Quote Originally Posted by rjbetty View Post
The other thing I didn't mention was that I was quite conservative with reliability levels in the game. I did not have crazy races with 3 finishers, but rather I tried to be as realistic as possible, and sure enough, every race I had varied between 12-18 finishers, a sensible and realistic amount.

Amazingly, the reliability has been even better than my conservative estimates and if China is anything to go by, we are already back to 2013 levels (sigh)...

That is another thing I have gotten very wrong over the years, and am now learning from. The amount of unreliability and incidents was always more outlandish in my feelings and thoughts before the season, but during the season was not the case at all.
I think throughout the years I also have done the miscalculation of predicting more reliability problems than there really were.

I have made one conclusion on the back of the 2014 Chinese GP and mere 2 retirements. That the era of half of the field retiring (like 10+ years ago) is forever gone. If it didn't happen in 2014, it ain't ever happen again.

Which means the era of pushing technology to the limits, which sees the increase in technical troubles, is over. Nowadays everything is about saving and long-life components. And considering the world developments and how important economical use of technology and resources has become, this is the future. So almost all of the grid finishing races will be a norm till unforeseen future.