Former F1 driver Jolyon Palmer, who left Renault at the end of 2017, has joined the BBC team to offer insight and analysis from the point of view of the competitors.
In his latest BBC Sport column, Jolyon Palmer gives his views on the title race and the 2019 driver market in a Twitter Q&A.
Are Mercedes mistakes coming from Ferrari’s pressure in pushing the limits of engine and car development? – @calta1985
I think so, yes. The championship is still close and the cars are evenly matched, even if Mercedes seem to have had a bit of an advantage since they brought their upgrades on engine and aero. But in the races, with the mistakes on strategy, Mercedes are feeling more pressure, I’m sure. In Australia and China they lost race wins, and they made a mistake in Austria last Sunday.
Ferrari are doing a good job by and large on strategy and it is a problem that Mercedes would not really have had for the last few years because they have had such a dominant car. So the pressure is up just because they have other people who can beat them if they made mistakes, whereas from 2014-16, even if they made mistakes, they were probably still winning.
Are Sebastian Vettel’s mistakes (like Baku and France first corner) re-countered by Lewis Hamilton’s supposed ‘off’ weekends such as in China and Canada? – @f1fanatic96
I guess so, at the moment. I don’t think Vettel’s mistakes are that big. The crash with Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas at the first corner in France was definitely bigger, but he still finished fifth, so I guess he was lucky in that respect. The Baku one, he went for a move that was on, and just slightly misjudged it, dropping from second, or a possible win, to fourth. But again I don’t think it was a huge mistake.
But Hamilton has these weekends where he can be absolutely sublime, which we have seen already this year in Melbourne, Barcelona and Paul Ricard. But then he can have anonymous weekends as well, like Montreal, where he is normally so strong but this year just didn’t get going.
Vettel is more consistent but making more mistakes, whereas Hamilton is having some blindingly quick weekends and others where he is just shaded by Bottas. Across nine races, so far, it has evened out for there to be nothing in it.
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