Mercedes needs to sharpen-up under pressure

What a race the Hungarian Grand Prix was.

If we are trying to understand what has made the last two races interesting, arguably the key factor is that they were livened up by cars being out-of-position, with Williams ahead at Silverstone and Ferrari at the Hungaroring.

Had the Mercedes drivers ended the first lap first and second, it would probably have gone down as another straightforward race.

This again points towards the idea of developing some kind of reverse-grid format because it stands to reason that when the fastest cars get away at the start, it is all over.

If you put the best car at the front automatically, why expect slower cars to get ahead? Overtaking is always a result of a faster car, or a car on the same pace, being behind another one.

But when drivers have to make their way through traffic, everything becomes a lot tougher. Some will think I'm mad to suggest this, but it's worth thinking seriously about.

Up until the lights went out on Sunday afternoon it looked like business as usual for the Mercedes team. Lewis Hamilton had his advantage over Nico Rosberg and the rest were going to be left to squabble for that last step on the podium.

But that's when it all changed; fantastic starts from both Ferraris, and a bit of erratic driving - especially from Hamilton - meant at the end of lap one we had a Ferrari one-two with the championship leader among the midfielders.

Mercedes lost out at the start for the second race in a row © LAT

From there it looked like the only drivers that wanted to win the race were Vettel and Raikkonen in their Ferraris. Everyone else seemed to want to throw it all away and Rosberg in third simply didn't have the speed to attack.

We saw at Silverstone that when the Mercedes drivers got behind the Williams cars after a poor start it was no easy task to overtake them. You would imagine that a car with the pace of the Mercedes would just have swept past but that didn't happen and it was the same story in Hungary.

It wasn't only catching the Ferraris that Mercedes was struggling with - the pitstop strategy calls were fairly questionable too.

The team always says it puts both cars on the same strategy and won't give either driver strategy priority. But I don't understand why, as a two-car team, you would do that because many times two different strategies come out as more or less the same. So why not run each car differently and see what happens?

If it is because the drivers are too selfish to allow whichever strategy does work out best on the day to go through and win - and I think this is the case from what we have seen in the past - then the drivers really run the team.

That's a very dangerous position to be in. It is time for the big bosses to make sure the drivers know where they stand.

And if the team is determined to run both cars to the same strategy, why did it put Rosberg on the slower tyre at his first stop and Hamilton on the faster tyre?

It was a surprise that Mercedes put Rosberg back on to the hard tyres © LAT

What really surprised me was Mercedes putting Rosberg on the slower tyre again at his second stop during the safety car period. The safety car was going to close everything up and if Mercedes had put him on the faster tyre he could have attacked for the win with race leader Vettel on the harder compound.

To me Mercedes has everything and it's a winning team, but it is not yet a team that knows how to win when things start to go wrong. Both drivers are far too selfish and self-centred, and it needs to be explained to them that the team comes first.

Also if I was Rosberg I would be asking some questions because, from what I saw on Sunday, I am pretty sure the team knows exactly who it wants to win the drivers' championship.

While I am on about Mercedes, what has happened to its starts? The last two races have shown that pole is one thing but if you can't get off the line on Sunday afternoon it is very easy to throw everything away.

As we know there are a lot of changes on startline strategy coming for Spa and this was being discussed and detailed before the British Grand Prix.

I wonder if it is just a coincidence that Mercedes' starts have dropped off since then? Perhaps it decided to back things off a bit while the FIA was snooping around.

Either way, it should make for an interesting second half of the season. Mercedes has comfortably held the advantage but, with Ferrari not too far behind, the championship-leading team has to sharpen up its operations.

As the chasing pack closes in, you inevitably get punished more for errors and even though the Ferrari is still half-a-second off the pace on a good day in normal conditions, Mercedes has got plenty to think about over the break.

Perez and Maldonado collide - just one of the many incidents during the race © LAT

Another thing that surprised me in Hungary on Sunday was how much contact we saw in the race. Do we really want Formula 1 to become a destruction derby every weekend?

It seems to me many drivers forgot that they need to respect each other and give the other car room.

If they don't do that then, as we saw, the FIA will step in with more penalties. So even if you do get away with contact without damage, it's still in the drivers' interest not to hit each other.

F1, as with any open-wheel formula, should not be a contact sport because it is too dangerous. We saw plenty of clashes both up front and in the mid-pack, which played a big part in the race ending with mixed-up result.

The Hungaroring was once famous as a circuit where overtaking was impossible. But the track has always had the potential to create incidents and there have been some famous passing moves in its 30-year history.

It has also produced a few upsets - even in the first year of Jordan, Bertrand Gachot took fastest lap for us there!

The corner layout through Turns 1, 2 and 3, plus the fact that the road drops away under braking into Turn 1 and 2, means that it is very easy to make a mistake, run a little wide and allow another car to get alongside you through this section.

And once cars are alongside each other, the sequence of corners means there is the chance for people to fight back. It's a track that has produced plenty of action during the past few years.

We also had the tyre factor. At Silverstone in the previous race, the tyres were very conservative, and in Hungary they were also reasonably conservative. So this points to the racing being better when the tyres don't degrade as much as we have often seen during the Pirelli era.