How Hamilton's Baku weekend fell apart

Things were looking so good for Lewis Hamilton until qualifying for the European Grand Prix came around.

Formula 1's inaugural visit to Azerbaijan was shaping up to be a Hamilton victory parade. A super-high-speed street track with lots of tricky slow-speed corner entries seemed to be playing to his strengths under braking. He'd topped every practice session despite refusing to walk F1's newest circuit, and completing only limited laps of Baku in the Mercedes F1 simulator beforehand. But then qualifying happened.

Usually so supremely adept in this department, Hamilton suffered a disastrous session, locking brakes, flat-spotting tyres, and running off the track repeatedly.

The Mercedes W07 was comfortably the quickest car in the field here, so Hamilton still made Q3 despite these dramas.

But after yet another off-track moment at Turn 15, he then crashed into the wall and ended the session a lowly 10th on the grid.

Meanwhile, team-mate Nico Rosberg enjoyed an unchallenged run to pole position.

Mercedes altered the set-up on both cars after Friday practice. It wouldn't say how, and neither would Hamilton, but he admitted the braking performance was different, and that he was unable to adjust his technique accordingly.

"It was something the team had to change on both cars," Hamilton said. "We just lost the brakes. I couldn't push and just went straight on most of the time."

From this statement we can deduce the change wasn't one of driver preference; it was enforced for some reason.

What's also clear is that it didn't disturb Rosberg's rhythm in the same way. "I was happy all weekend," he said.

Hamilton was actually nearly three tenths faster than Rosberg across the first sector of the lap (the first six turns), and within a tenth from Turn 16, through the flat-out kinks to the start/finish line. He felt his car was still easily good enough for pole without those repeated errors in sector two, where there are undulations and the braking zones are trickier.

The potential for slipstream racing on Baku's enormous main straight, coupled with the likelihood of the sort of safety car-inducing chaos witnessed in the GP2 support races, suggested Hamilton still had a chance of carrying the fight to Rosberg in the race - if he could make a good start and clear the slower cars in front.

Also encouraging for Hamilton was that recent challengers Ferrari and Red Bull were nowhere close to Mercedes at this circuit.

Both the SF16-H and the RB12 struggled to get the super-soft Pirelli tyres working properly in the cooler conditions of practice two, but even with a vast improvement in Saturday's warmer weather they were still more than a second adrift of Mercedes over a lap.

Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo set identical lap times in qualifying, but the Red Bull ran into tyre trouble early in the race, and by the start of lap six of 51 Vettel had drafted easily past his former team-mate to run second to Rosberg.

Vettel was 0.992 seconds per lap slower than Rosberg over the remainder of that opening stint, in the car that is clearly second best to Mercedes this season.

Mercedes hasn't really enjoyed this sort of qualifying and race-pace advantage since 2014, so in theory Hamilton should have had ample scope to at the very least execute a damage limitation drive to second place.

But more of the unfortunate technical trouble that has plagued Hamilton's 2016 season lay in wait to thwart him.

He made no progress over the first lap, and almost immediately the reigning world champion could feel something was wrong with his Mercedes.

"It just felt like I had a lack of pace," he said. "I felt it particularly at the start of the straights. I was losing ground - therefore I was struggling to overtake people."

It wasn't clear initially whether this related to rear-tyre graining, which became the limiting factor here thanks to low-downforce and a propensity for sliding in the high-speed corners and wheelspin in the low-speed ones, or something else.

As it turned out a particular setting related to Hamilton's Energy Recovery Systems was not performing correctly, giving him a de-rated amount of electrical energy deployment on the straights. Essentially, his engine was down on power because the mode it was set to was not working properly.

"We had a configuration setting problem - an electronic setting problem with engine modes, which occurred on both cars," explained Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff.

"The settings were wrong because we had a messy Friday, where we couldn't configure it in the way we should have done - so it was preset in the wrong way."

Mercedes lost a long run in first practice thanks to Hamilton brushing the wall and flat-spotting a set of tyres, and another in the second session when Rosberg suffered an engine failure and lost drive.

That cost Mercedes valuable track time to tune its ERS settings. Hamilton's engine was placed into this faulty mode from the start of the race, while Rosberg found it later on when he switched into the 'wrong' mode of his own volition.

The FIA's stringent restrictions on radio communications, introduced to prevent teams coaching their drivers while on track and to re-enforce existing rules that state the drivers should drive the cars 'alone and unaided', prevented Mercedes telling Hamilton exactly how to correct his engine settings.

But Mercedes was permitted to inform its drivers of a problem with the mode they were in. Mercedes did this as soon as Rosberg switched into the offending setting, so he was able to intuitively correct it - within "just the one lap".

Conversely, Hamilton did not enjoy the benefit of inflicting the loss of power on his own car with an adjustment, so could not simply reverse engineer himself out of trouble.

"Nico was in the more fortunate situation that he did a switch change just before which kind of led him on the right path," added Wolff. "So within half a lap he went back into the right mode.

