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Talking Points: Behind the scenes of the British GP

There was so much promise in Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen and Michael Schumacher lining up at the front of the grid for the British Grand Prix. While the result was somewhat dull, the event highlighted some key differences between the top three teams and their drivers. Adam Cooper has the inside scoop on the decision makers and the decisions made last weekend at Silverstone

We've waited a long time to see Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen and Michael Schumacher line up at the front of the grid together, so the buzz in the run-up to the British Grand Prix was quite something. Which of the three would get it right?

In the event, the race itself was a bit of an anti-climax, and even before the teams showed their hands at the first stops, Alonso appeared to have things well under control. Rather than adding spice to the battle between Renault and Ferrari, Raikkonen's presence actually served to spoil it.

Nevertheless, there was a great scrap for second place between Alonso's two main rivals, and while the Spaniard was pacing himself for much of the race, he wasn't that far ahead. And there remained the nagging question of how much closer Schumacher would have been had Raikkonen not been in the way for two thirds of the race.

Kimi's surprise

The big surprise of qualifying was Kimi Raikkonen. Fourth on the grid in Australia and Monaco (he was promoted to third in the latter by Schumacher's penalty), he has not been as competitive over one lap as he was last year, when it seemed that he could be first or second regardless of the fuel load he was carrying. This season, the package has not had the pace, and more often than not, McLaren have erred towards a higher fuel load and in effect opted out of the fight for pole.

This time, Raikkonen was very much in it, and he produced an astonishing lap right at the end of the session to go second, splitting Alonso and Schumacher. This was a really special effort, as the team came very close to 'doing a Button' and cutting things too fine.

Raikkonen was the last driver in the top 10 to go for new tyres, and thus also the last to come in for a second set. Having been held for a few seconds at the first stop to create a gap, he then had a very difficult job to get round before the chequered flag after the second change, in order to be allowed to get a lap in.

He made it with seconds to spare and had to set the fastest final sector up to that point to do it. Raikkonen's not a man who needs any extra inspiration, but it probably didn't hurt that the situation got his adrenalin going. In addition, the fact that he pushed so hard on his out-lap might have actually been a benefit, as it got his tyres into the right temperature zone.

Interestingly, the Finn had been suffering in the first sector. At the stops, the mechanics were putting the tyres on the car with the blankets still on, only removing them at the last minute. It's not a new trick, but Ferrari and Renault didn't do it on this occasion.

What made Kimi joining the party fascinating was that the three top teams all had two rivals to try and outguess, rather than the usual one. I thought that might give everyone concerned a major headache, but both Pat Symonds and Ross Brawn confirmed that it was not such an issue. Everyone knew that everyone else was on the same strategy, give or take a lap, so having two key rivals to think about was no big deal. What worried them was cars immediately behind that might be doing something different.

**
A crucial tyre choice**

As far as the two guys on the front row were concerned, the really significant thing was that McLaren had chosen a harder tyre than Renault. That decision had been set in motion in the week before the race, when the teams gave Michelin their definitive choices of which two of the available tyres they wanted to take to Silverstone. McLaren chose a tyre that Renault rejected.

As we've seen all season, the products of both suppliers are extremely sensitive to ambient temperature, so guessing what the weather would be like come race weekend played a part in that decision.

'It was a bit tricky,' said Pat Symonds, 'because there were forecasts for it to be abnormally warm. I don't think anybody anticipated this much! But as our first choice tyre, which we'd made earlier, was a relatively low temperature tyre, it absolutely came into our minds to bring a high temperature tyre. I chose not to take the tyre that I had in mind for Silverstone as our option, because seeing the temperatures could be high, I didn't want to have two low temperature tyres here.'

These things are never straightforward, but one can assume that McLaren felt that their harder choice was an even better one for the hot conditions of race weekend, and was going to be a better bet on Sunday.

But all that became rather academic in the first stint. Alonso crept away, slowly but surely, and put enough daylight between himself and Raikkonen to make sure that, whatever happened in the pitstops, he would stay ahead.

When third-placed Schumacher peeled into the pits on lap 18, the Spaniard was already 3.7 seconds clear of the Finn - not much, but plenty considering that Renault knew he was going further than his rivals.

