The Final Stint: ESPN looks back on the main talking points from the Chinese Grand Prix
"Therefore we race"
"Nico is the same as Lewis and Lewis is the same as Nico when the shit hits the fan ... that's the way it is and therefore we race." You can always rely on Niki Lauda to get straight to the point. Even if you agree with Nico Rosberg's assertion that Lewis Hamilton compromised his race, it's hard to agree that Hamilton did anything underhand. Rosberg proved last year that he too can be utterly ruthless when a whiff of victory is in the air and there is nothing in the regulations that legislates against a driver controlling the pace from the front. After all, the last driver to win multiple world championships for a Mercedes works team, Juan Manuel Fangio, always drove with the stated objective of winning the race at the slowest speed possible.
It seems Rosberg's frustration was seated in Saturday's qualifying session. If he had gone 0.043s faster on his final qualifying lap - less than a blink of an eye according to Google - then he would have had the stronger hand in Sunday's race. Ahead of the race, the possibility of one Mercedes holding up the other was raised with both drivers in the engineering briefing on Sunday morning and both were warned about the opportunity it could create for Ferrari. In the end, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said Hamilton did not cross the line - it was a one-two victory after all - but if anything that will only compound Rosberg's frustration.
Hamilton winning the psychological battle
At the moment Hamilton must seem invincible to Rosberg. The German has beaten his team-mate just once in the last ten races and this year he has lost his qualifying advantage that regularly offered him a slither of hope last year. The current 17-point gap in the championship could easily be wiped out in a single race, but Rosberg will need more than Hamilton DNFs to start looking like a genuine title challenger again.
Hamilton, meanwhile, is looking even stronger than he did in 2014. At the last two races he has failed to improve during his second Q3 attempt in qualifying - a trait that saw him pipped by Rosberg from time to time last year - but such has been the quality of his banker laps that it can hardly be labelled as a weakness. His race in China was further proof, if it is still needed, that he can think his way through a race and look after his tyres as well as other parameters such as fuel consumption. Much like Sebastian Vettel during Red Bull's prime from 2010 to 2013, Hamilton is making his success look easy and that reflects badly on his team-mate.
The true pace of Ferrari
To say Ferrari's victory in Malaysia was a false dawn is unfair. Instead it should be seen as the first tangible sign of Maranello's long and arduous resurgence. Of all three race results this year, China was probably the most representative of where Ferrari stands - firmly in second place behind Mercedes but without the edge to really take the fight to the Silver Arrows, as team boss Maurizio Arrivabene explained...
"After Malaysia, okay, it was a big happiness for all of us, but here we were expecting exactly what happened. It is not news to us that Mercedes was very strong, our strategy was to be as close as possible to take advantages of any mistakes. It has happened exactly in line with what we had in mind and I think we have achieved our objectives."
Asked whether the Bahrain circuit would swing the pendulum back in Ferrari's favour next week, Arrivabene added: "If I'm going to say Mercedes has to be careful because we are going to win and give them a hard time ... you can see that everyone is laughing. What we are trying to do is our best to make you stop laughing."