Quote Originally Posted by The Black Knight View Post
Precisely. One can't but admire a four time WDC, even if he did get his ass handed to him by Danny Boy.
He did get his ass handed by

a) the team, which stole his potential victory at Canada (and apologized afterwards)
b) the car which kept breaking down while RIC's didn't. Even Marko admitted that and that says a lot.
c) the fact that they had to change the chassis three times throughout the year.
d) he went into the season with a massive mileage deficit as he also had the majority of mechanicals during the abysmal winter tests and RIC got the entire Bahrain test with Vettel not running at all.

There is no doubt that Danny got used to the different characteristics of the car quicker than Seb, but the picture is massively skewed by the fact that Vettel's year was like Lewis' start to 2016. He had all the bad luck in 2014. If you look at the second half of the 2014 season, you'll see that there wasn't much in between them. RIC is good, but he is not championship material, because he lacks the consistency. He is brilliant in one race and rather anonymous in the next. He was looking good in 2014, but a year later, against Kvyat he looked distinctly beatable while Vettel was back to his old self.

People seem to forget that the great Ayrton Senna once barely beat Berger by a single point. There were only five races in 1992 in which both Maccas finished and Berger finished higher than Senna in three of them. Long story short: Being handed your ass and having a bad season are not the same thing. Kimi Räikkönen was handed his ass, first by Alonso then by Vettel, but looking at 2015 you can easily see that Seb hadn't forgotten how to drive. He had just inherited Webbers car.