Michaels was better than you would have expected before the race, certainly didnt do anything wrong.

Rosberg (good solid drive that it was) was always going to lose 4th, and on pace he could easily have lost 5th too, webber lost that place by mucking about behind hulkenberg.

No, Rosberg had enough advantage to stay 4th ahead of Vettel. And then he had a 2 sec slower lap.

Rosberg out-classed M Schumacher for the entire weekend, lap after lap yet again in the most comprehensive manner. 112 - 46 in terms of points.

When one driver is so dominant over the other over the course of a season and the dominant driver is not even considered to be one of the every top drivers, it does bring into question the ambition of the team. Rosberg's life is far too easy at the moment. He would benefit from having a teammate that could push him and so would Mercedes. M Schumacher simply cannot do the car or team justice.

If Schumacher continues to drive for Mercedes next season it is proof that Mercedes is not serious about F1 at all and only sees it's participation as a marketing tool. Schumacher at Mercedes for '11 would/will be ideal dream news for Mercedes competitors.

Are 'we' still blaming tires? Perhaps we can try new excuses: the track surface at Monza did not suit Michael.

These are the facts, anything else it doesnt matter

Quali
Rosberg 11
Schumacher 3

Races
Rosberg 11
Schumacher 3

The question is will Brawn and co build the new car around Schumacher or will they choose Rosberg. The bean counters back at Mercedes are looking for results and it is Rosberg who can drive.

ps. Schumacher has been mathematically eliminated with this result.

He will be gone at the end of the year then all you haters can be happy and stop complaining when he beats Rosberg and stop complaining when he Rosberg beats him.

I wonder if Schumacher still thinks he matches Rosberg in race pace..

This is how it goes. When Kimi was at Ferrari suffering from the same problem that he did not have enough front-end grip, it didn't matter what people said in his defence, they were still wrong, because others could say "na na na na naa naa, he should have been faster!" and that's the discussion. That's the level of the discussion. The people who try to take the discussion to a higher level of detail and understanding will effectively be told to shut up.

People are effectively discouraging others to try and understand the situation better. Sometimes it goes even as far as bullying people out of the discussions completely. This is reality at discussion forums and everywhere else too where people get together to do something. It's actually fun to study psychology and see the very primitive reactions at work at on-line discussion forums.

Noisy place at 100 pages. MS should speed up or this thread will really get out of hand. Maybe find a slower girl to race against?

yea it really spoils the forum if anyone does manage to start a serious discussion its always ruined usually by the same few people who want to chime in with

"1-0" and other waste of space posts that only seem to be about trying to get a reaction.

XXX driver should quit

if hamilton was driving the lotus it would be winning the championship acording to some peoples logic

man: "M Schumacher was slower than Rosberg for virtually every lap of the entire weekend. M Schumacher had clear air in front of him for most of the race. Why is that so difficult to comprehend my friend? ;-)"

There is very simple reason for this: Nico need it to push all race, because other drivers behind him was pushing hard too. I mean Kubica, Hulk, Webber. Michael have very calm race. Not real threat from behind. Not real chance to catch the guy infront. To hurry for where? Better save the engine. Why is that so difficult to comprehend my friend? ;-)"

Maybe villeneuve?;)

The fact is this weekend Rosberg was faster the whole weekend simple as that. Michael made a great start again (as did rosberg) and made the best out of this weekend. He didn't get it right. He just needs to make the best out of the rest of the year and then fully concentrate on next year. If Michael can't do it next year he needs to retire, and he most likely will.

That is a fine and relaxed attitude. "I don´t want to win so I´ll just cruise ´round and ´round". What the he** happened to racing.

It is alright to be a fan but your excuses for Michael´s way less than expected results are silly. He is old (older than me even) and is just not competitive. Nothing to be ashamed of. Nico is just the benchmark and as such way above MS right now.

I loved the move that Rosberg made at the start. He found an opening and shot past several faster cars to slot into fourth place. Beating one Red Bull to the finish is more than anyone could expect. Schumacher had a decent afternoon and he also made up positions on the start. Hopefully we can expect similar results in the remaining races.

1996, 1997, 1998, 1999.......

Schumacher is a man. Hell get there.

An old man more accurately...

