German Car Zone

In the first half of the year Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso and Robert Kubica all struggled to overcome their team-mates and live up to expectations.

But Silverstone proved that all three are now back to their best. Expert analyst Mark Hughes explains why the 2007 Bridgestones were the root cause of their slow starts, and examines the implications for the rest of the year.

Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso and Robert Kubica gave us arguably the three stand-out performances of Silverstone.
Kimi by winning the race in a flawless way, making him the first triple winner of the season.
Fernando by making Kimi work for it despite being in a car that was significantly slower on the day.

Kubica because in the two consecutive races he’s done sine that terrifying Montreal crash, he’s been ‘The Man’ at BMW, completely eclipsing Nick Heidfeld and comfortably winning ‘division two’ behind the Ferrari/McLaren battle.
All three of these drivers spent much of the first half of the season struggling against their team-mates.
Each of them were coming from Michelin tyres onto single-supply Bridgestones and were against team-mates not having to make that adjustment.
Raikkonen’s team-mate Felipe Massa spent all of 2003 testing Ferraris on tyres very like those being used this year.
At BMW Nick Heidfeld spent the 2003 and ’04 seasons on Bridgestones with Sauber and Jordan respectively.
Being an F1 rookie, Alonso’s team-mate Lewis Hamilton had no Michelin experience to unlearn, and the Bridgestone control rubber on the GP2 car he drove last year, although a slick rather than a grooved tyre, behaved in a very similar way in terms of the driving style it demanded.
What the Bridgestones ask of their drivers is a style that doesn’t demand too much, too suddenly of the fronts.

Try to drive them like a Michelin by loading them heavily and being aggressive with the steering, and they simply don’t respond. They slip gently over the peak of their performance, losing the car valuable momentum on corner entry.
This is not a difficult thing to understand in theory, but to be at peak performance an F1 driver needs his every input to be instinctively the right one, leaving his brain with the spare capacity to apply itself to other vital matters.
The problem is, there are hundreds of sensations being received by the driver and probably 90% of them are irrelevant to his task. He has to filter which are the 10% that he needs to act upon.
That’s not an easy thing to learn when you fundamentally change the sensations you are getting from the most vital piece of sensory info of all – the grip of the tyres and how quickly it builds.
So when observers comment that world class F1 drivers shouldn’t be making such hard work of a simple change in tyres, that’s probably unfair.
They have each been able to get to within maybe a couple of tenths of their ultimate pretty much immediately.
But the last little bit – the stuff that has to come instinctively at the outer edges – takes a little longer. The recent turnaround in form of Raikkonen, Alonso and Kubica suggests it maybe takes half a season.
Only from this point are we probably now at a level playing field when we look at comparisons with their respective team-mates.
The second half of the season is likely to give us a more definitive comparison than the first.

As pointed out here before, Raikkonen’s underlying speed has not really been lacking alongside Massa, only his race consistency. But Silverstone suggested he had a significant speed advantage over Massa rather than mere parity. Is Kimi in the process of stepping up a gear to leave Massa trailing?
At BMW similar questions must hang over Heidfeld, who had a very impressive looking first half of the year. But must we now ask if that was being flattered by his team-mate’s struggle. Was the BMW actually an even better car than it looked early season?
Certainly, Kubica’s recent speed advantage tallies with the pattern we saw when Robert first came in last year. Will Heidfeld have the speed to hit back and keep the younger guy in his place? That’s a very tough ask if Kubica is as good as he’s looked recently.
And Hamilton? For sure he has been helped by the tyre situation. But Lewis’ sensational form has been about much more than Alonso’s struggle with the rubber. Silverstone was his least competitive race of the year.
He made an incorrect set up choice on Friday, having not been at the Silverstone test two weeks previously, and crucially stayed with it too long – until it was too late to change. That was maybe the first symptom we’ve seen all year of his lack of F1 experience.

As a result, all weekend he had a car that was an oversteery handful in the fast corners.
He took some brave pills for his final run in the dying seconds and produced a pole lap out of nowhere – but even then it was actually slower than Alonso’s once you’d made the compensating sum for Alonso’s greater fuel load.
But Alonso is not going to be able to rely on Hamilton struggling for set up for the rest of the year.
Everything else we’ve seen so far suggests that Lewis is fantastically adaptable to balance changes in his car, smothers them with his silky touch.
Of the three Bridgestone converts, even if they have all now fully adapted to the tyres, I suspect Alonso has the toughest challenge ahead of him.

Source = ITV F1

I am sure after another bad race by both Raikkonen and Alonso, the experts will be saying something else.

Kimi supposedly makes at least $30 million more than Massa. Even with Massa's black flag and reliability issue, Kimi is only 1-pt. up on him!

Alonso makes god knows how much more than Hamilton and trails him by 14.

If these "big guns" were so great, maybe they would never have been down so much to their teammates to begin with. I don't see how those two blokes in the photograph offer good value for money. I still think they are among the two most overrated drivers in F1.

Kimi's achievements especially get overstated. He gets two somewhat fortunate wins and suddenly he's great again.

This is an ITV/british press article. The same ITV were it's F1 commentators battle it to kiss Hamy "deriere" more.


Now back on topic.


SEL I think you're wrong:

- for starters it wasn't just Massa who suffered from problems
(remember Raikkonen's failure during the race in Spain, or tire graining at Montreal; whereas Massa for his his technical problems could always race/gain points/do something about it

- Alonso 12 points behind LH; let's see, crap car at Bahrain, mistakes true, but also penalty + grained tires at Montreal, gearbox issue at Magny-Cours; Lot's of points lost

- for Robert, I'm not even gonna start, he's got a lot more problems that his team mate, meaning both reliability and the Montreal accident/no participation
at Indy

- for the salary part, I disagree in Alonso's case:
Without him McMerc wouldn't have been able to win one race, because he's in charge of car development-input and setup.
Renault when they lost Telefonica, they lost an estimated 30 millions.
Now that sponsorship was brought to them by Alonso (along with Guru), and they only paid him 7 to 8 millions at best. So on a net basis they gained over
20 millions. And guess what with, with Alonso McMerc gained a fat juicy check from spanish giant Santander. And this means they basicaly gained more money with Alonso on net basis, just like Renault.

- now I've stated this before, the season isn't over, far from it.

Maybe I was a bit harsh on Alonso, but I still think Hamy boy is exposing him. Anyway, I have always acknowledged that the Macca will likely not be as fast without Alonso. I am just disappointed with his performance, technical issue or not.

I won't repeat my Kimi bombs because I don't think highly of him. The Alonso testing/sponsorship defence you offered is valid for Alonso. As far as I know Raikkonen doesn't do any of those.

Speaking of arse-kissing, there is a funny article about Hamilton's alleged expulsion from school for fighting many moons ago. The school/teacher/arse kissing admin finally apologized to him and completely exonerated him. It's just funny that this piece of crap - er, news - crops up now that he has 9 podiums. What if he had 9 DNFs.

More that Hamilton, Alonso's problem is adaptation.

Both with his status as no longer the prima-donna (and the list of such drivers is long, starting with Fangio, in F1 alone) and with the car-tires (this is quite reminescent of his 2003 and also 2004 seasons at Renault).


[ His driving style alone, sometimes seems unrecognizable.

From understeer and oversteer (induced agressively by a hard lock coupled with 4/5 brakes) on the Renault, to an almost exclusive oversteer behaviour (quite soft vs. the Renaults). The rear of the McMerc slides a lot compared to the Renaults. And nose points the McMerc car in a corner (and even on the straight) just like a WRC car.
His entering in the corner has gone from Jim Clark style to Sebastian Loeb style ]

Let us see:

Massa vs Kimi: In my humble opinion, Massa is the better driver- Kimi is overpaid, and overrated. Kimi might be a point ahead of Massa but Massa has had his share of problems.

Alonso vs Hami: This is one that I find hard to resolve in my little wren head. Even though Alonso is considerably behind Lewis, I think he is a very good driver, and may not be as overrated as Kimi is.