Bored F1 drivers took too long to speak up

The Brazilian Grand Prix was not the most exciting race of the season and I spent some of it watching my dog chasing leaves being blown around the lawn.

We heard Lewis Hamilton trying to get his Mercedes team to change his strategy so he could potentially overtake his team-mate Nico Rosberg. I was glad the team stuck to its guns and kept both drivers on the same strategy, converting both to three stops to cover Sebastian Vettel in case Ferrari made good use of its tactics.

Incidentally, I think Vettel might just have been that little bit better off if he had used the medium tyre after the second stop and then the soft tyre for the last stint, rather than taking the soft in the middle, but then Mercedes would probably have done the same and it would just have been stalemate.

Hamilton also said on many occasions he was faster than Rosberg but couldn't follow him close enough to mount an overtaking manoeuvre.

I was surprised by this statement. Hamilton is a three-time world champion and has been in Formula 1 since 2007. That's nine years and he has only just realised that if you have two cars with similar performance following closely, passing is more or less impossible. In the dirty airflow from the leading car, yours either turns into a very badly balanced machine with lots of understeer, or you overheat the tyres by sliding around because of the lack of grip.

Verstappen gets on with some overtaking © XPB

Hamilton and Vettel have now both said what we the viewers have known for many years about overtaking: it's very difficult to follow close enough and something needs to be done to address this.

I am not sure that the planned regulation changes for 2017 will do anything to help. I think all that can be done is to hope for more Max Verstappens to come along, since he seems to manage overtaking moves fairly regularly. If he is signed up by a top team - if it hasn't happened already - he will go on to win many races and world championships.

With the reliability we are now seeing (for everyone other than McLaren) the race actually starts when the green light goes on for the start of qualifying on Saturday afternoon, and the battle for the victory in effect takes place in Q3. Unless something out of the ordinary happens, the reality is that the way the cars start is the way they are going to finish.

Rosberg was fastest last Saturday by the tiniest of margins. 0.08 seconds is not a lot, but it is enough to secure you a grand prix win if you then make a good start to lead that crucial first lap.

Has Rosberg suddenly sped up now the championship is over, or has Hamilton lost his speed?

I don't think it is either. I think they have always been very close and it has always been down to who would get it right on the day.

Hamilton was the first to say when he crashed his sportscar in Monaco that it happened because of tiredness. He had been partying, including his mother's birthday celebrations, and that meant he had been burning the candle at both ends. Rightly so, he has done what he set out to achieve in 2015 and no one will resent him for enjoying it.

James Hunt knew how to enjoy life © LAT

I used to work with James Hunt - now there was someone who knew how to party. The unfortunate thing was he didn't know when not to party.

As we all know you can't do that and not lose your edge. No matter who you are, it takes time to recover.

In many of my columns I have said that I enjoyed working with young drivers more than the hardened professionals. That was because they were very open-minded about what we could get out of the car and how to adapt to a given track.

Any racing car will always have its good features and its inherent vices, so it is just a waste of time trying to change the set-up to overcome those vices. It is better to put your effort into optimising the set-up around the car's good features. That way you get the best bang for your buck as far as laptime is concerned.

An example of this was the track changes in Brazil. The introduction of raised kerbs in certain areas meant drivers had to relearn the best line. I believe that, in general, new drivers come to terms with that better than the veterans who have done it all before.

One of Felipe Massa's main problems in Brazil was his inability to adapt to those changes. He struggled to do that and on many occasions you could see his car leaping off the kerbs and bouncing back onto the road surface.

Going way back to Spa in 1991, the track had been resurfaced at Pouhon and Andrea de Cesaris spent the whole of the Friday practice sessions complaining about how it should have been flat through that area - it was last year and it should still be now.

De Cesaris refused to accept that changes stopped Pouhon being flat © LAT

We tried everything to sort it but it was not possible. We just wasted a lot of practice time that could have been used to make the car faster.

We sat down at night in the team debrief with both drivers. Newcomer Michael Schumacher listened and then said part of the track there had been resurfaced and there was a bump where the surfaces joined. Andrea insisted it should be flat as it was in previous years.

He went back to his hotel that night and over dinner spoke with Riccardo Patrese, who was driving for Williams. Riccardo said yes, there was a joint in the asphalt and there was no way to take it flat. Problem solved. We never heard of it again that weekend.

We heard during the race that one of Massa's rear tyres was questionable in terms of the Pirelli directive for temperature and pressure, which specifies a maximum of 110 degrees centigrade and minimum tyre pressures of 20.5psi. After the event he was excluded from the results.

To roughly explain how the two are linked, 10 degrees centigrade of tyre temperature equals about one psi. So if the tyres are at 137 degrees, you'd expect a pressure of 23.5psi. It was clearly not a tyre blanket problem as the measured pressure at that temperature was 20.6psi.

Lower rear tyre pressures give better traction, which is something that every driver wants.

Heating the tyres up to a high temperature will definitely not do it any good structurally or help compound grip, but on the circuit when the tyre cools down to about an average of 100 degrees the pressure will be reduced to about 17psi. This would definitely give better traction and consistency with less likelihood of overheating and rear tyre degradation.