GP analysis: How Hamilton won Rosberg's race

Nico Rosberg could live with finishing second to Lewis Hamiton in Malaysia a week ago. Then, he was outperformed by his team-mate on every level. So he did what he always does: regroup, analyse, understand, improve - much to the frustration of Hamilton, who took every opportunity to highlight how much his team-mate had gained from studying his data during the intervening week...

But in Bahrain, defeat was not so easy to take. With the world championship battle a two-horse race - and judging by the rate at which the battling Mercedes duo dropped the chasing pack after the final safety car (24 seconds in just 11 laps) it will remain that way - pressing home your advantage on a given weekend is essential. Rosberg had the strongest hand in a dramatic Bahrain Grand Prix, but didn't play it right and lost out in a thrilling battle.

It was a spectacular grand prix, the antithesis of the 'taxi-cab' racing Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo had again slated in the build-up to the race.

With Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff promising "zero interference" in the battle between the drivers, Rosberg and Hamilton gave each other no quarter.

Track position was Rosberg's trump card and he started the race with that firmly in his hand after taking pole position, but within seconds of the red lights going out he had thrown it away.

Rosberg's launch was not a bad one, it was just that Hamilton's was better and the 2008 world champion reached Turn 1 just ahead and with the inside line. Rosberg had to give best.

He tried to wrest the initiative back at Turn 4 on that opening lap, but Hamilton was having none of it. He defended, forcing Rosberg wide on the exit to consolidate his position. Advantage Hamilton.

Hamilton made it out of Turn 1 first © XPB

Rosberg took up a watching brief, sitting 1-1.5s behind his team-mate for the next 16 laps. He knew the strategic plan. The fastest route to the end of the race was a two-stopper, with two stints on the soft-compound Pirellis and one on the mediums.

But whichever driver was second at the end of the first stint was always likely to switch to the slower tyre for the middle stint to set up a potential attack late in the race. It was a slower strategy, but only fractionally, and it promised the pursuer a speed advantage in the final stint.

"We had split the strategy in order to give Nico a chance for an overtake on Lewis because that strategy was quite evenly-matched," said Mercedes executive director Paddy Lowe.

"Naturally, the option/option/prime strategy is optimal and the option/prime/option is a little bit behind. But if the car behind is quicker, it can use the option at the end to catch up and have a performance difference to the car ahead."

But this was the more difficult path to victory. Rosberg knew he would have the chance to reverse the roles if he could pass Hamilton before the end of the final stint. Had Hamilton been behind, he is likely to have switched onto the alternative strategy, putting Rosberg in the box seat.

On lap 15, Rosberg launched his attack, taking three tenths out of Hamilton. The next lap, another three tenths and he was within DRS range. The next lap, he gained three-and-a-half tenths. The attack was on.

Rosberg made his move on lap 18, sending his Mercedes up the inside. But he couldn't make it stick. Hamilton cut back, the pair came close enough to touching that everyone on the Mercedes pitwall must have held their breath.

The following lap gave a snapshot that might come to define the whole championship battle. Again, Rosberg went to the inside, but this time both drivers locked up. They made the corner, Hamilton again cut back and carried good exit speed, although Rosberg attacked again on the outside of Turn 4.

Hamilton made sure Rosberg ran out of space each time he attacked © LAT

Just as he was earlier in the race, Rosberg was crowded out at the exit. Hamilton pitted at the end of that lap and the die was cast. Rosberg was on the alternate strategy.

Rosberg stayed out for an extra two laps, which led to him rejoining six seconds seconds behind. But during the middle stint, he really showed his pace. Lowe reckoned that the medium tyres were "three-to-five" tenths slower than the softs, yet Rosberg lost only a shade over two tenths a lap during this part of the race.

The final stops were approaching when Pastor Maldonado, exiting the pits, forced the issue by pitching Esteban Gutierrez's Sauber into a roll at Turn 1. The safety car was deployed and Hamilton's 9.5s advantage was wiped out.

"In terms of entertainment, you could not have set it up better," said Lowe. "The safety car created this situation with two cars that normally would have had a big gap suddenly closed up and the car behind was on the [quicker] option.

"If there hadn't been a safety car, [how the race finished] would all depend on the pace difference between the cars. The potential was that Nico would have caught Lewis with two or three laps to go, but that would all have depended on the gap. The gap when the safety car was called was right on that limit between whether Nico would catch Lewis or not."

Crucially, the gap had stabilised at 9.5-9.7s, so it is likely Hamilton didn't quite have the pace to haul himself far enough clear to keep Rosberg at arm's length in the final stint. But the inverted Sauber rendered that scenario hypothetical.

Gutierrez's flip brought the Mercedes back together © XPB

What really happened was straightforward; Hamilton, on the slower mediums, led Rosberg on the softs with 11 laps to go. Both were politely reminded over the radio that it might be a good idea not to drive into each other, but other than that they were free to race. They did race, hard. They did not drive into each other, just.