15 seconds over a race distance on a track like Monza especially is light years in F1 terms. M Schumacher had the team moulded around him in the aforementioned years. Which sane team chief would be willing to mould a team around a man who has taken a consistent spanking off a driver the calibre of Rosberg? Let's get real...it just ain't gonna happen... The writing is on the wall and his days will either dribble out as being an also-ran as he is in 2010 or more likely, he'll be politely shown to his jacket and very swiftly the door.

lets just pretend schumacher doesnt like a car that can turn in at speed, lets just pretend he doesnt like to carry speed through a corner , lets just pretend he doesnt need front end grip , lets just pretend the mercedes car doesnt have balance issues , lets just pretend the mercedes car has a low centre of gravity.

which is what most of the negative people on this forum do.
conclusion
mercedes car is brilliant hamilton , alonso, etc would have won the championship by now

schumacher sucks and should retire

Let's just pretend Nico doesn't like the same sort of car characteristics as Michael, that he isn't beating Michael in qualifying and races on a regular basis, that he isn't more than double the points of his famous team leader, that he hasn't scored all the teams 3 podiums, that the laptime difference between the two has been as much as 0.6sec...... You could then see all the ballyhoo about "wait until Mercedes build the Mercedes-Schumacher for 2011" having a thread of hope coming true. The same people were confidently telling us after the first GP that Michael would have the upper hand after 3 or 4 races. Then they were saying "by mid-season", then "by end of the season" rapidly followed by "next season". I don't know where they think Nico is going to go in his performances next year for Michael to start looking good.

If that realistic (IMO) view of the situation makes me a hater, or negative in your eyes then I have to conclude that you are looking through some highly confused rose-tinted glasses. Why are all the experienced F1 scribes now questioning the wisdom of Michael coming back at 41 years old? Let alone his determination to stump up for what might well be an even more miserable embarassment year in 2011. His performance this year looks no better than Nakajima's last year against the same unheralded teammate.

A sparkling Michael Schumacher would have been a great drawcard for F1, the reality is a pretty sad decline of a stellar career.

wheres this proof nico likes the car the same as schumacher then? ive never saw him throw a car around a circuit if anything nico drives more like button


ps, i like how your lasts posts are all schumacher bashing ones, i guess your another person who only comes on the forum to hate

It shouldn't be too hard to find quotes from both M Schumacher and Rosberg where they state how convenient it is that they like to set the car up in a similar fashion. As for this constant childish grand delusions of hatred for M Schumacher , it rather reminds me of Ali G with his "is it cos I is black?" ;-)

But you have to admit that the style of driving between those two drivers is different and not to mention the difference in height and weight of the drivers. Both drivers were talking generally about the car and its problems and I have never heard it from Rosberg that he had to changed his style of driving completely as Schumacher has told again and again.

A driver the calibre of Rosberg? You mean the guy who turned the fastest race lap in his first ever Grand Prix, and qualified in third position at his second ever GP? All this in the Williams Cosworth. Yeah, he's crap fer sure.

Williams Toyota.

And yes, Rosberg is crappy. He may be fast (sometimes), but lacks aggression and ... he just misses something. I would put him rather next to Massa, than next to Hamilton.

And to prove my words, there were often voices in his former team Williams Toyota, saying that they were not quite happy with him. I remember Frank saying last year that they had better car than results or something like that.

The 2006 Williams was powered by a Cosworth

There were complaints when Mercedes announced changes to the car in extending the wheelbase earlier this year. Rosberg specifically claimed he had a similar driving style to Schumacher which put the complaints to rest. The quotes are here, in this thread.

So we have a dilemma.

The defence against the claim that the team is favouring Schumacher ("they like the same setup car") is the one which damns him in the performance comparison.

Shumi looked utterly relaxed in his post race interview. That hunch of Eddie Jordan was probably more a populistic quote to justify his big license fee paid salary,

Similar is not identical. Which can make a 3 tenths or more difference.

This takes the biscuit for the creativity

So you need to lead people to make you go faster - kind a like a converse of dirty air slowing you down when you are behind!

