Was Nico Rosberg's title win over Lewis Hamilton in 2016 overrated?

The 2016 F1 season is often described as the one where the Nico Rosberg-Lewis Hamilton battle ended. This was the fourth year the two were teammates, and the rivalry's intensity had just reached a new high. This was also the only year that Hamilton eventually lost to Rosberg at the end of the season.

The result? Well, Rosberg became a world champion just like his dad was at one time, and soon after, he called time on his career. Over the years, Rosberg has been praised by many as the driver who beat Hamilton in the same car and in the same team with everything else being equal.

That has been a major part of his legacy where the driver has often talked about the kind of sacrifices that he had to make in his life to finally beat his arch-rival. This is also defined as one season that truly exemplified what Rosberg was as a driver and what he ended up accomplishing in the same car as the F1 legend Hamilton.

While there's certainly merit to this as being teammates with Lewis Hamilton is not easy, does the Nico Rosberg title win get blown out of proportion? Is it a campaign that is possibly a bit overrated at this stage? Let's revisit the campaign to get a better idea of how we can judge that season.

So to form a more educated opinion on how this season went, we'll take a look at the races where Rosberg finished ahead of Hamilton in the race. We'll divide these results into one of the following 4 categories that are:

• Driver Error (Where the rival's driver error contributed to the result)
• Reliability Issue (Where reliability played a role)
• Won in a straight fight (Where the rival was beaten in a straight fight with no external factors)
• Luck (Where the rival's result was impacted by something other than an error on his side or a reliability issue)

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Assessing Nico Rosberg's win against Lewis Hamilton

Driver Error

4 (Australia, Bahrain, Baku, Monza)

A fixture of Lewis Hamilton's 2016 F1 season was his inability to get on top of a weakness in terms of nailing his starts. The British driver's arguably biggest weakness proved to be those poor starts as it hurt him in 4 different races.

He started the race in pole position in Australia, Bahrain, and Monza. In all three of those races, he'd lost the lead at the start, ceding advantage to Rosberg. At Baku, the driver crashed out in qualifying after a dominant display in practice and hence ended up ceding further ground to his title rival.

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Reliability issue

4 (China, Russia, Spa, Malaysia)

We just cannot ignore the fact that Lewis also had an uphill battle when it comes to reliability issues in 2016. The driver suffered in different race weekends like the one in China, Russia, and Spa, and arguably the biggest blow was in Malaysia where he was comfortably leading but the Mercedes power unit gave up.

The problem with these issues was that the PU would give up on Saturday and then the driver would try to compensate in the race and still end up conceding points to his title rival.

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Won in a straight fight

2 (Singapore, Suzuka)

It is very interesting however that out of the 10 times that Rosberg finished ahead of Hamilton, he only beat his rival twice in a head-to-head battle. The German was just untouchable around Singapore in 2016 where the Brit had an off day and when we move to the race in Suzuka, it was the ability to nail that qualifying lap that helped him secure pole position.

With Hamilton fumbling another start in Suzuka, the path was clear for Rosberg to secure another win.

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Luck

1 (Barcelona)

The one race where we could claim that Lewis Hamilton and arguably even Nico Rosberg were unlucky was in Barcelona where both drivers ended up colliding. The move was deemed a racing incident and no one was penalized. Although it's safe to say that the drivers would have been gutted because looking at the performance levels of the cars, if either had survived, a podium would have been a possibility.

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Conclusion

Now, this is where things get interesting. There were 10 races in total where Nico Rosberg finished ahead of Lewis Hamilton. With that being said, the appalling state is however the fact that the German driver could only beat his teammate twice in a straight fight with no outside interference.

Other than that, 40% of his advantage came through Lewis making mistakes while the other 40% came through reliability issues. When you add all that up, does it mean that even though Rosberg beat the F1 legend, it wasn't as impressive?

Well, that's for our readers to decide. There are two schools of thought here. The first is that Lewis should not have been making that many mistakes and that Rosberg did what he had to with the tools at his disposal. The other is that it was possibly not a fair fight and you have to convincingly beat your rival to claim the win.

On our side, we've laid the facts on the table. Now, it's on our viewers to take a call on what side they want to be on.