Rosberg's strategy was simple. Save up the maximum available energy to focus his efforts on a big attack. With the regulations allowing a total of 4MJ of electrical energy to be deployed on a given lap, but only permitting half of that to be harvested by the MGU-K on top of whatever you could stash from the MGU-H mounted on the turbo. That, potentially combined with the absolute maximum permitted fuel flow, could give Rosberg an advantage.

Twice, he attacked into Turn 1, but twice Hamilton managed to outwit him. After all, with each side of the Mercedes garage able to see what the other is doing, his all-guns-blazing attack was noticed and responded to.

"One of the new games you can play in F1 is energy management," said Lowe. "It was the same with KERS, you can save up energy and deploy it in double boosts. With this power unit, that effect is even more extreme, so there are opportunities to manage your energy flow and save it up.

"What we saw in the last 10 laps was the drivers competing and each side of the garage competing in terms of playing with the energy deployment, so it was the cat and mouse game with one staying ahead of the other with the use of the energy around the lap.

"With Nico, they were running a little bit of a plan to save up a lot of energy for a big attack on one lap, but the other side spotted that and started saving energy as well."

If that sounds a bit dry, it was nothing of the sort. Rosberg's big attack came on lap 52, diving up the inside of Turn 1. Hamilton again cut back inside, but their battle continued all the way to Turn 4.

Rosberg pounced on Hamilton again as soon as they reached parc ferme © LAT

Again, Hamilton squeezed Rosberg off the track - hard but fair - with the German keeping his foot in but unable to make his move stick. He had another go with a late lunge a lap later, but Hamilton effortlessly cut back again to retake the lead. By then, any energy advantage Rosberg had built was gone.

It was a superb performance by Hamilton. In that final stint, he was on the slower tyre, he had been robbed of the cushion he had built in the middle of the race and on top of all that was fractionally slower on raw pace than Rosberg. What he did have was track position and he defended beautifully.

"I had a good enough lead, around nine seconds, which I think I would have held without the safety car," said Hamilton. "But when the safety car came out I thought 'shoot, he's on options, I'm on primes, that's it, it's going to take a miracle to hold him back'. And he had so much grip behind me.

"So it felt like one of the best calculated races I've had, how I was using my power and how I was positioning my car. He'd catch me down the back straight, still be with me at the last corner and have 10-12km/h on me with the DRS. So I had to accept that he was going to come past. I couldn't come to the inside and then block, I had to get him back. I don't know how I did it all the time."

The interesting question is what might have happened had Rosberg held the lead at the start or made one of his two moves at the end of the first stint stick. Were the roles reversed, would Hamilton have lived up to his reputation as a great overtaker and made the difference, or would track position have prevailed?

Impossible to say, but while Rosberg was happy to attack, there were a couple of times where he might just have been tempted to keep his foot in had he been battling with any driver other than his team-mate. While he didn't exactly give a quarter, perhaps he did give an eighth.

Force India had a fierce intra-team battle too © XPB

And had their positions been reversed and there been no safety car, would Hamilton have had the pace to lap just 0.217s per lap slower than Rosberg during the middle stint? Perhaps not, in which case we would be hailing an impressive Rosberg win. On such details championship fights can turn.

While it only takes two cars to make a race, and Hamilton versus Rosberg was a classic, the supporting cast played its part to perfection. Warring team-mates were a recurring theme. Sergio Perez drove superbly all weekend and while Force India team-mate Nico Hulkenberg complained that "he pushed me right off" after the Mexican pulled off an opportunistic pass at Turn 4 on lap 28, the Mexican was the stronger Force India driver. The Silverstone squad, which now sits second in the constructors' championship, would probably have finished third and fourth but for the safety car, which allowed the Red Bulls to close up on them.

But it wasn't Sebastian Vettel who led the Red Bull charge, it was Daniel Ricciardo. After showing his willingness to take on the four times world champion on the opening lap for the second successive race, the Australian was smoother and, in the final stint, quicker than Vettel.

He passed him at Turn 1 on lap 50, three laps later getting past Hulkenberg to take fourth. Had the race gone on a lap longer, he might even have passed the other Force India and made the podium.

Felipe Massa again prevailed in an intra-Williams scrap, with Valtteri Bottas just behind. Their battle ran on and off through the race, but never spilled over.

Behind them, perhaps this was the scene di Montezemolo was talking about. If there were any taxi cabs in the Bahrain GP, it was the Ferraris of Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen, two world champions who came home ninth and 10th on merit.

Certainly, given the F14 T's lack of power a pedestrian might have fancied their chances of flagging one down from trackside. The Ferrari was brisk enough to sit in among the cars ahead at some points in the race, but simply did not have the pace to do much more.

Alonso raised his arm from the cockpit, shaking his fist in mock celebration as he crossed the line. Now in his fifth year with Ferrari and with a third world championship as far away as ever, he was perhaps one of the few that could take no enjoyment from a stunning grand prix.