F1-Blog

Britain Runthrough

Sorry it’s taken this long to get this up, but I had no network connection after the race to do it, so here we go.

The big news (as everyone will now know) is that Lewis got his championship hopes back on plan, after a sublime drive to take the win.

Lewis, Kimi and Felipe all sit on 48 points, with Robert Kubica just behind on 46 in the championship going into the second half of the season, this year should end in some great racing.

So why did this race turn out to be so good? well it’s all down to the rain. Lewis showed his car control and skill to at times lap multiple seconds faster than the competition on the same tyres.

The start was good for the two McLaren’s, with Lewis going into the first corner challenging Heikki for the lead, Heikki managed to hold Lewis off for three laps, but then had no choice but to let the faster driver through.

French Roundup

The French grand prix showed the domination of the Ferrari’s around the track, but the one-two finish for Massa and Kimi is not the interesting news.

No the interest comes from who finished behind them, and the orders they did it in.

After a clean start all the cars ran down to turn three, but the order had been shuffled. Fernando in the Renault got a horrible start, and had Jarno Trulli pass him before turn one. A strange occurrence when you consider how good the Renault’s used to be off the light’s. It seems they are struggling to come to grips with the new FIA approved ECU, as most of the other teams are now getting decent starts.

Kimi out front started to gap Felipe, and Jarno could not keep up with the Ferrari’s for very long, so the race at the front settled into a rhythm.

Lewis conquers Monaco

Lewis Hamilton and McLaren have taken the race win in Monaco on a rain drenched day.

Lewis managed to get the jump on Kimi at the race start, taking corner one behind Massa.

He then managed to bump his rear wheel against a barrier, and had to pit for replacement, where the McLaren team switched him to a one stop race. This turned out to be the winning move for Lewis, who then proceeded to get up to speed, and was the fastest of the front runners, which ultimately gave him the race.

BMW-Sauber took second spot with Robert Kubica running a solid race, and Ferrari took the last podium spot with Felipe getting his strategy all wrong, and was caught on a drying track, with wet tyres.

Drive of the day must go to Adrian Sutil though, as he drove a fabulous race all afternoon, setting fastest times in difficult circumstances, right up until Kimi Räikkönen smashed the back of his Force India into submission on the breaking into the chicane after coming out of the tunnel.

Kimi takes both top spots

Kimi Raikkonen is tonight crowned as the new world champion of the F1 world. He takes the title that Fernando Alonso held last year.

The race was not all that interesting from the Ferrari point of view, the two Ferrari’s where by and away the fastest cars on the track.

No all of the interesting things that happened, happened behind the two scarlet machines. First Alonso managed to get past Lewis in the Senna S’s, Lewis obviously did not like that, and tried to get back passed in the next corner, however he ran wide and lost a lot of time.

Then on lap 7, Lewis’s McLaren decided to select neutral in his gearbox, and it took him and his engineers over 30 seconds to get the car to select a gear. Eventually the car did find a gear and Lewis was on his way again, however he was now in 18th position.

German Grand Prix

The German grand prix proved interesting on a number of fronts. The Bridgestone/Ferrari combination showed again that the Japanese tyre giant has taken a substantial step up in performance of late, even the new 'experimental' Michelin tyre had not got the pace needed.

The Renault's showed that they do require the 'outlawed' mass damper system they have employed for the past 18 months, as the car was not it's settled easy to drive self (with Fisi calling the car un-drivable in his second stint), it also seems to have caused blistering to the tyres on the car in the race.

McLaren also showed they have found some performance from somewhere, yes it's not as much as they need, but it's a clear step up, and last but not least Honda have found the level of pace that they showed in the early stages of the season.

Did all of these factors then make for a good race? Well no, the Ferrari's ran off and hid after the mistakenly short fuelled Kimi Raikkonen had to pit on lap 10.

So if we ignore the scarlet cars what do we make of the rest of the bunch?

Well, although Kimi was short fuelled, and then had a stuck wheel during the first pit stop (for the second week running) he fought through and came 3rd, a great drive by the Fin, and shows why so many teams are fighting for his signature at the end of the year. Pedro de la Rossa showed decent pace as well, however his engine packed up on him early on in the race.

The pitting of the leading McLaren allowed the Ferrari's to take the first two spot's and have an unhindered race to the flag. However the other teams running on Japanese rubber showed it was the tyre of choice, with both the Toyota and Williams cars setting good pace.

Barrichello suffered an engine failure on lap 18, this caused him to retire from the race, leaving only button to make point's for the Japanese Honda team.

Button was now running in third behind the quickly disappearing Ferrari's. He pitted on lap 15, showing just how much pace the Ferrari's had in the bag. Alonso was loosing ground in fifth to team mate Fisichella when both he and Massa pitted on lap 19.

Lap 30 brought a big crash from Jacques Villeneuve, who looked to have something in his suspension break as he was mid corner, the car seemed to loose it's front end and come to a halt in the barriers leading onto the home straight. Both him and team mate Nick Heidfeld had separate coming together’s on lap one with other cars, this could have been the root cause of the failure. Nick Heidfeld had already retired after the lap one incident, meaning both of the German BMW cars were out of their home GP.

Fisichella started to struggle with his Renault, allowing Alonso to catch up and overtake him in the stops, Button, Raikkonen and Mark Webber where in a battle for the last podium step.

The weekend of the Toyota driver Ralph Schumacher got worse, he was penalised with a drive through penalty for speeding in the pits. However Trulli after starting from the back of the grid (penalised for an engine change) had made his way into the points scoring positions. 

The 3 way race for the third step came to an abrupt end, when Webber's Cosworth engine let go allowing the race to be between Jenson and Kimi.

The race had one final climax, with Trulli coming on fast behind the obviously suffering Renault of Fisichella. The Renault however had just enough pace to fend off the Toyota assault until the end of the race.

The final kick came when after the race, the stewards deemed the rear wings of the Midland Toyota cars to be flexing, and disqualified them from the race. As they only finished 13th and 14th there were no point's involved, however it seems that even the smaller teams are now trying out the 'flexi' technologies the larger teams have obviously been running.