The GSOH - Round Two - 1987 vs 2015

[crmalcolm]

The next match of the GSOH bracket puts 1987 up against 2015.

Summaries from Wikipedia:

1987 - At first, the 1987 championship was a four-way battle between Williams drivers Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell, Lotus driver Ayrton Senna, and McLaren driver and defending two-time champion Alain Prost. Eventually, it became a straight fight between Piquet and Mansell, who between them finished with nine wins from the season's sixteen races. Mansell took six wins to Piquet's three; however, he only recorded three other points finishes while Piquet recorded nine (including seven second places). The duel was settled in Piquet's favour at the penultimate race of the season in Japan, when Mansell crashed heavily in practice and injured his back, ending his season and handing Piquet his third Drivers' Championship.

Senna finished third having won at Monaco and Detroit; the latter was the 79th and final win for the original Team Lotus. Prost finished fourth despite winning three races; his victory in Portugal took him past Jackie Stewart's record of 27 Grand Prix victories. Ferrari's Gerhard Berger won the final two races of the season, in Japan and Australia, to finish fifth.

The Constructors' Championship was comfortably won by Williams, with McLaren second, Lotus third and Ferrari fourth.

For 1987 only, there were two other championships, contested by drivers and constructors of cars powered by naturally aspirated engines: the Jim Clark Trophy for drivers, and the Colin Chapman Trophy for constructors. These championships encouraged teams to switch to such engines, ahead of the ban on turbos from 1989 onwards. Tyrrell were the only team to run two "atmo" cars for the entire season and thus easily won the Colin Chapman Trophy, while their drivers Jonathan Palmer and Philippe Streiff came first and second respectively in the Jim Clark Trophy.

With the return of the naturally aspirated engines, and the aforementioned turbo ban in mind, the FIA introduced new rules for 1987 in an effort to reduce costs and slow down the cars with a resultant increase in safety, as well as to increase competitiveness between the two engine types. Turbo-powered cars now had to feature a pop-off valve which restricted boost to 4.0 bar, thus limiting engine power. However, advances in engine development, aerodynamics, tyres and suspension meant that the leading teams such as Williams, McLaren and Ferrari nonetheless frequently recorded faster times than they had in 1986, when turbo boost was unrestricted. The FIA also banned super-soft (and sticky) qualifying tyres for 1987, thus eliminating the unpopular practice of having to find a clear lap on tyres which were good for two flying laps at best.

Pirelli's withdrawal from F1 at the end of 1986 meant that Goodyear was the sole tyre supplier for 1987 and thus this was the first season since 1963 that the sport featured a standard single tyre supplier.



2015 - Mercedes began the season with a one–two finish in Australia, resulting in a twenty-eight-point lead after just one round. They finished over thirty seconds clear of Sebastian Vettel, who finished third and secured a podium finish in his first race with Ferrari. Red Bull's Daniel Ricciardo finished a lap down in sixth, prompting the team to continue to voice their frustrations with Renault, as they were forced to use its second of four allotted power units for Ricciardo on the very first day of the season. The team also voiced its displeasure over the progress Renault had made in terms of power, with the team principal, Christian Horner, saying the Renault Energy F1-2015 was still 100 horsepower (75 kW) down on Mercedes's PU106B Hybrid. After the race, the Red Bull team advisor Helmut Marko suggested that Red Bull might exit Formula One entirely if changes to the regulations were not made to level the field or cut development costs. Renault countered with their own threat to pull out of Formula One as an engine supplier if its reputation continued to be damaged or if its participation was otherwise not profitable to the company. Mercedes followed up by finishing second and third in Malaysia, while Red Bull continued to struggle, rounding out the top ten a lap down. After four rounds, Mercedes led the field, having earned 159 points (with Lewis Hamilton acquiring 93 out of 100 possible points), while Red Bull's struggles continued. The team acquired twenty-six points, enough for a distant fourth, and Ricciardo entered the European stages of the season on his fourth and final permissible power unit with fifteen events remaining on the calendar.

With McLaren's longest continuous testing session lasting twelve laps in Montmeló – a total of 56 kilometres (35 mi), a sixth of a total Grand Prix distance – before running into engine trouble, Honda elected to detune the power units for the opening Grands Prix in an effort to improve reliability and longevity while the manufacturer worked to improve these areas before homologation. After both cars qualified on the back row, Kevin Magnussen failed to reach the grid after suffering an abrupt engine failure while on his way from the pit lane to the grid. Jenson Button managed to finish the race, albeit in the last classified position, two laps behind the leaders. Magnussen relinquished his seat back to Alonso in Malaysia; both cars qualified ahead of only the Manor Marussia cars and eventually retired. The team showed signs of improvement in terms of performance and was able to compete with the midfield cars in China and Bahrain, although reliability continued to prove troublesome as Button's car was unable to compete in the latter Grand Prix.

Following a tumultuous pre-season in which they went through a period of administration and were saved by late investment, Manor Marussia arrived in Melbourne with a car that had passed its mandatory crash tests but had completed no testing. After the team's arrival in Australia, while assembling the cars, it was discovered that their computers had been wiped completely clean of all data in preparation for auction, and they ultimately could not compete in the Grand Prix. The team managed to get their cars running and on the racetrack by the second round in Malaysia, and were able to set times within 107% of the leading times in practice, giving stewards reasonable grounds to allow the team to race when they failed to do so in qualifying. Merhi was able to finish the race three laps down in fifteenth, while Stevens did not start. Manor Marussia continued to show signs of consistency, with both cars qualifying within 107%, starting, and finishing both Grands Prix in China and Bahrain. They were one of two teams, the other being McLaren, to return to Europe without a championship point.

