Donkey of the Race - Russia

[truefan72]

A rare thing, but having voted Rosberg driver of the race for his comeback, I am also giving him a donkey mention

That second corner mistake was a bit dumb and ruined his race win chances.

Williams - What their idea was for Massa, I have no idea.

Russian Track

Putin & Bernie

Stewards for giving a penalty in the rare occasion someone attempted a pass.

Exactly!

[anfield5]

Herman Bloody Tilke for providing yet another inept, boring piece of tar-sealed crap for cars to circulate around

[jens]

A rare thing, but having voted Rosberg driver of the race for his comeback, I am also giving him a donkey mention

I vote Rosberg for neither as he didn't do a good enough job to be the star of the overall race, nor did bad enough job to be a donkey, since he still finished second!

But Massa's performance certainly raised eyebrows. His strategy was far from ideal, but he could never get past Pérez and didn't even finish in the points in what was clearly a very good and fast Williams...

Then what about Toro Rosso setup, because it was too biased towards qualifying and they had no pace in the race.

[airshifter]

Felipe. How he manages to screw up so bad in that car on a regular basis is the secret of his lack of success.

[yodasarmpit]

Rosberg, driving the only car capable of challenging Lewis and to give it away before completing a single lap was disappointing - however nice recovery drive.

[zako85]

I rank the donkeys in this order:

1. Rosberg: the donkey of race. He gave it all up in the first turns of the first lap. The ridiculous thing about Rosberg going wide is how distracted he was when it happened. The on-board cameras show he was fiddling with car settings, keeping his hands off the wheel.. basically not taking the track seriously.

2. Vettel. While Vettel moved up relative to his start position, he still ended up behind Ricciardo. From the interviews, it's obvious that Vettel is tired of this season and just wants it to be over.

3. Kvyat. Baby Vettel he was not. Started 5th, ended 14th. Out of points and behind his teammate. Some people are right to start questioning why Kvyat is being promoted into the mother team.

[zako85]

The overall setting of the race. Didn't Bernie once complain that some of the tracks in Europe didn't have enough grand stands for people to watch the race (aka - the old, glorious Hockenheim).

You can argue about the race track, but what would that have to do with the grand stands? Personally it doesn't hurt me a bit, as I watch the race from 10s of thousands miles away on TV, that there may not be enough grandstands. Bernie probably complained about the grand stands in European GPs because he wants to be paid more (more people = more money, it's that simple). The Russian GP is probably sponsored by the Russian state or Putin's pocket oligarchs, so Bernie is probably being rewarded handsomely as is.

[zako85]

Let me share one significant observation. The biggest donkey of the race was probably the Pirelli tires. They were really hard. Some drivers could run the whole race without changing tires. Once the teams figured this out, they just told their drivers to drive to the end on whatever they have, with at most one stop. The first 1-2 opening laps decided the whole race. Rosberg run almost the whole race on the same set of tires while also charging through the field. That's boring. Of course, I don't advocate going back to the mockery of the autosport which was the first half of 2013 season, but Pirelli should have provided tires that make the team strategists think harder. I would have loved seeing a battle of cars that run mostly on soft tires vs those who run on harder longer lasting tires.

[555-04Q2]

Either Pirelli for going too conservative with the tyre choice, or every team other than Mercedes for building such slow cars.

To be fair, no-one knew what the tyres were going to do, including Pirelli

[AndyL]

To be fair, no-one knew what the tyres were going to do, including Pirelli

It was probably also a bit unfair of me to chastise all the other teams for not building a car as fast as Mercedes'