Raikkonen came in next time round, on lap 19, and then Alonso had three laps on near-zero fuel and carefully-nursed tyres to hammer home his advantage - and he did it in style.

Alonso Lap Times

Lap 16: 1:22.488
Lap 17: 1:22.649
Lap 18: 1:22.370 (Schumacher pits from third)
Lap 19: 1:21.873 (Raikkonen pits from second)
Lap 20: 1:21.983
Lap 21: 1:21.599
Lap 22: 1:25.845 (Alonso pits)

As soon as Michael signalled the start of the stop sequence, Alonso banged in a series of three laps that were substantially quicker than the pace he had been running, and which were obviously much faster than those of his rivals on heavy fuel loads. The fourth, his in-lap, was a second quicker even than that of Schumacher's.

This kind of performance would thoroughly demoralise any opposition. Able to adjust his fuel load in response to what the others had taken on board, Alonso emerged with his lead having stretched from 3.7 seconds to an astonishing 10.7 seconds between laps 18 and 23. A great performance, both on the pitwall and in the cockpit.

After that, it was a question of managing the gap, which stayed at around 11-12 seconds throughout the middle stint, although it wasn't all straightforward.

'That's the way we always race, to manage the gap,' said Symonds. 'We get what we can in the first stint, we check our targets on the second stop, and then we manage it from there.

'We had a lot of graining on the second set of tyres with Fernando. I was getting concerned then. Not worried, just concerned. We could see the understeer was building up, and the lap time wasn't on the targets that we anticipated. But it wasn't enough to put us in danger. It was the only bit that wasn't quite to plan, really.'

The second round of pitstops followed a similar pattern to the first, with Schumacher in on lap 41, Raikkonen on 42, and Alonso two - rather than three - laps later, on 44.

Before it all kicked off, Alonso had an 11.3-second lead on Raikkonen, and after it he had 12.4 seconds over Schumacher. The change in the identity of the pursuer didn't make much difference, and while Schumacher did briefly look like a threat, much to his frustration, Alonso responded with ease.

**
An easy run to the flag**

For once the gap didn't shrink in the closing laps as the leader backed off - Fernando was at the end of the two-race cycle with this engine - and in fact as it was the opposition who went slower and allowed the gap to grow, but only from a low of 10.8 seconds with four laps to go, to 13.9 seconds at the flag.

'It was one of the easier ones,' said Symonds. 'I think we knew what we had to do to handle Michael and Kimi. I was a little bit worried about [Juan Pablo] Montoya and [Felipe] Massa. It was a very similar situation to last year, where they could have basically run a different strategy and left us trying to handle two things.

'But Montoya was out of the picture early, behind [Nick] Heidfeld, and Massa, I think we had the pace on him anyway, as it turned out he didn't do anything we didn't expect. So it was for once one of the easier ones to handle.

'You can never be totally confident these days, because you don't get too much information on the tyre degradation. We actually assumed going into the race that [Ferrari, on Bridgestone] might be slightly better than us [on Michelin] on degradation. It wasn't really the case in the race. We always try and anticipate worst case scenario. Luckily it was a little bit better than we anticipated.'

The big question was what could Schumacher have done had he not been stuck behind Raikkonen for the first stint? A difficult one to answer. He certainly ran at a near identical pace as the Renault for the latter two thirds of the race, but to his credit Ross Brawn admitted that Alonso probably had the edge.

'I don't think it would have been massively different,' said Symonds. 'As always we were racing up to the final pitstop, and I think we were OK then. You can't really judge it after that final pitstop. As always knobs get turned down.'

The bottom line was that Alonso won the race with his qualifying performance, which saw him carrying some 9kgs more fuel than Raikkonen.

'It's the way F1 is, isn't it? People who don't get on the front row or don't get pole always say 'let's see what the strategy looks like'. Well, they've seen what the strategy looks like!'

Even Ferrari chief Jean Todt had to concede that Alonso was faster: 'It was two or three tenths, which is not a lot. But if you multiply by 60, it makes 12-18 seconds. And definitely they were quicker yesterday in qualifying. Michael, at the beginning, probably could have been quicker if we would not have been behind Raikkonen, but he was behind.'