"Lewis, because he didn't have that right path, it took him a while to figure it out - 12 laps - and this for sure affected his race.

"We need to analyse how much [it cost]. As per the data it is 0.2 seconds per lap. But it must affect much more, because the engine was de-rating between Turn 2 and 3 where you expect the biggest boost."

Hamilton was carrying this ERS deficit from the start - reporting de-rating of the ERS as early as lap four - but running in traffic during the first part of the race caused his rear tyres to grain, which compounded his lack of pace.

He made solid progress during this time, passing Daniil Kvyat's Toro Rosso and Max Verstappen's Red Bull, jumping Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull, Felipe Massa's Williams and Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari when they each made early pitstops, and overtaking the other Williams of Valtteri Bottas to rise to fourth by the end of lap 11.

The ERS issue only became evident to Mercedes once Hamilton started dropping back from Sergio Perez's Force India, following Hamilton's sole pitstop on lap 15.

GAP TO PEREZ

From laps 17-22, Perez and Hamilton were busy fighting their way back past Massa and Ricciardo, who pitted much earlier. From lap 23 to lap 40 (before Hamilton finally resolved his problem) Hamilton was an average of 0.724s per lap slower than the Force India.

This is significantly more than the 0.2s per lap deficit indicated by Wolff after the race, but that's without considering the distraction of Hamilton making constant switch adjustments between Baku's unforgiving walls, at incredibly high speeds.

A frustrated Hamilton urged his team over the radio to solve the problem, but his engineers were bound by regulation and unable to instruct him to make the simple switch change that would cure it.

Hamilton grew increasingly irate as his attempts to fix the ERS failed, and he felt the distraction of staring at his dash "every five seconds" during that portion of the race also hampered him severely, describing it as "dangerous".

"All they can tell me is there's a switch error," Hamilton added. "So I'm looking at every single switch thinking 'am I being an idiot here? Have I done something wrong?'

"I looked at it time and time again, looking through all the different switch positions, and there was nothing that looked irregular.

"I didn't know what the problem was so I didn't know if I had done anything to make the engine not work. I disabled something and it didn't change anything; I put it back on, it didn't change anything.

"In the end, I switched again and the engine power came back maybe 10 laps after that. I think there were nine laps to go, so I just turned the engine down."

With full power restored Hamilton pumped in two quick laps, the second of which (a 1m46.822s on lap 42) was the race's fastest up to that point.

He held a comfortable gap back to the sixth-placed Williams of Bottas, so knew he could cruise and collect, even though Bottas closed to within 4.551s by the flag.

"The team was saying it's not that big an issue, then the power came back and I went over a second faster so it obviously was," Hamilton rued. "There's nothing I can do. It's just something the team will try to rectify in the future."

With his main rival's challenge neutered by this excruciating ordeal, Rosberg sailed on serenely to victory. His pace advantage over the rest was such that this result was never in doubt.

The only thing that might have caused Rosberg concern was the likelihood of a safety car period early in the race, which would have made him vulnerable to attack, but to everyone's amazement that never came.

So Rosberg was left clear, pulling out a lead of more than 21s over Vettel's Ferrari before his rival pitted on lap 20. Rosberg stopped one lap later, fitted the soft Pirelli tyres, and then simply nursed his car to the flag.

"The first stint was the best because I knew I had to open the gap to cover a safety car, and that worked out well," said Rosberg. "I was feeling great out there."

ROSBERG/VETTEL GAP AFTER PITSTOPS

Kimi Raikkonen emerged ahead of Ferrari team-mate Vettel after the stops, on account of making his much earlier in the race. Knowing Raikkonen would need to nurse his tyres for 43 laps to the finish, Ferrari instructed him to let Vettel past, which he did on lap 28.

Apart from lap 31, when Rosberg encountered a train of traffic and dropped more than three seconds to Vettel in one lap, the Ferrari was unable to make any real inroads. This was Rosberg's, and Mercedes', race all the way.

"All weekend they've been very, very quick," said Vettel, who overruled his team's original call to pit early in the race. "In the first practice session, after four laps they were putting lap times in that took us probably the whole day to copy.

"They were gaining quite a lot down the straights; maybe we carried a little bit too much wing. The other bit, we were losing quite a bit in low speed corners.

"Arguably they are doing something clever to pick up pace in low speed - the way they treat the tyres. But if there's something clever to be done, we need to be as clever as them."

Rosberg still deserves enormous credit. He kept his car out of the walls, stuck it on pole and won the race. Hamilton suffered technical problems again, but compounded them with too many uncharacteristic mistakes of his own.

After Rosberg's travails in Monaco and Canada, which allowed his once healthy championship lead to be hacked back to single digits, he has rebounded in the best way possible, stopping the rot quickly and pushing his points cushion back out to 24.

Still, Rosberg has not beaten Hamilton in a straight fight since Australia. They should have enjoyed one here, but Hamilton's woes ensured Rosberg had an easy ride in Azerbaijan.

He should enjoy it, because they won't all be like this.