F1-Blog

French Results

A torid day for Lewis Hamilton. After having to start 10 places down on his qualifying position, he then put a move on Sebastien Vettel, but had to cut a chicane to keep the position, and as a result had to take a drive through penalty. That put paid to his race, as he was never going to recover from that, he did finish tenth in the end, which after what he went through was not a bad result.

Kimi looked on to win the race easily, but then before the half distance one of his exhausts failed, this allowed the Brazilian team mate to take the race lead, and complete the race in the first spot. Kimi held on and limped the Ferrari home in second, the huge lead that the Ferrari cars had got initially allowed him to hold onto the second spot. Although it has to be asked why the car was not Orange and Black flagged, as the Exhaust hanging in the breeze was certainly dangerous, as others have said, if it was a McLaren, I’m sure they would have been asked to resolve the issue. When the exhaust did finally break off, it flew extremely high, and could have caused a lot of damage to another car or perhaps killed a driver if it had hit them square. It’s certainly something that a lot of people will be asking the FIA to explain there thinking behind not O&B flagging Kimi.

A great result for the Toyota team, as Jarno Trulli took the car through to third spot, holding off a charging Heikki Kovalainen in the last part of the race. He even managed to keep his head when there was a small shower, which as Jarno has said in the past really does not suit the Toyota. A good result for both the team who lost Ove Andersson this week, and for Jarno who drove a superb race, and was probably the driver of the day.

Heikki drove a good race to take fourth, with a good drive up through the field on a heavy car initially after the five spot penalty for blocking the Red Bull in the qualifying session.

Robert Kubica also drove well, the BMW Sauber team have struggled all weekend with a car that has been off the pace, and unsuited to the track. He took the fifth place finish, not far behind the

Mark Webber drove a decent race to take sixth spot. With Nelson Piquet just beating his double world champion team mate. Both Renault’s finishing in the top eight places. So a good result for Nelson, who needed a decent finish to possibly stay in the race team.

A full race rundown shortly (I promise).

Pos	No	Driver	Team	Laps	Time/Retired	Grid	Pts
1	2	Felipe Massa	Ferrari	70	1:31:50.245	2	10
2	1	Kimi Räikkönen	Ferrari	70	+17.9 secs	1	8
3	11	Jarno Trulli	Toyota	70	+28.2 secs	4	6
4	23	Heikki Kovalainen	McLaren-Mercedes	70	+28.9 secs	10	5
5	4	Robert Kubica	BMW Sauber	70	+30.5 secs	5	4
6	10	Mark Webber	Red Bull-Renault	70	+40.3 secs	6	3
7	6	Nelsinho Piquet	Renault	70	+41.0 secs	9	2
8	5	Fernando Alonso	Renault	70	+43.3 secs	3	1
9	9	David Coulthard	Red Bull-Renault	70	+51.0 secs	7
10	22	Lewis Hamilton	McLaren-Mercedes	70	+54.5 secs	13
11	12	Timo Glock	Toyota	70	+57.7 secs	8
12	15	Sebastian Vettel	STR-Ferrari	70	+58.0 secs	12
13	3	Nick Heidfeld	BMW Sauber	70	+62.0 secs	11
14	17	Rubens Barrichello	Honda	69	+1 Lap	20
15	8	Kazuki Nakajima	Williams-Toyota	69	+1 Lap	15
16	7	Nico Rosberg	Williams-Toyota	69	+1 Lap	19
17	14	Sebastien Bourdais	STR-Ferrari	69	+1 Lap	14
18	21	Giancarlo Fisichella	Force India-Ferrari	69	+1 Lap	17
19	20	Adrian Sutil	Force India-Ferrari	69	+1 Lap	18
Ret	16	Jenson Button	Honda	16	+54 Laps	16