One question must have been asked at Maranello this week - should we have gone to the Silverstone test? Of course the weather conditions changed markedly, but that absence just might have made the difference.
**
The battle for second**

We saw at races like San Marino and Spain that McLaren were nearly but not quite there on race pace, and it was more of the same at Silverstone. Raikkonen was frustratingly close to Alonso when he made his first stop - he was carrying 9kgs less after all - and in the end that choice to go with the harder tyre might have made the difference.

'We thought we had a reasonable race car today,' said McLaren's F1 CEO Martin Whitmarsh. 'We had a harder tyre than Renault, and we hoped that this was going to pay some dividends in the race. Looking at the data so far, there's no evidence that it did, frankly!

'We also had a situation where Kimi was at the end of the life of an engine. We were conscious of that. It was one that was involved in two minor conflagrations in Monaco. We weren't really under threat, but nonetheless we weren't in a position to threaten anyone either.'

Beating the Renault was always going to be a difficult job, but McLaren were none too pleased to ultimately lose second place to Michael Schumacher at the final pitstop, thanks to a typical Schumacher/Brawn double act.

As the second round of pitstops approached, the Ferrari technical director tried exactly the same ploy that Renault used in an attempt to get past Schumacher at Imola. It didn't work for Alonso, but it did work this time for the German.

Like Symonds in Italy, Brawn suspected that Schumacher would follow Raikkonen into the pits, and that being the case, the chances were that he would follow him straight out again. So what Brawn did was gamble and bring Michael in early.

In fact, Ferrari had tried the same strategy at the first stops, and it very nearly worked. Brawn wouldn't say when Schumacher was due to stop first time round, but it does mean that the Ferrari was not four laps, or 12kgs lighter than Alonso in qualifying, as would otherwise be the case.

To make the early second stop work, the team could not tip off McLaren, because if the Woking team were on the ball, they could also bring Raikkonen in early and negate the Ferrari tactic. Thus, the Ferrari crew did not head into the pitlane until the very last second, so that McLaren had no time to change plans.

Interestingly, Brawn admitted that to make this work the crew was not told until the very last moment - had they got an early warning the body language would have been a bit of a giveaway, even if they didn't head straight out into the pitlane.

It worked. Schumacher was right behind Raikkonen but drove an exceptionally quick in-lap, followed by a typically brilliant out-lap. Kimi lost two tenths of a second to Michael on his own in-lap, and a little more in the pitlane as the Finn seemed to make a sluggish departure. As he headed out of the pit exit, the Ferrari swept past with more than enough advantage to steal the position.

'There was a little problem in that we had a small airbox fire that cost us a little bit of time,' said Whitmarsh. 'In an F1 engine, it's not a very rare thing, but it's not something that you want. There's quite a lot of fuel around with the airbox system, and it can catch alight, and the consequence of course is that it consumes the oxygen that the engine is about to see, so it gives a cough and a splutter and it can stall the engine. So that made us a little bit slow away.

'Inevitably we'll go and do the analysis of the airbox fire, exactly how much did it lose, if we hadn't have had would we have come out in front. I think Michael nailed some good laps at that point, we should have been able to do that, and once we'd gone in, we should have been able to push a bit harder and create the comfort you need to come out in front. Michael did a better job than us.

'Our pace in the second and third stint wasn't as good as it felt in the first part of the race. We need to have a look at that, whether it's the tyres or not.'

Losing a position was not good news, but nevertheless it was a solid performance from McLaren, although Alonso is staying frustratingly out of reach of both of his pursuers. Jean Todt put his performance into perspective:

'He's scored 74 points out of 80,' said the Ferrari boss. 'It's remarkable. He's quick, competitive, and reliable, so it's made the things more difficult for the others. Michael has 51, so all depends on how it will be the next 10 races.'

We should not overlook the fact that Schumacher and Raikkonen both had the pace with which to beat Alonso in Monaco, but for different reasons, failed to make use of it. You win titles by taking maximum points even at the races where logic says you shouldn't...

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