As the Australian Grand Prix is over, now is a good time to see how everyone is reacting to the race in which Lewis Hamilton won, but only 15 cars started with 11 finishing.
Mercedes’ Nico Rosberg acknowledged that Hamilton was untouchable this weekend: “Lewis did a fantastic job this weekend, he drove like a world champion all weekend.” Rosberg went on to add: “I couldn’t quite beat him, I was trying every single lap all the way to the maximum and I will do all year. I’ll give him a big run for his money.”
Rosberg never really threatened Lewis today, but he certainly looked strong as the W06 never looked like being caught by the likes of Ferrari and Williams. However Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel was happy with his new team’s performance: “It is a great start to the season for us, we had a good winter already and we can be very proud,” Vettel said. "Of course it's not a victory, but for us today it feels like a victory. For us it's a nice relief after a horrible season [for Ferrari] last season."
Ferrari are enjoying somewhat of a revival so far this season and with Vettel in third and Kimi Raikkonen running fifth before an unsafe wheel caused an end to his race: “I’m not happy not to finish the race, but I still believe in good races. “In race pace we are not so far from Mercedes,” Raikkonen added.
Williams were right behind Ferrari throughout the Australian Grand Prix, but with Valterri Bottas not starting due to a back injury, they could only run one car, Felipe Massa finished fourth in the race and Pat Symons had a few words to say: “We have a bit of work to do, Ferrari are quicker than us. It was quite a difficult race tactically, we felt the way Vettel was right behind us he must be pretty quick, we had to avoid the undercut so we went early and we saw in those couple of laps that he was pretty quick.”
When asked should Bottas be unfit to ace in Malaysia, would Susie Wolff race in his place, Symonds was keen to dispel that theory: ““She is not actually our reserve driver, she is our test driver. With Valtteri we are getting good indications from the medical people.” When asked whether Williams have a reserve driver Symonds simply replied: “we don’t have one.”
McLaren ended an embarrassing weekend by their lofty standards as after Qualifying on the back row, Kevin Magnussen’s car broke down on the way to the grid. Jenson Button regained some pride back as he finished 11th. When asked about the importance of points, Jenson replied by saying they aren’t important.
“Points really don’t mean anything to us right now anyway, there is so much more to achieve and do really before we are competitive. But it was a good day for us to get to the end, the longest stint we had done before this weekend was 12 laps so I think that is pretty impressive.” The 35 year old said.
“We are still a long way off, but it is a good starting point. There was a lot of fuel saving during the race and it was pretty tough for me out there, but I still enjoyed, I had a battle for about 20 laps with Perez which I wasn’t expecting – I quite enjoyed that – and then I was just bringing it home. There was a lot of useful data there and hopefully it will give us a step forward in Malaysia.” Button added.
As Button crossed the line the McLaren pitwall didn’t sound happy with the result but took it: “Well done, mate. Not remotely where we want to be but we learned a lot.”
The funniest quote of the day came from Lewis Hamilton, as he met an idol of his on the podium. Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger took to the podium to conduct the post-race interviews, to which Hamilton replied: “I thought you were a lot taller!” Hamilton later admitted to being starstruck by the Hollywood star, and hoped he didn’t offend him.
Finally Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff praised the work of the mechanics and engineers back in Brackley and claimed it was pleasing to see the work pay off: ““It is so pleasing to see that all the hard work that has been done in the factory has come to a reward. The base of the car is incredible and if you have a faultless weekend like we had with both drivers then this is the result you can achieve.”