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Formula One |
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Written by Mariner
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Monday, 22 October 2007 |
Was it won…or was it lost
Depending on your point of view, and also what country’s media you follow, either Kimi Raikkonen won the Formula 1 World Championship in Brazil this weekend or Lewis Hamilton lost it. And there are good arguments to support both cases. Other questions being asked are:- How did Kimi win it? How did Lewis and McLaren let it slip? And has the championship gone to the right man?
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Taking the argument that Hamilton lost it, the next question is…where? Was it two weeks ago at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai, where Hamilton and his team, McLaren Mercedes, threw away what could have been a title-winning outcome by getting his tyre strategy all wrong, which eventually led to him sliding off the track into the gravel? Or was it at Interlagos this weekend, when he made one of his worst starts to the season and then saw his race and his dreams shattered by a temporary gearbox failure on his car?
McLaren are devastated but it is hard to feel much sympathy for them. They made a terrible mistake in leaving Hamilton out on ruined tyres in China, ignoring the advice from the Bridgestone people, while they hesitated over what to do next. If they had brought him in two laps earlier, when it was so obvious he was in trouble, and put any kind of tyres onto his car, he would have scored five or six points and Raikkonen wouldn’t even have been in contention in Brazil.
But they tried to win the title in China, when they didn’t need to, and paid a massive price.
 Hamilton went into the race at Interlagos as the clear favourite – on the front line, four points ahead of his team-mate, Fernando Alonso, and seven clear of Kimi Raikkonen, of Ferrari. He didn’t need to win…all he needed was to score a few points and the title was his. So what went wrong?
Hamilton got off to a bad start, something unusual for him, and he had already been passed on the outside by Raikkonen at turn one, then Alonso, who was trying to defend his World Championship principally against Hamilton, got past the Briton on the inside going through the Senna “Esses”.
At that moment, all the bitterness and anger that has attended the breakdown in relations between these two foes inside McLaren was all too evident as Hamilton tried to fight back in a position, World Championship-wise, that did not require it. Had Hamilton finished fourth behind Alonso in third, he would have won the title by two points. It can be argued that a more experienced driver would have settled for that, and would have run the race in a “tactical” way.
But Hamilton’s reaction was instinctive and demonstrated his lack of experience in the big league. He immediately tried to get back his slot from Alonso, in a part of the track that was not exactly favorable, and he ran wide across the grass and then on to a large run-off area and returned to the fray in eighth position.
 On lap eight , with the title still his for the taking, he suddenly found his car without drive. His race was ruined by the gearbox glitch when the box went into default mode, selecting neutral, as Hamilton sat helpless in the cockpit. In the time it took him to radio his technical support team for advice and then implement it, most of the field had swept past him and he had lost 40 seconds. Do the maths: subtract 40 seconds from his race time, and it is clear that the fifth place he needed to beat Kimi Raikkonen to the title would have been his – comfortably.
However Formula 1 isn’t that simple.
McLaren decided to switch to a three-stop strategy and soft tyres quite early in the race on a short middle stint, seen by many as a gamble. McLaren say it made up 10 seconds compared to a two-stop by doing it and you’d have to have a hell of a clever computer to disagree with them.
Hamilton spent the rest of the race trying to catch up with the front three, passing everything he could, but the distances were so great, and few cars retired from the race, so in the end the best he could get was a seventh place finish…not enough to win the title.
Alonso spent the race doing exactly what he had to do...keeping the best position he could and hoping that something would happen to his two rivals. On a day that Ferrari were evidently much faster than the rest, that's about all he could do. In theory, he could win the Championship if he finished third and Raikkonen second. But it was obvious that Massa would let the Finn pass him and go for the 10 points. When it happened, at the second pit stop, nobody was surprised and Alonso was effectively ruled out of the Championship. Driving a car that was difficult to control, he finished third with the same number of points as Hamilton but Hamilton took second place in the Championship because he had the same amount of victories (4) as Alonso, but more second place finishes.
Hamilton could have been world champion. But he learned in Brazil something that all racing drivers have to learn, and most of them have to learn it earlier in their first season than Hamilton has. Racing cars break down. And, like road cars, they break down not when it would be convenient, when it really doesn't matter, but when it matters most. When it leaves the driver open-mouthed, saying: "But that's not fair."
Not an enjoyable lesson. But one to be stored away with the other megabytes of new material that will have been absorbed in his brain this year. He won't need McLaren's £20 million simulator to learn tracks next year, since he has now visited them all in person. He won't need to wonder next year what it is like to win a grand prix – or lose a title.
 Does Raikkonen deserve to be champion? Of course he does because a supreme talent like his should be rewarded in the history books. He has won 15 grand prix, been a front-runner for the past six years and come close to the title on two previous occasions. Does he deserve it this year? That’s more tricky. He does in the sense that in the second half of the year he was clearly the best driver.
He got off to a bad start at the beginning of the season. Kimi took some time to get up to speed with the Bridgestone tyres: They act differently from the Michelins in the way they turn in to a corner and as that is a key area where Kimi gets his speed, he had to adapt his style to get the most out of them. That took several months.
The Ferrari star twice retired with mechanical failure earlier in the season, and those problems cost him 14 points - more than enough to have put him at the head of the trio of drivers going into the final race with a chance of the title, rather than the back.
Neither Hamilton nor his McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso failed to finish as a result of problems with their car, although Hamilton can now claim to have lost a handful of points as a result of his problems at Interlagos.
But then around mid-season everything started to come together. Since the British Grand Prix in July he has been F1's dominant force, taking four wins, two seconds and two thirds from nine races, and retiring from the other. The Ferrari driver finishes the season with six victories - two more than any of his rivals. Raikkonen's win tally accurately reflects his status as arguably the out-and-out fastest driver in the sport.
No-one in F1 has any doubts about his ability in the car. Ferrari, after all, signed him for this season on a reputed stratospheric retainer of £25m as a replacement for Schumacher, the most successful driver in the history of the sport. F1 teams do not pay out those sorts of sums without good reason, and Raikkonen was deemed worthy of it because of what he had already proved since he started his career in the sport in 2001.
Had luck gone his way, he could easily have just won his third world title rather than his first, for he came close to beating Schumacher in 2003 and Alonso in 2005 when he was driving for McLaren, the team whose hearts he has just broken. The dramatic reversal of fortunes in Brazil on Sunday was hard on the McLaren drivers, and Hamilton in particular, for either of them would have made a worthy world champion.
But that description applies equally to the man who did win it.
And next year, with a year in his current team under his belt, he will be more formidable again.
It is easy to envisage a vintage season of F1 next year. Drivers' skills will be more severely tested by the abolition of traction control, which Hamilton will relish. Fernando Alonso will be in a Renault, or a Toyota, or possibly even a Ferrari, which Hamilton will also relish. Kimi Raikkonen, buoyed by the elusive title, will be hard to stop, and BMW and Red Bull seem sure to make life more difficult for the top teams.
Some of these things will be in Hamilton's favour: the departure of Alonso will lighten everyone's burden at McLaren. But some of them will not, and it would be madness to assume that because he led the title race for so long this year he can repeat the feat next season. The Boy Wonder has had to learn to be patient. His fans may have to learn the same lesson.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 October 2007 )
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