A Retrospective of the 2014 Formula 1 Season Through the Lense of 2 Races

After four years of Red Bull supremacy, the 2014 Formula One season promised change. New engine regulations allowed each team to start fresh.

As it turned out, Mercedes produced a power unit far superior to those of Renault and Ferrari, setting their factory team up for a season more dominant than any of Red Bull's championship years.

However, the German team promised their drivers equal treatment and allowed them to race all season. This led to a thrilling battle for the drivers' championship, which was not settled until the final race in Abu Dhabi.

Meanwhile, the rest of the racing up and down the grid was also fantastic, from Nico Hulkenberg and Jules Bianchi's bold overtaking manoeuvres in Monaco to Sebastian Vettel's side-by-side skirmish with Fernando Alonso at Silverstone to Jean-Eric Vergne's late-season bid to save his F1 career.

Still, as the year went on, there was a noticeable, negative shift in the sport.

It was not a strictly linear progression. There were negative stories at the beginning of the year and there were positive positive ones at the end, but between the two races I covered on-site—the Canadian and U.S. Grands Prix—the tone shifted.

Those two races were separated by just five months, but the feeling in the paddock at each one was completely different.

The Canadian Grand Prix on June 8 was only the seventh of 19 races in 2014, but the trajectory for the season was already mapped out. Mercedes would win...and win...and win, again. In the end, the Silver Arrows would claim an inevitable constructors' title and one of their two drivers—Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg—would be crowned world champion.

Despite this knowledge, the mood in the paddock was upbeat and optimistic. Everywhere you turned, another feel-good story cast a warm glow over Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve.

True, the sport was still reeling from Michael Schumacher's skiing accident last December and there was a gathering storm in the form of financial troubles for several smaller teams, but the overall mood was positive.

In the Thursday press conference, the drivers joked about the upcoming FIFA World Cup. Adrian Sutil explained his Uruguayan roots and Kamui Kobayashi laughed that he didn't really know anything about football while Hamilton said he hoped to make it to Brazil for a match.

Later that day, I spoke with Alexander Rossi, then the reserve driver for Caterham. America's next great hope—if America has any F1-related hopes—was preparing for his first outing in the 2014 race car during Friday practice. 

He was nervous and excited and confident. He was ready, he said, to race in F1—a good sign for a sport still trying to make a splash in the U.S. market.

Paul Gilham/Getty Images

On Sunday, I interviewed Simona de Silvestro, who had just signed a contract with Sauber. She was working toward a race seat with the Swiss team in 2015. 

A woman has not started an F1 grand prix since 1976. De Silvestro, fresh from a promising four years in IndyCar, looked a decent bet to end that streak.

Marussia, meanwhile, were the toast of the paddock in Montreal, having finally scored their first-ever points at the previous race in Monaco.

Bianchi had muscled Kobayashi out of the way at La Rasacsse and then benefited from an overly optimistic attempted overtake by Kimi Raikkonen into the hairpin. The two points left the Banbury-based team primed for a big payday at the end of the season.

I sat down with team principal John Booth at breakfast on Friday. Booth, who helped bring the team into the sport in 2010 as Virgin Racing, was beaming with pride over the accomplishment of their "Little Engine That Could" outfit.

Paul Gilham/Getty Images

Then the race started and the two Mercedes cars sprinted out to a 30-second lead over the field. Rosberg had won the first and sixth races so far, with Hamilton taking the four in between. The only question as the race neared half-distance was which of the Merc drivers would win this time.

Here we go again.

But then, suddenly, the Silver Arrows began to slow. Word went around that they had a problem with their energy recovery systems (ERS), causing their brakes to overheat. The trailing cars started to reel them in.

In the first six races, the Mercs had finished one-two five times. The only blemish on their record came in the first race, when Hamilton retired on the second lap with an engine problem (after qualifying on pole).

Hamilton would eventually retire in Montreal, as well, but Rosberg fought on. The brake problem merely levelled the playing field—it did not guarantee victory for anyone else. Slowly, though, a group of cars that included Daniel Ricciardo caught the lone, suddenly vulnerable Mercedes.

On Lap 66 of 70, Ricciardo made a gutsy pass on Sergio Perez to move into second place, dropping two wheels onto the grass at Turn 2 to make the move stick. Two laps later, he blew past Rosberg into the final chicane—whose exit includes the infamous Wall of Champions—to take the lead. 

On the final lap, a scary accident between Perez and Felipe Massa brought out the safety car, clinching Ricciardo's victory, the first of his career.

It was a popular result, not only because it put a temporary hold on the Mercedes dominance, but also because of Ricciardo's endearing personality. I followed him around for an hour after the race, gathering quotes, and the smile that already never seemed to leave his face only grew wider.