Ferrari came into the season seemingly much more competitive than the previous season, finishing on the podium in the opening race. Kimi Räikkönen said the SF15-T was "much better" to drive than 2014's F14 T. In Malaysia, Vettel won comfortably and Räikkönen finished in fourth, despite suffering a tyre failure. The team then finished third and fourth in China and Räikkönen secured his first podium appearance since rejoining Ferrari the previous season with a second-place finish in Bahrain. With 107 points, the team returned to Europe 52 points behind Mercedes, and 46 points ahead of Williams, who were third. Sauber left the opening rounds with their first points since 2013.

Mercedes arrived at Spain already with a comfortable lead. Lewis Hamilton had scored ninety-three points out of a possible one hundred, giving him a twenty-seven-point lead over his teammate Nico Rosberg entering the eight-race European portion of the season.

Rosberg quickly cut into Hamilton's championship lead by securing victories in Spain (reducing his deficit to twenty points) and Monaco. The latter win was aided by the result of a costly miscalculation by the Mercedes team to pit Hamilton with a 19-second lead during a safety car period (that briefly saw the use of the "Virtual Safety Car" for the first time in F1's history) with 14 laps remaining. Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel did not make pit stops, allowing both to narrowly pass Hamilton by the pit lane exit. Racing resumed on lap seventy-one and Rosberg quickly pulled away, remaining in the lead till the chequered flag. Vettel held off Hamilton for second and third, respectively. As a result, Hamilton's lead over Rosberg in the Drivers' Championship was cut in half, to just ten points. Meanwhile, Button secured McLaren's first points of the season by finishing eighth. This left the Marussia drivers of Stevens and Merhi, along with the other McLaren driver, Fernando Alonso, as the only full-time drivers not to score a point after seven rounds.

At the following Grands Prix in Canada, Austria, and Britain, Mercedes put to rest the criticism following the result in Monaco through finishing first and second in the next three races, extending their championship lead to 160 points over Ferrari. Williams collected their first two podiums of the season in the form of third-place results by Valtteri Bottas in Canada and Felipe Massa in Austria, while Ferrari lost ground to Mercedes following a retirement in Austria and an eighth-place finish in Britain by Räikkönen. Other power unit manufacturers continued to struggle, with a Renault-powered car finishing in the top five only once, in Monaco, indicating their continued lack of power. Honda continued to have reliability issues and, up to the British Grand Prix, suffered nine retirements and two failures to start due to power unit problems, translating to only seven overall finishes out of 18 possible results.

The Drivers' Championship remained closely contested between leader Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, with the gap between them never larger than twenty-eight points after Hamilton's victory in round eleven in Belgium. The two would trade victories between rounds six and nine, closing the gap to as little as ten points. Sebastian Vettel, who at one time was within three points of the lead, after his victory in Malaysia, and who was the only non-Mercedes winner after eleven rounds, could not overcome team errors in Canada and Austria, and fell fifty-nine points off the pace of Hamilton after round nine. He rebounded in Hungary by winning his second race of the season, reducing the gap to Hamilton to forty-two points in the process, but fell out of a point-scoring position in Belgium after a tyre failure on the penultimate lap, dropping him to sixty-seven points behind the leader.

Hamilton closed out the European portion of the season with his seventh victory of the season in Italy. With Rosberg's retirement at the event, Hamilton entered the closing rounds of the season with a lead of fifty-three points over his teammate in the Drivers' Championship standings, the largest gap of the season at that point, while Vettel sat a further twenty-one points behind. Hamilton's tenth pole position in Belgium assured him of victory in the FIA Pole Trophy, the award for the driver who achieves the most pole positions during the season. Mercedes had built up a 181-point lead over Ferrari in the Constructors' Championship, with Williams in third, 263 points behind the leaders. After twelve rounds, half of the teams had been represented on the podium, while nine out of ten had scored points.

Shortly before the thirteenth round in Singapore, Manor Marussia announced that the American GP2 driver Alexander Rossi would race for the team, replacing Merhi in five of the final seven rounds, while Merhi was retained for the remaining two. Vettel won his third victory of the season in Singapore, closing his gap to Nico Rosberg in second place to just eight points.

Rosberg could not close the gap to Hamilton in Japan or Russia; despite winning pole position in both races, his leads were short-lived. He was passed by Hamilton on the opening corner in Japan and retired on lap seven in Russia. Vettel capitalised on the results with third and second-place finishes respectively, to take second place in the Drivers' Championship from Rosberg with four rounds remaining, while Hamilton extended his lead to sixty-six points, the highest lead he had held in the season. A victory in the United States, with Rosberg and Vettel finishing second and third respectively, secured the third Drivers' Championship for Hamilton with three races left to run. Rosberg won the final three races in Mexico, Brazil, and Abu Dhabi to reclaim second in the Drivers' Championship from Vettel, while Hamilton secured the Fastest Lap Award in Brazil.

[S griffin]

Two very similar seasons. A dominant season by one team, with the title going to a driver who won his first title. On balance I will go for 1987. They had 5 wins to 2015's 3 and the racing was more simple