Conclusions from the 2014 German GP

Rosberg enjoys the quiet life
After a week in which his country won the World Cup, he tied the knot and then tied his immediate future to Mercedes in return for a reputed €50m, it just had to be Nico Rosberg’s day at the end of it too. Truly, few could have ever had it so good.

Then again, few victories in F1 could have been achieved with such anonymity. The notion that Rosberg was in a race of his own was made literal by the Hockenheim TV race director, with the German out of sight from first to last and his presence rendered a distant, almost mundane, afterthought. And so there were two 2014 German GPs; the first, a predictable procession in which Rosberg cruised to victory and the second, like a magician’s trick, upgraded into riveting spectacle by the stubborn refusal pay any attention to its lead player.

Rosberg certainly won’t have known about his disappearing act and it’s almost as certain that he won’t care a jot either. “I generally don't read the media, so most of the time I don't know what's going on,” he wrong-footed reporters in Thursday’s press conference. It was a passing remark but a revealing one nonetheless. The Mercedes driver is entirely focused on winning the World Championship. It’s all he’s interested in - and why, after a living in a world without the media, a race without television must have been a walk in the park.

F1 forgets its safety-first approach
Beyond the inevitable conspiracy theories, fuelled by the glaring absence of official reasoning, two explanations have been put forward for why the Safety Car wasn’t deployed with twenty laps remaining of Sunday’s race. The first is that Race Control spied a convenient gap in the pitwall through which Adrian Sutil’s stricken Sauber could be deposited into the safe embrace of the pitlane. But there are at least two salient flaws with this argument: first and foremost, that the marshals ran out from the other side of the track, thus putting themselves in acute danger; the second that the situation was so haphazard that a fourth marshal was apparently intent on running out on track before having second thoughts (look for yourselves after forty-four seconds of this video), an about-turn which underlined just how risky and dangerous the situation was.

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The second suggestion, voiced by Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, is that the non-deployment was powered by FIA’s recent disposition towards non-interference. But that directive ought to have nothing to do with matters of safety and everything to do with leniency towards minor incidents on track. Moreover, it was just a week ago that the British GP was closed down for an hour while a barrier was repaired. And what was likely, the Silverstone barrier being struck again at speed in the race or a marshal being injured as he ran through a gravel trap and then across a busy track to slowly push away a broken-down car? Forget the conspiracies, it’s the lack of consistency in an envrionment that ought to be governed by absolute consistency that should have the alarm bells ringing.

Saturdays have become Hamilton’s nemesis
For the past