Sunday 20th July 2008
The Boy Hamilton Is Good Value
Lewis Hamilton never wins easily. His victories are invariably dramatic, hard-fought, compelling events. They are rarely - and perhaps all-too-rare from his perspective - processional formalities. For the first two-thirds of the race, the 2008 German GP was proving to be one such formality, but Timo Glock's crash, coupled with the resultant deployment of the Safety Car and McLaren's peculiar decision not to pit the lead driver, changed all that.
Hamilton's response was devastating - proof that even wins for the fastest car (and the fastest driver) can still be rip-roaring, edge-of-the-seat yarns. Hamilton's pace in his third stint - he was instantly approximately a second-and-a-half quicker than Felipe Massa - made a lie of the suggestion that McLaren had opted against pitting him because they feared his pace would suffer on soft rubber. The reasoning was more prosaic - the team expected the Safety Car to return to the pits far quicker than it did, but even the best-case scenario would have only provided Hamilton with an additional twelve or thirteen laps rather than the ten in which he built up a lead of 16 seconds. As Hamilton needed to construct a lead of at least 22 seconds, the maths didn't add up.
McLaren erred, albeit on the side of recklessness, and their relief afterwards was palpable. They might also be questioned about the apparent employment of team orders when Heikki Kovalainen was instructed to let his team-mate past. That moment has already been seized upon the tedious band of Anti-Hamiltonists as evidence of favouritism and fortune, yet the real mystery is why it took McLaren almost a lap to persuade the Finn to yield given that the pass was an inevitability. It was a matter of time and the time lost could have mattered dearly to Hamilton.
Speaking Of Which...Ron Dennis's Post-Race Explanation Didn't Add Up Either
"The safety car stayed out longer than we anticipated because we just didn't see the car was behind the barrier, we didn't think they would have to move the car. We just thought there was some debris on the circuit."
"...With the benefit of hindsight maybe we should have double-shuffled the cars but that's with the benefit of hindsight It's not what our strategists said, and it is not a decision taken from the pit wall, it was a decision taken in Woking."
Spot the problem? In the first set of remarks, Dennis appears to be suggesting that the team couldn't see from their vantage point on the pitwall that Glock's car was ruined. In the second set, he reveals that the decision was made by the army of technicians that the team employs to watch the race on television from the comfort of their Woking HQ. But how could they have claimed to have been unsighted when they were privy to the same sight of a ruined Toyota spinning to a halt on the same of the track that replays revealed to the rest of F1's armchair followers?
Curious.
Heikki's Struggles Continue
Were it not for the distorting introduction of the Safety Car, Kovalainen's trouncing would have verged on the embarrassing and his defeat to Hamilton was scheduled to be measured in minutes rather than seconds. It's worth emphasising that even in the final stage of the race, when Kovalainen was still chasing a podium finish, Hamilton built up a 12-second lead over the second McLaren in 15 laps.
Whatever his popularity within the team, and the guarantee that he will not rock the Woking boat, such a deficit must be deemed unacceptable.
Massa Is A Great Driver Except When He Has To Race
In that context, it is odd that Felipe Massa is considered to be the top-four driver most vulnerable to losing his seat for next season. The Brazilian's resilience is under-appreciated, for he has an unheralded habit of bouncing back from setbacks and his performance in Germany was another such example after his humiliation in Silverstone. Forget for a moment his amateurish attempt to block Hamilton and dwell on the fact that he comprehensively thrashed Raikkonen.
Massa's pace is also under-estimated and he is arguably the best frontrunner in F1 today (a product, perhaps, of the year he spent as a test driver for Ferrari, pounding out lonely lap after lonely lap). World Championships are not won on empty tracks, however, and it is a race driver that he falls short and the critics criticise. He is weak in the rain and his attempted block on Hamilton when the McLaren homed in on second place was feeble. Does he have the all-round package to win a World Championship? It's a question that Ferrari will be hugely tempted - and goaded into doing so by a fierce Italian press unaccustomed to defeat - to decisively answer in the negative if he fails to prevent Hamilton winning the championship this season.
Kimi Could Be Paying For The Absence Of A Work Ethic
Raikkonen's position is safe courtesy of his title triumph last year. Yet he should not be spared criticism for another lacklustre outing (his last victory was in April). If the Finn has a weakness then it is his apparent inability to dial out a problem whenever his Ferrari is not tuned in to his liking. If the weekend begins badly for Raikkonen on a Friday it invariably tends to stay that way. Perhaps his race engineer is culpable, or perhaps Raikkonen's set-up deficiency is the inevitable consequence of his infamous reluctance to spend time in the car outside of race weekends or engage in lengthy debriefing sessions whenever he does.
"Kimi is extremely talented," Bernie Ecclestone once observed. "The trouble is, he's not as dedicated as Ayrton Senna was, or as Lewis Hamilton is, for whom it is the end of the world if something goes wrong." The problem, in fact, might be that something went very right for Kimi last October. Ambition achieved, has he metaphorically stepped off the gas since winning the championship?
A final thought on the matter: Last year, it was repeatedly asserted that Hamilton was 'lucky' because he was able to copy the set-up of Alonso. So whose set-up is he copying this year? Certainly not that of his team-mate. And who was the driving force during the recent tests at Silverstone and Hockenheim when McLaren found an edge that has cut Ferrari to second best?
Ferrari Don't Have The Man They Need
And from those questions comes another: who will be the driving force when Ferrari consider their response to the resounding defeat in Germany? The team must be in shock. Just a few weeks ago they were cruising to a one-two in France. Suddenly, in the blink of two races, they find themselves a distant second-best on a circuit that should have suited them. There is no denial that McLaren now have the upper hand but plenty of doubt that Ferrari can recover. How Stefano Domenicali - who has plenty to prove himself - must wish that Michael Schumacher was still on the payroll as something other than an headset operator.
And Ferrari Aren't Alone In Missing Schumi
Considering that there were five Germans in the race, Hockenheim hosted a surprisingly large number of empty seats this weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment