Which Mercedes Driver Has Had Worse Luck in 2014: Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg
"We don't want to have the spin that the championship was decided because one car let the driver down," said Toto Wolff, the boss of Mercedes' motor racing activities, to BBC Sport's Andrew Benson after last month's Singapore Grand Prix.
The Austrian was speaking with mixed feelings having just witnessed Lewis Hamilton take an ultimately comfortable victory—his seventh of the year—at the Marina Bay street circuit in a race which began with the retirement of Nico Rosberg, who started the day as the world championship leader but ended it as the chaser through no fault of his own.
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It seems odd that a team that has won 11 of this season's 14 races thus far should be so beset with worry, yet that is the price Mercedes have paid for having the fastest car on the grid but also one of the most brittle.
The worst-case scenario for the Silver Arrows is that the destiny of the drivers' title will be decided by luck and reliability.
And it would be particularly cruel on the team—not to mention their drivers—if that were to be the case, with Mercedes playing an instrumental role in producing one of the most compelling, intense Formula One seasons in recent memory by openly promoting equality and hard, fair competition between Hamilton and Rosberg.
But whoever finishes second in the standings when the final chequered flag of the campaign falls in next month's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix will—even with five races still to go—have few problems identifying the key moments which prevented them from claiming the crown.
The general consensus is that had reliability not been an issue in 2014, Hamilton would already have one hand on the title.
A hypothetical drivers' championship produced by The Telegraph's Daniel Johnson, however, attempted to dispel the myth, with the writer's race-by-race estimations resulting in the British driver enjoying a five-point advantage over Rosberg, rather than the three-point gap he holds over the German in reality.
"I've made some mistakes but also had some bad luck in Championship race http://t.co/BlX50mQlX1 pic.twitter.com/M9LPZEz4LO
— Lewis Hamilton (@LewisHamilton) July 25, 2014"
Hamilton has, nevertheless, endured a great deal of bad luck since the beginning of the season, instantly falling 25 points behind Rosberg after retiring from pole position in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.
His career-best run of four consecutive wins in the Malaysian, Bahrain, Chinese and Spanish grands prix—the only events which have been contested on truly even ground between the Mercedes pair this year—allowed him to take seven points per race out of the German's early lead, fuelling the belief that Hamilton would have been long gone had luck not intervened.
The 2008 world champion's problems between Spain and Italy—from unforced errors, brake failures and fires in qualifying sessions to bad starts and contact with other drivers, including Rosberg—have been well-documented, but much less has been made of the effect that bad luck has had on the opposite side of the garage.
And while it is true that Rosberg has suffered fewer niggles than Hamilton over the course of the opening 14 races—despite the post-Singapore claim of Paddy Lowe, Mercedes' technical executive director, to BBC Sport's Andrew Benson that it was "reasonably even in terms of how we've let them down"—the German's difficulties have a habit of occurring at the worst possible moments: just as he has looked like escaping from his rivals' clutches.
Hamilton's retirement from the Canadian Grand Prix with a brake issue due to an overheating MGU-K, as Wolff confirmed to F1 journalist Adam Cooper, was a problem shared by Rosberg, who succeeded in managing the problem for around half the race to eventually finish second behind Daniel Ricciardo.
Although he was considered fortunate to even reach the finish line at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, he was unlucky to miss out on victory after holding on to the lead until the final two laps, missing out on seven points that all these months later would have proven to be valuable.
Two rounds later at Silverstone, Rosberg was nursing a 29-point advantage over Hamilton in the standings and seemingly on course for his second successive victory—after winning in Austria—when a gearbox problem forced the German to retire from the lead.
The British driver, who was gaining on Rosberg at the time of his teammate's halt, inherited the win and, more significantly, cut the gap to just four points in a single race.
In Hungary, meanwhile, Rosberg led the field by a comfortable margin of over 10 seconds, as per the FIA television feed, at the time of the deployment of the safety car for Marcus Ericsson's crash—which in hindsight proved to be the turning point in this game of luck—reeling the German into the midst of the chasing pack.
Unable to recover on a tight and twisty track, he went on to finish fourth, one place behind Hamilton, who despite starting from the rear of the field, did benefit from the neutralising effect of the safety car and took three points out of Rosberg.
The German regained a 29-point lead after Hamilton's retirement in Belgium, but his gifting of the win to his teammate in Italy before those miserable 13 laps in Singapore after, according to the official F1 website, qualifying just seven thousandths adrift of the No. 44 car the previous day, left him unable to capitalize once more.
Much has been made of Hamilton's struggles with bad luck and reliability this season, and while it may be true that the British driver might have more than 241 points on the board if his car had been bullet-proof, it could be argued that Rosberg would have more than 238 points to his name if he were immune to bad luck.
So which Mercedes driver has had worse luck this season?
Well, that depends on what you deem to be more costly: the sheer regularity of misfortune or the significance of the moments when it occurs.
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