Rosberg blows one of his last chances

Nico Rosberg knew this would be his one chance to win the Russian Grand Prix. Perhaps even the world championship.

With races ticking down, Lewis Hamilton on a roll, overtaking around the new Sochi circuit very difficult and no hope of a clever tyre strategy to give him a second shot, it was now or never.

From second on the grid, Rosberg had a run on his team-mate into the first braking zone of the race and wasn't going to let the opportunity go to waste.

He squeezed up the inside on the way out of the flat-out Turn 1 kink and was perfectly placed to take the lead into the tight right-hander that followed.

Before the braking zone, he was ahead and Hamilton knew that he would have to cede ground. At 180mph, and with the ideal positioning heading into the right-hander, Rosberg just needed to close out the move.

Rosberg's error meant the top step was out of reach © XPB

Maybe it was the pressure of the situation and the desperation to prevent Hamilton taking his second run of four consecutive victories of 2014. Maybe it was the knowledge that he would go 17 points down if he finished behind his team-mate.

Whatever the cause, Rosberg looked certain to complete an overtaking manouevre on Hamilton on track for the first time this season, but got it badly wrong.

The metaphorical pressure translated into an excess of pressure with the left foot. He hit the brakes too late and too hard, suffering a spectacular lock-up. The mistake was "unnecessary" and Rosberg could not offer a good reason for his miscalculation.

"It just went completely wrong and I don't understand it because it was actually an easy situation," he said. "It's just the first time at this track, the first time braking on 100kg fuel."

Had Rosberg made it into the lead, it's hard to see how Hamilton would have been able to get back past him.

He did have a slight speed advantage. In single-lap pace, he reckoned his superiority over the German was in the region of three tenths of a second, appropriately enough a chunk of that advantage a result of being stronger on the brakes into Turn 2. But everything that happened in the race indicated that overtaking was very difficult.

In that scenario, Rosberg would likely have reeled off the laps, had first call on the pitstop timing and retained the lead throughout.

Hamilton would have had the pace to shadow him, but it is probable Rosberg would have won, in doing so closing to within three points of the championship lead.

Rosberg held on to lead lap one before pitting © LAT

But with just one error, Rosberg turned the question of winning into one of how to salvage second place. Immediately, he recognised that he had to pit, refusing to cede the lead that he had taken by flying across the expansive asphalt run-off area and informing the team that he had to come in.

The ferocious lock-up meant that the cord was showing in the worst of the flat-spots. There was no alternative. Most lock-ups at Sochi, such as the one Hamilton suffered late in the race, created a flat-spot that could easily be run off. But not this one.

If the mistake into the first corner was a mental one, Rosberg immediately reset himself to the more calculating mindset that serves him so well.

Off came the soft Pirellis he had started the race with and on went the mediums. The challenge was simple. Get to the end of the race. That meant 52 laps on a set of tyres.

Tricky. As Jenson Button, who moved up to third when Rosberg pitted, said over the radio when told of this, "it's too early for Rosberg to do that. It's too early..."

Rosberg wasn't sure whether it would be possible. After a 6.5s stop, hindered by being held to let Felipe Massa's Williams, which also stopped at the end of the first lap, past on its way to a tyre change, he lay in 20th place, half a minute behind Hamilton.

Fortunately for Rosberg, the situation favoured him. The Mercedes was dominant in race conditions and if he could make it to the end at a decent pace, he would jump most of the field when his rivals pitted.

Rosberg found himself among the backmarkers for the second time in three races © LAT

"I had to give it a go, but then in the middle of the race I had big degradation," Rosberg said. "I thought 'this is not going to work out' and I was sure that I needed to stop. But they held on."

Thanks to this old-school grand prix, which harked back to the one-stop races that proliferated in 2010, Rosberg didn't actually have to do a vast amount of overtaking of the faster cars in the field to make his strategy work. Of the 11 cars he passed on track, all but two of them finished outside the points.

Rosberg made short work of the tailenders early on. Max Chilton, Kamui Kobayashi, Pastor Maldonado, Adrian Sutil, Marcus Ericsson and Romain Grosjean were all dispatched on track by Turn 2 on lap 10. That put Rosberg 14th.

With Daniel Ricciardo pitting early from seventh place, the consequence of a front-right tyre blister picked up in qualifying that always meant he was going to stop early, Rosberg was up to 13th after 11 laps.

Rosberg then passed Nico Hulkenberg, Esteban Gutierrez and Sergio Perez by the 20th lap, at which point the mid-race round of pitstops began.

In many ways, Rosberg's timing was impeccable. In clearing the slower cars efficiently, by the time Hamilton made his pitstop at the end of lap 27, Rosberg had only lost a further nine seconds to his team-mate.

Daniil Kvyat, Jenson Button, Jean-Eric Vergne, Fernando Alonso and Kevin Magnussen all dropped behind Rosberg when they stopped, with the Mercedes driver passing Kimi Raikkonen with DRS assistance into Turn 2 on lap 26. When Sebastian Vettel eventually pitted from second on lap 30, Rosberg was up to third.

