Ataxia wrote:GerhardTalger wrote:mario wrote:I think that the point is that, at the time, Williams had the choice of either getting rid of Rubens or getting rid of Hulkenberg in order to accommodate Maldonado.
It's not that Williams necessarily thought that Maldonado was better than Hulkenberg, rather that Rubens was considered to be of higher value to the team that Hulkenberg and therefore they were happier to sacrifice him rather than Rubens. When you're an aspiring young driver, it's a bit galling that a team thinks that a 37 year old veteran is a better long term bet for them than you are, which is effectively what Williams were saying at the time.
That was sort of my point. At least Maldonado proved to be somewhat decent by that one win, unlike Bruno Senna.
That's more than The Hulk has shown.
Yeah, producing the goods week in, week out means he's not decent...wait, what?
We're talking about a guy who was consistently good last year. Fine, he didn't reach the heights of, say, his teammate who bagged 3rd at Bahrain (it's an oft-neglected fact that Hulkenberg had energy-harvesting problems that evening; he'd have fought for that podium otherwise), but all of the other results that Perez drew praise for were results that were Hulkenberg's bread and butter.
I don't really know what more Hulkenberg can do to prove himself in the cars he's had. His rookie year was hit-and-miss, but most are anyway. He beat Di Resta at Force India, demolished Gutierrez at Sauber and easily had the edge on Perez last year. What more do you want, him to slide under the table and stroke your bollocks?
That said, whilst Hulkenberg did eventually beat di Resta, it has to be said that it wasn't really until the final few races of the 2012 season where he looked to have a clear advantage over him.
After the Korean GP, Hulkenberg only lead di Resta by one point (45 to 44) and had the same number of finishes in the points (eight apiece). The bulk of Hulkenberg's points came right at the end of the 2012 season, and Force India did later reveal that period of dominance by Hulkenberg coincided with a period in which di Resta's chassis had been damaged and suffered from a loss of torsional stiffness, which did take a bit of the shine off Hulkenberg's relative performance.
In that year, whilst Hulkenberg did eventually finish on a high, the problem was that it came far too late in the season to really influence any of the contract talks - his best performances came after almost every other team had already signed their drivers for 2013. If you were to have made a decision based on his performances over the first three quarters of the season, I think that most observers would have put him on a similar level to di Resta.
As for Gutierrez, it's arguable whether beating him really gave him that much credit - the problem there is that the general expectation in the paddock was that Hulkenberg would thrash Gutierrez, so his relative performance against him was more or less what was expected of him.
Furthermore, given that Sauber had had a relatively strong 2012 season, I think that there was an expectation that they would be reasonably strong - after all, Sauber had scored 126 points with Perez and Kobayashi, and Newey himself had spoken positively of the C31, so there probably was an expectation that the C32 would carry on from where the C31 had left off.
Part of the problem, therefore, is that whilst I would agree that Hulkenberg is a solid driver, I still think that some team bosses have some uncertainty over him given that his team mates have not always been the strongest contenders.
It's something that has probably been seen before, whether here or on some other forum. In fact, the idea itself is from another forum I frequented a few years ago and was usually the only place I posted on that forum. That game died eventually. Anyway, this is only going to be an off-season game, so it will hopefully only be "put away" while the F1 season's on.
) shows you posted about 1,000 times across the 5 threads. So a good 10 times as much as you thought.