I dont have probs with Michael anymore but his fans are still cracking me up.

i dont think they are favoring anyone this year how many upgrades has there been?
chasis needed extending wether schumacher was there or not it was the only thing they could do to try and get the balance for the tyres better.

i dont think ive ever saw rosberg try to throw his car around a corner where as theres loads of video footage of schumacher launching the front end in to corners with the rear sliding to catch up.
look at parabolica schumacher was struggling to get the front end to grip in that corner all weekend, rosberg plays alot of mind games i dont think i can believe much he says.

nearly every race at the start of the season when he finished higher than schumacher , rosberg was always disapointed with himself for not finishing higher even though it was practicly impossible , he could have got pole in nearly every one of the races for the first half of the season

in my mind he was always going to claim he had a similar driving style to schumacher aslong as he was getting better results
since hes started beating schumacher consistently i dont think we have seen anymore mind games off track?

schumacher probably realises hes beaten this year , the team has nearly always guinea pigged him at tyre stops making his results look worse than they should have been.

if the mercedes apears to be a well balanced car next year without any obvious flaws and rosberg still beats schumacher by 1-2 tenths ill happily accept schumacher has totally lost it.

its a pitty the bbc dont do the ghost car in practice anymore i'd love to see some schumacher/rosberg comparrisons on how they take corners it could settle wether the driving style is really as similar as rosberg claims

No, you need to be chased to drive faster("Push hard"). Or you think it is working, other way around. When somebody chase you, you drive slowly? Michael was not chased he can chose his speed. He was 10 sec behind Kubica. 20sec infront of Bari. His race was to bring car home.

Rubbish, I will be amazed if you can find a bad word about Rosberg from ANYONE at Williams ever. They thought the sun shone out of his arse.

I do think he occasionally has lacked something of a killer instinct in races, but the last few races he has definitely picked it up in that department, even to the point of being borderline gungho sometimes.

no one is fueled to finish the race at race pace.

everyone has to save fuel at some point this is a fact of formula one. theres no point pushing hard if your position is safe and your unlikely to gain anymore positions, no point killing your tyres either.

if people are pressuring you then obviously you need to make sure your fast enough to not be under so much pressure that you have to start taking defensive lines into corners and losing time to everyone else around you

That's an unusual (i.e. made up) race tactic.

So you should only go as fast as the person behind you?

So 1st should only go as fast as second is going, 2nd as fast as 3rd .....etc. And by extension everyone should go round at the same speed as Yamamoto, nicely spread out.

So what is it? Why is Schumacher not doing well against Rosberg this year? There's no doubting his record in the past and I'm not looking to denigrate or cast aspersions upon that at all. However, in 1996 he was credited with front-rowing the 'dog of a Ferrari' and winning despite the car being a piece of shit. He is hailed as a great overperformer, putting a crappy car into unexpectedly high finishing positions.

Rosberg is new to the team as well, so there's a direct comparison between them as to how they can quickly adapt to a team and a car and despite what you say I have no reason to doubt his word that he likes his car setup similarly to Schumacher.

Maybe Schumacher's lost that art? Maybe he got so used to a comfy situation at Ferrari that the skill of dealing with a crappy car declined? There's definitely a spark missing and those of us who were looking forward to seeing him return this year (and I include myself in that) have been sorely disappointed.

I'm sure we are not going to work out exactly what it is on here, but interesting to speculate as long as you can accept he actually IS lacking something against Rosberg.

I am talking about Nico in 4th/5th position. And other drivers 2-3 sec behind him. Why he didn't leave them 10-15 sec behind? I am sure in this moment he was driving as fast as he can? Because if he was faster than Kubica and Hulk and Webber he would leave them many seconds behind him. But he was not faster enough and he was pushing hard,I think? Michael from other side was faster than Buemi and leave him more than 10 sec behind, and he didn't need to push much after this. If you have speed you leave the guys behind you, if you don't have speed you push as much as you can. Massa leave Nico behind, Nico couldn't leave Kubica and Hulk behind. Michael have space infront and behind him. And from the start of the weekend I know that this will be hard race for him. But, he still get the points. He didn't have speed to catch guys infront of him. He made his race at the start. And after first lap race was over for him. Maybe if somebody was pushing him ,we could see his speed?
About Yamamoto, nice theory there.

Makes sense in a wierd kind of way.
Basically you are saying that MS knew that he can not lose (nor make up) any more positions - so he drove at his pace.

Altho conventional logic says that all things being equal - a driver fighting for positions will go slower than driver in clean air even if the clean air driver is not pushing hard.

