Hulkenberg. Wow.

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Is this the sign of a guy who never reached his potential in F1 (I say this as someone who was at LM in 2015)?

Or is he showing up a lack of talent on the current grid?

Either way, third place is deeply impressive. Always had a soft spot for the guy.

ETA - Goddamnit. Typo in the title.

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kiseca said:

REALIST123 said:

kiseca said:

REALIST123 said:

Hulkenberg’s a good driver but has never, perhaps, been one of the best in F1. To do what he’s done says more about Perez and Stroll than it does about himself.

It can't say anything about Perez and Stroll without saying the opposite in equal measure about Hulkenberg.

You can't say that when the package is slow it's the driver, but when they change the driver and all of the sudden the package is quick, it's the car. The car is a constant. The difference was the driver.

Anyway, all that qualifying showed was that at Silverstone, Hulk seems quicker than Stroll (but still lost to him in the race because of that extra pit stop). We have no idea how Perez would have done.

I would suggest Perez would have been, as he generally is, just ahead of Stroll, all things being equal. Which would make him about the same as Hulkenberg after many months out of the car. Maybe.

I doubt many would put Hulkenberg in the top 25%, just for example, of F1 drivers which would suggest that the ’ package’ could be quicker than it is made to look by Perez and Stroll, given that a fairly middling driver after a long layoff, equalled or bettered them both.

I’d quite like to see Vettel in that car, which would give us another take on it. At his worst I suspect he’d be faster than the others.

The problem I see with your reasoning is that you're using Hulk as a known yardstick by which to judge the other drivers, in other words no matter what he did in that car, your reference point is already set so you use it to rate the other two drivers instead.

This doesn't mean I disagree with your conclusions to any great extent. I'd certainly put Hulk in the top half, maybe not the top quarter. Ricciardo had the better of him but not hugely, but then I'm doing exactly the same thing I'm saying you've done. I already have a rating for Ricciardo, and it's high, so when the two drivers can be compared and are close, for me that pulls Hulk up instead of pulling Ricciardo down.

Very hard to be objective about it. But, accepting that, I also agree with you on Vettel, I think he would be faster than all of them.... as long as I don't think too hard about Ricciardo vs Vettel at Red Bull compared to Ricciardo vs Hulk at Renault....

I think most people were impressed with Hulk's qualifying. I wasn't expecting much from him in the race and I did feel a bit for the guy with that extra tyre stop. Meanwhile Ricciardo went backwards (literally at one point)... but I think Hulk would have done a lot better this last weekend had he been able to compete the weekend before, but once again his bad luck nailed him.

This is the interesting point about subjective comparisons. It's only been a couple of seasons since Ricciardo was being touted as a "future world champion" by pundits and fans alike. Where does that now leave Hulk?