Winning the team-mate wars

Formula 1 teams spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, or even millions, to find that extra tenth, or even few hundredths, of a second.

If you are spending that amount of money, it's essential that you have two drivers capable of performing. Some will argue that good or bad luck will influence the outcome, but seven race weekends is a good enough sample set to offer a reasonably accurate picture of relative performance.

Taking each driver's fastest lap of every grand prix weekend, turned into a percentage of the quickest overall and converted into a percentage, this is how the 11 pairs of team-mates stack up, with the most evenly matched first.

Interestingly, it shows that while the two Mercedes drivers are very close, that isn't the tightest battle on the grid.

TEAM-MATE RELATIVE PERFORMANCE (AS OF CANADIAN GRAND PRIX)

WILLIAMS
Felipe Massa
Valtteri Bottas +0.013%

MERCEDES
Nico Rosberg
Lewis Hamilton +0.054%

SAUBER
Adrian Sutil
Esteban Gutierrez +0.111%

McLAREN
Jenson Button
Kevin Magnussen +0.231%

CATERHAM
Kamui Kobayashi
Marcus Ericsson +0.237%

RED BULL
Daniel Riccardo
Sebastian Vettel +0.255%

FORCE INDIA
Nico Hulkenberg
Sergio Perez +0.274%

TORO ROSSO
Jean-Eric Vergne
Daniil Kyvat +0.342%

FERRARI
Fernando Alonso
Kimi Raikkonen +0.368%

MARUSSIA
Jules Bianchi
Max Chilton +0.529%

LOTUS
Romain Grosjean
Pastor Maldonado +0.856%

Williams pair Bottas and Massa are evenly matched © XPB

Williams and Mercedes have what every team wants: two drivers that will keep each other sharp and honest. They know that if they improve the car, the drivers will extract that extra performance.

But when you start to see gaps of 0.3 per cent or more, that equates to a big investment being made on developments that aren't being put to good use. In that situation, there needs to be a lot of money coming from the slower driver to justify it.

And if it is a driver that's being paid, then it's time for some face-the-facts discussions to take place. And perhaps even some big decisions.

The drivers outside of that 0.3 per cent cut-off are Kvyat, Raikkonen, Chilton and Maldonado. So there are three teams and drivers who have some thinking to do.

After all, with Mercedes pairing Rosberg and Hamilton the second-closest pair of team-mates, it's clear how essential it is to have drivers able to get the most out of the machinery.

This, of course, also means that there's a fierce battle between Rosberg and Hamilton that continued to rage in Canada before the latter retired.

It's looking very likely that the fight for the drivers' championship between the pair will go down to the wire at Abu Dhabi. So let's hope that what is shaping up to be a classic battle is not spoiled by more retirements, which have already cost Hamilton a lot of points.

Again, in Montreal, we saw flashpoints between the pair, notably at the first corner. Rosberg made a poor start, and was fairly heavy-handed with Hamilton, resulting in his team-mate having to take to the grass exiting Turn 1 and losing a place to Sebastian Vettel.

It could so easily have ended in tears for both of them. It's not the first time this year that there's been a dicey moment between the pair, and there will be many more to come.

The Mercedes battle continues to heat up © LAT

So far in 2014, Rosberg has two wins and five second places, with Hamilton on four victories and two runner-up spots.

The big difference is that Hamilton has two DNFs, in the season-opener in Australia and Canada. Could those two retirements prove to be the deciding factor in this classic battle?

Montreal showed how things can change very quickly. When Rosberg and Hamilton ran into Energy Recovery Systems (ERS) problems within a few seconds of each other, they were left limping.

The 160bhp available from the system would be worth 1.5-2 seconds per lap at a circuit like this, so for Rosberg to pull off a second place using only the conventional turbocharged 1.6-litre V6 engine required him to adapt very quickly.

This is something the top drivers can do: put in impressive laptimes even when they are battling major problems. It's about adapting, and it's much more difficult than it looks from the outside.

Before the season started, everyone said that if your ERS failed, you might as well park the car and walk away. But Mercedes was well prepared even for an unexpected problem.

You always want to do what you can to get a car home. And on Sunday, all the work Mercedes had done to understand what to do when things go wrong was crucial.

It's easy to win when everything is working, but it's when things go wrong that you need to have default modes to fall back on. In this case, it was worth an extra 18 points to Mercedes and Rosberg.

The main problem was that both drivers lost that extra horsepower, which equates to a slower laptime. But it's about more than that because the process of harvesting energy under braking from the rear wheels is now key to the braking system.

To save weight, the teams have designed this year's cars with lighter rear braking systems. Montreal is one of the hardest tracks on brakes, so you need all of your braking potential. Rosberg was able to come to terms with the fact that he had lost the ERS system's contribution to braking force, whereas the unfortunate Hamilton retired.

So while the two Mercedes cars disappeared into the distance for their own private battle, when these problems set in, the chasing pack soon closed in.

Ricciardo became the 105th driver to win an F1 race © XPB

It was a battle royal behind and in the end Daniel Ricciardo ended up with a much-deserved win. He has been hugely impressive all season, so this first victory, while unexpected, was very much merited.

There will be lots of teams simulating the change in performance of the Mercedes cars to try to understand how the team uses its 160bhp of ERS power.

They can do this by looking at a lap time in a section of the track and the top speeds, crunching the numbers to try to work out how that extra horsepower is deployed. This has been an area where Mercedes has excelled.

One thing that's happened more than ever is that F1 has become like Noah's Ark, with team-mates running two-by-two in races. Why? Well, most likely it's the new power unit, which has become a far bigger part of the performance equation than the old 2.4-litre V8s were.

To get the best from all the different torque outputs requires a lot of simulation work. Those with the best simulation tools will do the best job, but the problem is that this will all be done in the back of the garage and not for public consumption. This is why the analysis of how Mercedes does things could come in useful.

And what is essential is that you have two drivers capable of making the best of whatever you discover.