They both were in clear air almost all race. Massa was 18sec infront of Nico? Maybe this was the fastest speed for Michael, but we will never know? When there is nobody behind you, you relax a little bit?

Nonsense. In a race all can happen. Nobody does know if someone is getting a problem ahead of Schumacher. So you never never can cruise around for fun, a driver is driving as fast as possible. Also the fact that MS was about the same margin slower early in the race is speaking against your theory.

If you think so. I can't comment, never participated in F1 race. About the slower pace, I give you FIA file and you can tell me about which laps you are talking about: http://www.fia.com/en-GB/mediacentre/f1_me...ace-history.pdf
I like to work with data.

Ivand911 My friend ;-)

You suggest as if M Schumacher had something in reserve and could have gone faster if he wanted to. What a cunning driver M Schumacher is. Next you'll tell us he could beat Rosberg...if he really wanted to but that is not part of his plan ;-) M Schumacher was slower than Rosberg for virtually every single lap from Friday morning practice to the end of Sundays race.

You suggest MSchumacher can make up the difference next year...perhaps. That's a fair bit of time he needs to make up and that doesn't take into consideration that Rosberg may be driving within himself. I think it is more realistic to believe that Rosberg has more in reserve than M Schumacher has.. The problem is he is beating M Schumacher too easily and only when he is alongside a very quick driver will we see the best of him.

There are a few crucial differences with 1996.

1. There was no testing ban. Ferrari was pooring in relentless testing laps to attend any defficiency they thought needed fixing.

2. There was no race set up ban. Shumi always had the spare car set up differently and before the race made his mind up according to the weather and other parameters.

3. There were much less serious rivals. Benetton was nowhere near topteam status in terms of people numbers or resources, and Mclaren still sought their way without Newey. Also, the ilmor engine wasnt game yet. The only competition was Williams.

I looked up the results of the first 4 races and the Ferrari qualified P3 or better in 3 out of 4, and finished P4 or better in all 4 of them. Thats miles better than Mercedes is doing now.

Oh, and Irvine outqualified shumi the first race, and outscored him in 2 of the first 4 races

Where I said that. For next year we will speak next year. About Michael speed I said this:"Maybe this was the fastest speed for Michael, but we will never know?" He have problem with low down-force tracks and with high down force track he is doing better. I don't know why people think Nico is bad driver. For me if he was in RBR , he would lead by now with more than 50 points. RBR drivers made a lot of mistakes with 100% winner car. Nico didn't make one error this year? Michael is doing OK , he is infront of Bari and Sutil and other drivers who didn't miss 3 years. One position behind Nico.

I'd like to add that it is not likely to do what Nico does, in a mid-field car, if you are a sissy - no matter if you drive like a berserk and look mean or just, well, drive really fast and take on all comers .

But he really walks like a girl .

I can think of one instance, which was (not surprisingly) last year, after everyone knew Rosberg was leaving Williams although nothing had been announced. After getting new parts at...Barcelona (I think), Rosberg said there was something wrong with the car's aero and it was losing speed the longer it stayed out. Sam Michael and Patrick Head then took the rather extraordinary step of suggesting, publicly, that the only thing wrong with the car's aero was the dead weight behind the steering wheel.

Of course, after engineering looked at the telemetry, they discovered Rosberg was absolutely correct, but that part got reported far less widely.

I point out again that this occurred when the team was sure Rosberg was leaving, because devaluing the goods is a pretty common negotiating technique. Even if they couldn't make Brawn or McLaren think twice about signing Nico, Williams still wanted to attract a rated replacement. Suggesting the car was better than the driver is one way to do it.

@ktsayshi

There are at least three of four news of Sir Frank Williams saying that Rosberg is as Good as Hamilton and Vettel.

Even SFW said that the main difference between Rosberg and Hamilton rookie year was the car, nothing more.

Maybe SFW was talking bullshit...

As a Schumacher fan I finally have to admit defeat. I knew Nico would be faster in the beginning of the year but I honestly thought Michael would have gotten the better of him as the season progressed. Obviously that's not happening and you have to give credit where credit is due. Congrats Nico on getting the better of a 7 time champion. Not too many people gave him a chance when the season started but he's passed with flying colors. You can insert a myriad of reasons of why Michael isn't up there but the truth of the matter is Nico has been the better driver, plain and simple.