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The email that led to a Mercedes fightback

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Formula 1 / Japanese GP Analysis

The email that led to a Mercedes fightback

By:

Jonathan Noble

Oct 11, 2018, 10:08 AM

Blaming Ferrari's blunders for Mercedes surging to another Formula 1 world title is too simplistic. The Silver Arrows' turnaround played a massive part, and it started with a single email.

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It's too easy to look at Lewis Hamilton's march towards a likely fifth Formula 1 world championship and consider it as simply the result of Ferrari's failures.

The consensus at the moment is that Sebastian Vettel had a car that was more than capable of fighting for the title but - through driver errors, team management and strategy stumbles - he and Ferrari blew it.

Jonathan Noble

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Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.