[Polo]

The issue isn’t that Mercedes aren’t letting their drivers race each other. Rosberg’s contract demands that he has equal status to Hamilton, and Toto Wolff has repeatedly reiterated that they are free to race.

The real explanation for why we haven’t seen much racing between the Mercedes teammates this year is because the new nose regulations have made it considerably more difficult to follow closely behind the car ahead (within 1 or 2 seconds, depending on how aerodynamically-dependant the circuit is).

There is another difference to last year. In 2014, Hamilton tended to make mistakes or have issues in qualifying, and so he often started behind Rosberg. Combined with the fact that the cars were pretty decent at following each other last year, this meant that we often saw the Mercedes fighting for position as Hamilton tried to fight back in the race.

This year, Hamilton has upped his game in qualifying and has out-qualified Rosberg 6-1 so far this season. In 2014, the only time Rosberg overtook Hamilton on track (with a healthy car) was in Bahrain, and he didn’t even make it stick as Hamilton took the position back each time. With cars that are much worse at following each other this year, it will be even more difficult for Rosberg to pull off an overtake on Hamilton.

We can also ask if Hamilton would be capable of overtaking Rosberg either – as Hamilton has never been running directly behind Rosberg this year we cannot be sure. But since Hamilton has had issues overtaking Vettel so far this year, I reckon that the lack of racing for the lead is mainly the result of the cars this year being very bad at following each other (this is probably the worst it’s been since the complex aero era prior to the 2009 rule changes).

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