on Sunday.
But it's silly, stupid, unreasonable, unjustifiable (you get the idea) to say that the above was proven in any way. It's unreasonable and unjustifiable to look at JB's lap times and conclude that he was going flat out - in fact the messages from his engineer confirm that he was conserving tyres, and he said this himself after the race).


I'm not talking particularly about journalists. Journalists report on what people involved at the sharp end have to say.
Conventional wisdom is that Lewis will beat Jenson this year. I imagine that's not part of the 90% though, is it? But if you look you can find people ('experts', and as I said that can mean anyone you like) who don't have that view.
'People like me'?
What does that mean?

Just to be clear...
I haven't read the press, watched the BBC and then decided that because MH said it there's no way to draw conclusions about JB and LH from the race (as opposed to qualifying). I've relied on my own expertise and training to examine the evidence and draw conclusions, have posted them on here and have later read 'expert' opinions. If I came to a conclusion and found that no 'expert' agreed, and several disagreed, I'd re-evaluate. That doesn't mean I'd change my mind.

Sure they do. But do you think they all do it simultaneously? That if there's a self-evident truth there no-one will speak it except a handful of perceptive forumites?

My ability to interpret evidence and draw conclusions (based on my scientific education and much time spent teaching the rules of evidence to recalcitrant teenagers) tells me that you're mistaken. The fact that I can find experts who agree with me but there seem to be none agreeing with the opposing viewpoint is merely a nice confirmation.

You know this is the Lewis v Jenson thread?

Maybe his point is that Jenson didn't lose a place.

Race pace means nothing if you cant overtake and the assumption is that Jenson never pushed the car

Could you rephrase that? I don't understand what you're trying to say.

So there was a time when Jenson was pushing?

So he was told to push right after his pitstop?

I'm confused i would have thought being told to push would be drive as fast as you can without destroying the tyres, not look after your tyres and push later as been suggested

So if a driver qualified 6th and finished 7th whilst his teammate qualified 16th and finished 16th he would have donre the better job because he didnt lose a place?

i personally thought jenson showed great race pace (his maximum with the car set-up the way it was) he closed schumis gap of 5 seconds to less then 1 sec. I know shumi was pushing and so was nico as i was watching RTL feed and we had pics of the mercedes pit and shovlin constantly looking at the timings and the board displaying jenson closing...closing. When jenson got within 2seconds shumi did his fastest middle sector. I thought jenson did really well his laptimes compared to nico and shumi were good. If he was ahead of them he would probably finished behind lewis.

lets wait 6 races until we say anything give jenson a break guys, the car is not to his liking -yet . One thing is for sure his feedback is great as the engineers quoted in testing, so the car will get better

Positive thing for me was after the race Jenson was far from the 'beaten' man I expected. He was still confident and relatively upbeat about Australia. Hope he can make good progress as the season goes on.

Sorry i was sort of summarising what you was saying maybe i should have put a question mark there?

exactly as MW said they underestimated jensons comments on turn 6, were lewis could handle the car darting around and go on full throttle jensons car was to unstable and he was lifting to settle the car -losing time. With a better set-up i think he be much closer. on fridays he seemed to be matching lewis and on long runs slightly better. The set-up direction during qualy went away from JBs side of the garage.

You've still lost me, sorry...
Are you asking a question?

I see you're trying out the old reductio ad absurdiumiumium btw.

1. I made it quite clear in an earlier post on this thread that I'm perfectly open to well reasoned articles and pieces that are backed up with data. What I said I ignore is "the white noise of pundits and hacks peddling their lazy sound bites...and half baked theories..." I then gave specific examples of the kind of thing I mean.

2. I don't think you read what I wrote with sufficient care. I said, "Conventional wisdom is generally wrong"; the 90 per cent is not the quantification of the extent to which it's wrong, it is part of the next sentence and is my rough estimate of the percentage of the average hacks output that is composed of warmed over conventional wisdom.

3. Despite your scientific background, you have demonstrated a most unscientific approach to data, indicating strong bias. You are not willing to own that Button was outperformed in the race as well as qualifying, even though others have demonstrated quite clearly that Button was nowhere near Hamilton's pace when they were both in clear air, and was not even able at some points in the race to keep up with the slower Mercedes ahead of him. I've never heard of a driver choosing to drop back five seconds from a competitor he is supposed to be trying to overtake to get out of turbulent air.

4. Laughably, you still appear to believe that because nobody who has written a race report found it necessary to point out the obvious - that the guy who qualified fourth, finished third and at some points suggested he was not too far off the pace of the two leading teams outperformed the guy who qualified eighth, showed no real pace at any stage and finished seventh (one place below what he should have achieved given the third best car) - you have won some sort of moral victory. Even Rinehart has accepted that Button was outperformed in qualifying and the race, yet you plough on. Anything but admit the obvious.

5. If you regard journalists with no technical background or hands-on experience of working in an F1 team as "experts" then your trust is sadly misplaced.

You're indeed confused as you don't even know half of the communication that went on between Jenson and his engineer during the race.

Guys, stay on the topic please and keep it civil. Thanks.

I still dont know what that means, some of you guys read to many books

You was arguing with that guy and he didnt understand what you was getting at regarding the actual race and i just said basically to sumarise your thoughts that being fast in the race was no good if you was out of position because no one could pass, also youre saying theres no proof that Button was ever going flat out

No i dont, i just read conflicting things on here like the RE told Jenson to push right after his pitstop but Jenson said himself that he didnt push until 20 laps from the end, then forumers on here say he never pushed because there was no point because he was never going to pass MS

Sounds a bit like 'I take notice if they agree with me'.

You're right.


However you couldn't be more wrong here.
If it could be demonstrated that Hamilton and Button were both driving flat-out in clear air at the same point in the race then you'd have a point. Even then, of course, you'd have to look at what had gone before as one or other (most likely Button in this case) could be driving on better tyres.
Of course that can't be demonstrated, and there's every reason to believe that Button wasn't driving flat-out for the vast majority of the race. Certainly his engineer seemed happy with his pace, his tactics made sense given the supposed issues of tyre degradation, Whitmarsh commented that Button wasn't able to show what he could do, Webber spoke of not being able to push, not being able to pass Button because he didn;'t make a mistake ebven though he had a faster car, and relating that to Button's situation.

Where would Button have had to finish to equal Hamilton's performance in the race in your mind?
Fourth?
Fifth?
Sixth?
That's a simple question, I'm asking for a straight answer.


Read what I said about 'experts'. I said you could define them any way you wanted to as long as it wasn't some bloke on a forum who agreed with you. You've chosen to take that to mean just journalists, not me. I'd value an opinion from someone involved in the sport much more highly.

I don't expect you to be convinced by anything I say. I think you're convinced that you know better than anyone else, after all 'most conventional wisdom is wrong' (or wtte). I look forward with interest to your answer to my question (re Button's finishing position), although I suspect it won't be a straightforward one.