Grand Prix Rejects

1. Grid penalties - I think this weekend finally highlighted to the wider world how utterly ludicrous the system is. Nearly half the grid having a penalty of some sort is not a good look for Formula One.

2. Honda - Standard procedures.

Honourable mention to the race itself, which proved once again that this current generation of F1 cars simply cannot provide entertaining, close racing at Monza. The race looks even worse when you compare it to the pair of F2 races this weekend.

1. Alonso - kept whining about Palmer even though the gap increased to well over 7 seconds quite soon after the incident.
2. Grid penalties - it's quite ridiculous when half of the grid don't start where they qualified.

1st. Drivers crying. Alonso's obsession with Palmer today was a bit sad, and Magnussen whining about Verstappen after he basically drove himself off the road.

2nd. Ferrari. Nowhere near Mercedes today, and may have found themselves 3rd best had Red Bull not had engine penalties.

1. McLaren: What can I say? Qualifying was OK but everything else went wrong. Both drivers had a lot of grid penalties. Vandoorne's car broke down while he was running in the points (I think this is the fourth time this season McLaren has lost a points finish to a failure). Alonso ran the whole race near the back, kept complaining about Palmer (which I found hilarious) and also retired in the end.
2. Renault: Never looked like contenders for a good result. A really disappointing weekend after the improvement they have shown lately. And Palmer's car broke yet again.

1. ALL The Grid Penalties -- Might as well not run qualy.

2. Ferrari -- For title contenders, they were very, very mild today.

Enforcer wrote:1st. Drivers crying. Alonso's obsession with Palmer today was a bit sad, and Magnussen whining about Verstappen after he basically drove himself off the road.

2nd. Ferrari. Nowhere near Mercedes today, and may have found themselves 3rd best had Red Bull not had engine penalties.

I have to agree with driver complaints over the radio being pretty tedious - Alonso seemed unusually rattled by Palmer, and I'd agree that, it looked more like Magnussen was too busy trying to outbrake Verstappen that he completely missed his braking point and drove himself off the road. Frankly, Magnussen wasn't driving that cleanly himself - he chopped across Kvyat's nose more than once when he was trying to pass Magnussen on the main straight.

I have to agree with Meatwad too that Renault were poor today - Hulkenberg burned through his tyres very rapidly, whilst Palmer's breakdown just capped things off (he sounded pretty dejected over the radio when they told him to retire). I guess that I'll probably go with driver radio whinges as the first choice and Renault as second, though there were quite a few candidates.

1. Grid penalties- for the reasons given above.
2. Nick De Vyries and GP3 driving standards.
De Vyries by pushing Leclerc off cost himself a chance for the win (handing the win to Fouco) as Ghiotto could not let him back through.
The GP3 driving standards meanwhile were terrible this morning.

1. Grid penalties
2. Driver's whining all around the grid

Grid penalties: when only the pole sitter starts where he qualified it is time to get rid
the race: or lack of it... lol

Grid penalties: Sergio Perez qualified eleventh. He got a five-place penalty and started tenth.

Romain Grosjean: It just feels appropriate.

Grid Penalties - Bore off F1 with your stupid rules
McLaren/Honda- Bore off with your rubbish cars

1) Alonso
2) Race itself

RoTR:
1. Grid Penalties: while it was nice (for GPR readers at least) to see a weird front row with Stroll on it, it did become a little bit of a joke when Grosjean managed to line up mid-grid (and about where he usually starts) despite crashing after setting only one non-competitive time all session. A system docking WCC points (like in the BTCC) would make far more sense at this point.
2. Palmer: While not quite as bad as Alonso felt he was, he did make by far the most mistakes of any driver in the race and was the slowest of the Renault-powered drivers by some way. The fact he made the exact same error of judgement with the exact same driver a mere week before does not reflect well on his racecraft either.

DHM:
Alonso: He is moaning just a little too much now...
Honda: ...mind you, Honda was predictably useless, lacking speed, drivability or reliability with both cars
The gap between Merc/Ferrari/Red Bull to everyone else: it is a shame that talented drivers such as Ocon or even Stroll can't even show a little defensive skill because they will be several car lengths behind a Mercedes by the end of a straight, thanks to DRS. As a result, fifth was the very best anyone bar a Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull could hope for, and that was only because of Raikkonen's setup issues and Verstappen's puncture

Aislabie wrote:Grid penalties: Sergio Perez qualified eleventh. He got a five-place penalty and started tenth.

I was going to stay out of ROTR for this race. But now that you put it like that... sixteen points for Grid Penalties and none for anything else.

I was wondering why The Rejects Podcast had dried up, but I saw Enoch had left a comment that said "F1 seems so hell-bent on satirising itself, we didn't think we needed to any more." This statistic sums up why Enoch was right.

1. Ferrari
2. McLaren-Honda

1. Grid penalties - For all reasons already mentioned.
2. Drivers whining - Cut it. At some point it just stops being funny.

