To be fair @fer-no65 your stat isn’t actually quite right; he got off fine fantastic in Melbourne; and was good in Shanghai considering he was on the less-grippy tyre. Turkey; similarly he got off ok if I remember correctly, but the massively dirty side in Turkey hampered him. Monaco he got off alright, just that Alonso made a killer start. Canada shouldn’t be counted as it was a rolling start. Don’t remember his other starts, though I most of them are probably dreadful starts.
Barrichello had a similar problem in 2009 if I remember correctly. Whenever he was near Jenson in qualifying, he would fluff it. I think a large part of it is the fact that Seb has dominated Mark for the whole year; and so when Mark is starting close to Seb; he kind of gets “nervous” of sorts and puts too much pressure on himself to get things right.
His feel for the Pirellis in low-speed traction has been horrible, sorry to say, and I think this could be hampering him. At times he does the 1st phase fine (releasing the clutch and letting the car lurch forward) but fluffs the second, equally important “traction” phase (where they go from launch revs to slowly go up to full power).
I think his lackluster feel for traction in the slow speed this year has also hurt him in the starts in this regard. Given how many people wonder about this I talked to several old colleagues still working around the paddock; and most seem to note that the Pirellis are very tricky to work with in terms of static friction – the window for a good launch is very narrow; around 180RPM (90 up, 90 down). Considering they launch at about 13000RPM; this is about 0.7% variance up and down from how much you press the pedal – not easy.