By the time I rejoined the F1 travelling road show in Austin at the end of October, the mood was different. Travelling around the globe and back for 16 races in seven months could make anyone tired and frustrated, but this was something different.

Gone was the sunny optimism of the spring and summer, replaced by low-lying clouds threatening to eclipse one of the most exciting seasons of racing in recent memory.

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment this year's championship took a nosedive into negativity, but looking back, it is clear that it was a long time coming.

On October 1, following longstanding reports that a number of teams were in financial trouble, assets were seized from Caterham's Leafield base. A remarkable back-and-forth followed between the team's original owner, Tony Fernandes, and its supposed new owners (and here we veer dangerously close to Dan Brown territory), a group of unnamed Swiss and Middle-Eastern investors.

There were arguments about who actually owned the team, whether money or shares had changed hands and who was responsible for the team's debt and the mess at Leafield. In the end, the team made it to the Japanese and Russian Grands Prix but failed to turn up in Austin.

Marussia also entered administration and failed to make the trip to the United States, although that was far from the team's biggest problem.

Bianchi's terrible crash at the Japanese Grand Prix was a jolt to an F1 world that had become accustomed to drivers regularly walking away from crashes that would likely have been fatal just 10 or 15 years ago (the Perez-Massa crash in Montreal being a good example).

The loss of two teams and a driver—Bianchi remains in critical condition, although he has been flown from Japan to a hospital in his native France, per the latest update from his family—has been a big blow for the sport.

Rossi, meanwhile, was a casualty of the problems at Caterham and Marussia. So confident in Montreal, he nearly made his race debut at the Belgian Grand Prix after moving to Marussia, when regular driver Max Chilton's sponsorship money did not come through.

The team announced on the Thursday before the race that Rossi would be in the car on Sunday, only to have the rug pulled out from underneath him when Chilton's financiers suddenly came through. Marussia let him drive in the first free practice session on Friday morning before breaking the news that Chilton was taking his car back.

By the time everyone arrived in Austin, Rossi was missing more than a race seat. With neither of his former teams showing up at U.S. Grand Prix, he was hanging around the paddock, along with Caterham drivers Kamui Kobayashi and Marcus Ericsson, looking for a drive for next season.

In the end, it was Ericsson who pulled off a coup, nabbing a 2015 race seat at Sauber from under the noses of a stable of drivers that included Sutil, Esteban Gutierrez, Giedeo van der Garde, Sergey Sirotkin and de Silvestro in the last year.

The team principals' press conference on Friday in Austin had a completely different look and feel to the light and fun Thursday presser in Montreal. With whispers of a potential boycott from the three smallest remaining teams—Lotus, Sauber and Force India—over escalating costs and unfair revenue distribution, it promised to be contentious.

As the team principals arrived, the room was a dry haystack, waiting for a match. Toto Wolff of Mercedes and Eric Boullier of McLaren sat in the front row, while Lotus' Gerard Lopez, Sauber's Monisha Kaltenborn and Force India's Vijay Mallya sat behind them.

For the next hour, Wolff and Boullier faced a hostile audience and fended off questions left and right about why their teams would not agree to a more equitable distribution of the sport's income to help ensure the survival of the smaller outfits. 

Wolff and Boullier are both interesting people to listen to, thoughtful and intelligent. Predictably, though, neither was willing to concede a dollar of the windfall the top teams collect every year.

The Sunday boycott did not occur and F1 CEO Bernie Ecclestone issued a surprising mea culpa for the sorry position the sport is in...but offered little in the way of a solution. The problems have not been solved and the small teams will continue to face an uncertain future in 2015.

Two races later, in Abu Dhabi, Hamilton claimed the drivers' championship in anti-climactic fashion, jumping ahead of Rosberg at the start and staying ahead for the entire race. It did not help that Rosberg's car suffered an ERS problem, ultimately relegating him to a 14th-place finish.

Clive Rose/Getty Images

With the season done, we can now look forward to next year.

Hopefully 2015 will bring good news for Schumacher and Bianchi, as well as Marussia and Caterham—at least their workforces, if not the teams themselves. 

The exciting racing should continue and, with an extra off-season of development, fans can be hopeful that some of the Renault- and Ferrari-powered teams will close the gap to Mercedes.

But there are also more storm clouds on the horizon. There is a push for knee-jerk changes to the engine regulations and the unequal distribution of revenue continues, among other problems.

F1 is a huge business and is not going anywhere, but the sport could certainly use more feel-good stories in the new year. 

In the end, though, the 2014 season had a bit of everything that makes people watch the sport: political drama, tragedy, advanced technology and exciting racing.

It is just unfortunate that, several times, the racing played second fiddle to the politics and the tragedy.

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