Verstappen...or at least his early laps 'luck' again. He's got a quick chassis (see Ricciardo) he can afford to be a little more circumspect early on.

Haas, earlier season promise slipping away.

At risk of sounding petulant but hear me out...

1. Mercedes
With Hamilton on pole and three Mercedes powered cars between him and Vettel, this was a chance for Hamilton to build up a nice points lead in the championship before a very tricky round in Singapore (and I'd possibly favour Ferrari around most of the other circuits from now on too). Instead, Vettel passed both Ocon and Stroll by lap 8 on what is meant to be a power circuit. Perhaps if Force India and Williams had the latest versions of the Mercedes engines they could have held back the Ferraris for far longer and maybe Vettel would have finished worse than P3; certainly Ricciardo was close by the end. As it is, there is a very real chance that Mercedes will be behind both Ferrari and Red Bull in Singapore and therefore surrender Hamilton's lead back to Vettel by a considerable margin. Surely Monza would have been a very good time to bring their customers up to spec?

2. Grid penos
I'll follow the crowd on this one.

1. Grid Penalties: For example, my mind was blown when Perez qualified 11th and was given a 5 grid spot penalty only to start 10th!

2. Ferrari: Really? And at your home Grand Prix.

watka wrote:At risk of sounding petulant but hear me out...

1. Mercedes
With Hamilton on pole and three Mercedes powered cars between him and Vettel, this was a chance for Hamilton to build up a nice points lead in the championship before a very tricky round in Singapore (and I'd possibly favour Ferrari around most of the other circuits from now on too). Instead, Vettel passed both Ocon and Stroll by lap 8 on what is meant to be a power circuit. Perhaps if Force India and Williams had the latest versions of the Mercedes engines they could have held back the Ferraris for far longer and maybe Vettel would have finished worse than P3; certainly Ricciardo was close by the end. As it is, there is a very real chance that Mercedes will be behind both Ferrari and Red Bull in Singapore and therefore surrender Hamilton's lead back to Vettel by a considerable margin. Surely Monza would have been a very good time to bring their customers up to spec?

2. Grid penos
I'll follow the crowd on this one.

I don't think that it would have made a huge difference in the end because, when you look at the lap time differential, both Ferrari's had a fairly sizeable performance advantage.

Once he passed them, Vettel opened up a gap at about 0.7s a lap, and even on tyres he'd used for 30 laps he could still lap faster than Ocon and Stroll when they were on fresher tyres (albeit on the soft compound). Kimi, meanwhile, might have had his own troubles, but he was still around 0.5s a lap quicker.

I expect that, in reality, even if Vettel had more difficulty in passing them on track, he could have relied on strategy to get past instead. Ferrari would have had a few strategic options - they could have pitted earlier and gained track position, or used Kimi to bait Ocon and Stroll into early pit stops and run Vettel in clear air, gaining track position by running longer on the softer tyres given their pace advantage.

It also has to be said that, although Vettel was running slower towards the end after a power steering issue, it sounds as if he probably could have pushed harder if he wanted to - he talked about managing the gap to Ricciardo, and towards the end he did noticeably pick his pace up (being able to match Ricciardo's lap times, despite the latter pushing pretty hard), suggesting he had pace in hand and had probably turned down the engine to save it for later in the season.

1. Grid Penalties
2. Grosjean

1. Alonso - stop being a petulant prat. Vandoorne has to use the same equipment as you and you don't hear him ranting all the time. Indeed plenty of drivers have equipment they can't be competitive in, such as the Sauber drivers. Oh and Palmer was penalised - what do you want, his blood? Sorry but he really irked me here.

2. Ferrari - nowhere on home soil, indeed Vettel would most likely have not made the podium had Red Bull started further up the grid.

I didn't mind the grid penalties as such; at least it mixed things up, the race would have been really boring without them.

1. Tie between Honda and Grid Penalties - Standard Procedures
2. The Race itself - Above.

And so the results are in! (I'm totally not trying to get this over with before Singapore so that for half a week I can say that I am caught up with the predicaments championship) and so here are the results!

1. Grid penalties 137
2. McLaren-Honda 43
3. Ferrari 34
4. Driver radio (whining) 32
5. Fernando Alonso 20
6. The race 18
7. Renault 12
- Romain Grosjean 12
9. Verstappen's luck 10
- Mercedes 10
11. Jolyon Palmer 6
- Haas 6
13. Nick de Vyries 3
- GP3 driving standards 3

The outright winner was the outrageous grid penalties that took place between qualifying and the race - seriously, just look at the wikipedia article and the number of "notes" explaining the qualifying results as they relate to the grid position. Just insane, and took an already somewhat-unpopular rule and threw it in people's faces. Well, the people responded by awarding it reject of the race The runner-up was a regular in our ROTR feature: McLaren-Honda, for their poor performance, car breakages, presumably also Alonso's whinging on the radio (see 4th place). They have not yet won ROTR for any races this year, and grid penalties are our first non-driver award to be handed out this season!