F1-Blog

Turkey a full runthrough

The Turkish GP again did not disappoint. We had all sorts of drama in the race, both on and off the track.

The Ferrari’s where surprisingly not as far ahead of the McLaren’s as we thought they would be, and the BMW-Sauber’s where miles off the pace. So it seems to have all moved at the top.

The race started with the McLaren cars on the harder tyre compounds and the Ferrari’s running the softer option tyres.

The first corner saw Lewis get the jump on Heikki, and took the second spot, whilst Heikki and Kimi had a small coming together, causing Heikki to pit for a puncture.

At the back of the field Fisichella was far too hot into the first corner, and out braked himself, launching the Force India over the Williams of Nakajima, causing a retirement for both drivers, and a couple of laps under the safety car to clean up the mess.

The race settled into a nice rhythm, with Massa leading by just a second or two over Lewis, and Kimi and Robert a little further back, as the two leaders were constantly quicker than the rest of the pack.

First to pit was the Renault of Fernando, showing that the Q3 pace, was down to light load’s in the car, but more of a surprise was that Lewis pitted shortly after, this showed that the McLaren team were running a very strange three stop race strategy. It turns out that Bridgestone were so worried about rear tyre wear on the MP4-23 that they forced the team to run three stops on race day.

This forced Lewis to drive out of his skin, and he caught and then overtook Massa in the lead, and then proceeded to romp off into the distance. Unfortunately for the Brit though, he could not make up the 25 seconds required to actually challenge for the win, even though the McLaren was clearly the most hooked up car on the track at that moment in time.

He did however manage to come in and go out on his third stop, and stay ahead of Kimi, but then seemed to struggle on the soft option compound tyres in the McLaren, and could not catch Massa, and in fact was struggling to keep Kimi at bay.

Further back, the BMW-Sauber of Robert Kubica was certainly not in the same league as either the McLaren of Ferrari’s this weekend, and as such they finished fourth and fifth.

Fernando showed that the Renault is certainly improving, and took sixth spot with a trouble free race, behind him was Mark Webber in the Red Bull with a strong performance from the Australian.

Nico brought the sole Williams in for the last point, and beat the factory Toyota drivers who finished down in tenth and thirteenth with a poor race day, after both showing pace in Qualifying.

Jenson again out paced his more experienced team mate and took eleventh, with Rubens finishing fourteenth on his 257th race.

Heikki brought his McLaren in twelfth after his problems at the start of the race, and showed that he is not afraid to pass the opposition, in fact if the team had have fuelled the McLaren to the end of the race, and not forced him to stop with seven laps remaining he would have made the points positions, a good strong recovery drive.

So we now head to Monaco, where historically the McLaren’s are stronger than the Ferrari’s, as they usually are at the Canadian race that follows.

So can McLaren take the fight to the Ferrari’s on the tracks that usually suit the cars, or can Ferrari bring a car that likes the tight twisty Monaco, and the bumps and humps in Canada. The season is only getting better.

Pos	No	Driver	Team	Laps	Time/Retired	Grid	Pts
1	2	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	58	1:26:49.451	1	10
2	22	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren-Mercedes	58	+3.7 secs	3	8
3	1	Kimi Räikkönen	Ferrari	58	+4.2 secs	4	6
4	4	Robert Kubica	BMW Sauber	58	+21.9 secs	5	5
5	3	Nick Heidfeld	BMW Sauber	58	+38.7 secs	9	4
6	5	Fernando Alonso	Renault	58	+53.7 secs	7	3
7	10	Mark Webber	Red Bull-Renault	58	+64.2 secs	6	2
8	7	Nico Rosberg	Williams-Toyota	58	+71.4 secs	11	1
9	9	David Coulthard	Red Bull-Renault	58	+75.2 secs	10
10	11	Jarno Trulli	Toyota	58	+76.3 secs	8
11	16	Jenson Button	Honda	57	+1 Lap	13
12	23	Heikki Kovalainen	McLaren-Mercedes	57	+1 Lap	2
13	12	Timo Glock	Toyota	57	+1 Lap	15
14	17	Rubens Barrichello	Honda	57	+1 Lap	12
15	6	Nelsinho Piquet	Renault	57	+1 Lap	17
16	20	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Ferrari	57	+1 Lap	19
17	15	Sebastian Vettel	STR-Ferrari	57	+1 Lap	14
Ret	14	Sebastien Bourdais	STR-Ferrari	24	Spin	18
Ret	8	Kazuki Nakajima	Williams-Toyota	1	Accident damage	16
Ret	21	Giancarlo Fisichella	Force India-Ferrari	0	Accident	20