Yeah, some fans can be a bit much. I love watching Lewis race, and I'm a big fan, but Rosberg deserved that championship and built the foundation of his charge on the back of four superb wins at the start of the season, catching Hamilton napping and underestimating Nico. You always need a bit of luck in F1, even in the modern era of bulletproof cars. But, really, after watching this race, I can't help but miss the guy. It makes you wonder how the combination of the Hamilton/Rosberg rivalry would have played out with Vettel and Ferrari challenging more and more in the last two years.
Wut?
Built the foundation of his charge on the back of four superb wins at the start?
Ham was crashed into in turn one of the second race.
Hams engine relegated him from qualifying sessions of the third and fourth race.
With very few working engine components left, he had to race without pushing too hard.
Those engine issues meant that by Spa came around, Ham had to start plumb last after taking penalties to replace the blown engine parts.
Despite Rosberg being gifted 75 points due to all this in a car that nobody else could challenge him in, by Malaysia he only had an 8 point lead over Hamilton.
In that Malaysian race, Lewis who was leading comfortably and on pace to take the lead of the championship by a good margin had his engine turn into a ball of flames and instead dropped 23 points behind Nico.
The next race, Hamilton had an issue with his car at the start which meant he was in P8 by the time he got to turn 1.
By the end of the season, despite all this, Nico only won with a 5 point advantage.
Securing 98 points purely from mechanical issues of your nearest rival, ruining your own races multiple times by being unable to race wheel to wheel properly and getting penalties, and yet only winning by 5 points at the end of the season is an interesting way of describing a "deserved" champion imo.
He won because the only other car on the grid (that mattered) was hampered from the very beginning. He drove better than he did in other seasons (and even thats debatable since he ended up getting penalties almost every time he had to actually race against someone and not just lead from P1), but you take that driving and apply it to any situation where Hamiltons car wasn't exploding every other race for the first half of the season and beyond and its quite obvious that his driving wasn't what gave him the advantage.
You can call people who say his championship doesn't count ridiculous, but you're not exactly looking any better if you're sitting there saying that the deciding factor in the 2016 championship was "a bit of luck", "superb wins" where the only person who could challenge was knocked physically or mechanically out of the running and Lewis "underestimating Nico".
There were clearly other much more damaging factors, that had nothing to do with whether Nico was driving well or not.