There was no chance of catching Hamilton even though Rosberg had done a good job to limit the time lost. After the race leader had pitted, the duo were separated by 19.5 seconds and Valtteri Bottas's Williams.

Bottas was caught off-guard by Rosberg © XPB

But Rosberg's situation wasn't clear cut. He was legitimately concerned about the state of the tyres, so it was crucial to get past the Williams as soon as possible.

It's fair to say that the few Mercedes versus the customer Williams team on-track battles previously this year have been relatively brief and Rosberg made an effortless pass for second up the inside of Bottas into Turn 2 on lap 31.

Bottas was told that Rosberg would come back to him later in the race and while that was true to an extent, the Finn never had a clear shot at challenging to break up the one-two for the works cars.

After the race, he admitted that he was caught out by Rosberg's move, but the pace advantage of the Mercedes was such that it would have been very difficult to stay ahead even if he had repulsed that initial attack.

And that was that. The race ran to 53 laps, but the top eight at the end of lap 31 was identical to the one that took the chequered flag.

While things might have been different up front had Rosberg not made his error at the start, in all probability the two Mercedes would have finished the race in whatever order they finished the first lap.

Sochi was a tough environment in which to design a classic GP track © XPB

Some criticised the new Sochi circuit. The track itself was unremarkable, the designers having to contort it around various buildings constructed for the Winter Olympics, but many drivers were pleasantly surprised by the challenge it offered.

In reality, it was the combination of a lack of the thermal degradation tyre variable (it was physical wear either to the right-front or right-rear that was the limiting factor in terms of tyre life), combined with the fact the circuit was very tough on fuel, that made for a processional race.

Pirelli was criticised for having allocated the soft and medium compounds, when in retrospect it should have gone with the super-soft and soft. Rosberg underlined that by setting the second fastest lap of the race on the penultimate lap, his 51st on a set of medium Pirellis that he was very worried wouldn't last the distance. But even then, that would probably not have transformed the race.

"The soft tyre was still doing 25 laps and more in some cases, so you could say that with the super-soft somebody might have pushed for one-stop even then," said Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery.

"The surface is not abrasive. If you go to Abu Dhabi, Austin, all the modern circuits, they are all low-abrasion and they are the races where we have less pitstops, even when we have been very aggressive."

Superficially, the fact that the circuit was low-abrasion might not ring true with drivers reporting that grip levels were surprisingly high. But friction between tyre and track surface is only one part of the equation.

The surface of the tyre is designed to chemically adhere to the track, creating grip, and Pirelli's suspicion was that the oils that inevitably leached out of a fresh-laid surface were of a composition that aided that process. The result: high levels of grip and very little thermal degradation.

Massa couldn't make the tyre strategy work as Rosberg did © LAT

Only three drivers pitted more than once - Massa, Kvyat and Ericsson - but for the rest it was a straightforward one-stopper.

Those tyre characteristics, the knowledge that the running order once it had settled down after the first lap would be pretty close to how it would end, all played into Rosberg's mistake at the start. Had he known that there would be other opportunities, he might have been less aggressive.

By a quirk of fate, had he hit the brakes less hard and a little earlier, he would very likely still have taken the lead without creating hexagonal tyres. But with just three races to go, that kind of error is symptomatic of the stakes getting higher and higher.

When there's half a season to go, there are plenty of opportunities to fight another day. But Rosberg could surely hear the clock ticking as he charged down to the first corner. And that pressure told.

The contrast between Hamilton, whose victory drew him level with Nigel Mansell's British record of 31 grand prix victories, and Rosberg was marked.

Hamilton knew that Rosberg had him beaten heading into the first corner, kept his head and could be forgiven for grinning as his title rival's hopes of victory disappeared in a puff of smoke.

The 2008 world champion often seems either to be on a high or a low, but right now he is very clearly in a good place behind the wheel.

Hamilton equalled Mansell's victory record last weekend © LAT

Rosberg eschewed the use of the word momentum after the race, but Hamilton has scored almost twice as many points as him in the past four races.

Just as happened in Monaco after Hamilton's previous run of four wins on the bounce, Rosberg needs to find a way to knock his team-mate off the crest of a wave if he's to win this title. With the constructors' championship now sealed for Mercedes, it will be gloves off in the final three races.

"It was a good day and an amazing weekend," said Hamilton.

"Once I was out in the lead, I was really just having to control [the race], just looking after the tyres and managing the fuel was quite straightforward.

"Then, towards the end of the race, the car felt great so I could push or not push.

"Even when I was having to pick up the pace a little bit when I eventually found Nico was behind, it was easy to match the times."

Others in that situation might have been distracted, frustrated by their rival climbing back up to second with relative ease. But not Hamilton. All weekend, his brilliance shone through.

That, more than his own mistake, is what will worry Rosberg most.

Against a Hamilton at the top of his game, it might be impossible for him to win the championship that he led for so long.

The Russian GP proved that he will find it very difficult to breach Hamilton's defences.