F1-Blog

It was a fine race in Spain, not as fine as the Spanish fans would have like though. Fernando Alonso finished the race in third, behind Lewis Hamilton and winner Felipe Massa.

The race was splattered with incidents, with the one into the first corner between Massa and Alonso ruining the race for the Spaniard as he was on a short first stint.

Hamilton could just not keep up with the winning Ferrari early on, and eventually finished 6.7 seconds behind Massa.

Further down the field was where the surprises showed. The Ferrari of Kimi Raikonen showed that the F2007 is not infallible. Kimi retired with suspected electronics issues on lap 9.

Robert Kubica managed to take his BMW into the fourth spot, with his best run this season, the BMW was also not without issues, as Nick Heidfeld’s gearbox failed and he lost a certain fifth spot, this after he had already been involved in a pit incident where the pit crew let him out before one of the bolts was put on his front wheel.

The Red Bull showed that the pace in testing was not all hot air, and David Coulthard had a great race to bring the Adrian Newy RB03 into it’s first points finish of the season after a great battle with Heikki Kovalainen (who stopped three times in the race) in the Renault. Both of the Renault’s had to re-pit after a failure with the fuel filler system during there second stops. Nico Rosberg managed to come in behind David Coulthard and ahead of Kovalainen in the Toyota powered Williams R27. There was bad news for the Red Bull team, as there seamless shift gearbox developed a fault in Coulthards car towards the end of the race, as Coulthard was shifting from second to fourth for the last section of the race. This will be fixed though on the new gearbox’s second outing I’m sure.

The Super Aguri of Takuma Sato managed to get the last point of the race. The first point for the Honda B team.

After a surprise performance in qualifying, the Toyota’s were the let down of the race. First off the start was delayed by the stalled TF106 of Jarno Trulli, later he retired as it was a fuel pressure issue that caused him to stall. It then seemed that the same problem affected Ralf Schumacher who also retired his car.

The result of the race is that Lewis Hamilton’s rise to stardom continues. He is now the youngest ever leader of the F1 Championship (eclipsing Bruce McLaren) he said “I keep saying I am living my dream and it’s really true. I’ve been working so hard, and to come out of my fourth grand prix leading the world championship, driving with top drivers in world, is just incredible.”