Dodgy Business: Street fighting men

You could hear the emotion in Rubens' voice on the slowdown lap. He'd won again, at 37, five years after he'd last stood on the top step of the podium. He'd known he could do it but others had doubted him.

Now he'd proven it.

There were extraordinary scenes in the paddock when he got back to the team. He was hoisted onto the shoulders of the mechanics and bounced from man to man as chants of 'Rubens! Rubens!' rang out.

They covered him in champagne. No doubts about the popularity of this one. As he'd rolled down the pitlane to park up, every team was in the lane to clap him in.

Outwardly it looked as if McLaren's slow last pit stop for Lewis had cost him the race but Martin Whitmarsh reckoned that Rubens had them beaten come what may.

They knew that Rubens was fuelled longer than they were and Whitmarsh explained that, roughly, you needed a second's advantage for every lap further than you someone was going to run. Rubens, they expected, was going to go five or six laps further at that second stop and the gap was just 3.5-4s when it was time for Lewis to pit.

Whitmarsh takes up the story: "Lewis was scheduled to stop on lap 37 and Heikki on lap 38 and we were obviously fighting Rubens. We thought we could enhance the possibility of beating Rubens by going one lap longer but we didn't know if we had the fuel, so Lewis was told early on we are going to stop on lap 37. But, we asked the fuel man to keep us up to date. He informed us, yes, you can make one more lap, which gave us the opportunity to reverse the stops of the two drivers, and so we decided to give that a go very late.

"That was communicated to Lewis but it was too late and he was committed to coming in. We had sent the crew out without the tyres because we didn't know which car was coming in first, so getting the tyres out we lost 2-3 seconds maximum, which was disappointing but didn't materially effect the outcome.

"You are down to your last kilo of fuel so it's a high risk thing to do. Had we run the extra lap, that in itself would have given us a second in relation to Rubens, then had we not made the mistake in the pits, another two or three seconds, but he was six or seven seconds ahead when he came out even though he stopped early. Had we had the perfect stop there Rubens would have probably stopped two or three laps later anyway, so he had us beaten and was able to stop early to cover us. We were trying to do anything we could to put pressure on him but, in doing that, we put a bit too much on ourselves."

The reason Brawn chose to stop Rubens earlier than they had to is that they now had the margin and once your opposition has made his final stop and you haven't, you're vulnerable to a safety car. And at that time Kazuki Nakajima was circulating on three wheels and a rim, which could have turned complicated.

To McLaren's credit, having taken the front row, albeit with a lighter fuel load than Barrichello, they could have raced strategically - Hamilton the hare and Kovalainen the first stint tortoise, backing up Rubens to the extent that he would not have been able to overhaul Lewis at the second stop. Some might argue that Kovalainen should have been able to stay closer than 7.5s by the time Lewis made his first stop on lap 15 but Heikki's driving for his McLaren life at the moment and there's no championships at stake, so it was probably straightforward.

"That's not how we go motor racing," Whitmarsh said. "Both of our cars have the opportunity to race each other and we weren't about to do those things. I think that has happened in F1 in the past but I don't think there's ever been a suspicion that McLaren has done it and I don't think there ever will be."

It was interesting that with the Brawn renowned for being so gentle on its rubber, it was actually McLaren who chose an option-option-prime tyre selection for the three stints, while Brawn went for prime-prime-option.

"Interestingly Lewis's pace on the final prime set meant that in hindsight that second, longer stint might have been better on the prime," Whitmarsh conceded. "There wasn't much in it but I don't think our tyre strategy cost us the race, we just weren't quick enough to win. We had to do quite a lot with the option tyre just to keep the temperature down and make sure it stayed in good condition."

Jenson Button in the Brawn BGP 001 © LAT

With Rubens stood on the podium's top step you could only conjecture at how Button must have been feeling as he took home his two points for seventh place. He'd paid the price for a messy Q3 run which had qualified him fifth despite being a tad lighter than his team mate, then he'd been outfumbled on the first lap and never had the opportunity to recover.

The positive is that even though Jenson did not have a stellar weekend himself, the car was the class of the field again and that's encouraging.

After the summer factory shutdowns, Brawn had revisited all the mechanical and aerodynamic changes they had made to the car which may have influenced their inability to get the tyres into their correct operating window. Both drivers had back-to-backed different set-ups on Friday to try to reach firm conclusions but the developing surface conditions and hotter track temperatures which they had not had for the past three troublesome races, rendered that difficult.

They thought they had some pointers but will likely repeat the procedure on Friday at Spa, where the ambient should be lower.

"We had a good car all weekend and we handled the dilemma about how to handle the KERS cars," Ross Brawn said. "If you're just in front of them but on the same fuel load, they pass you at the start and then you are in trouble. So we decided to go a little bit heavier and try to use the extra fuel in the race to overcome the problem of KERS, which worked."

In fact, Button got out of jail. Red Bull had an awful weekend.

Sebastian Vettel's championship chances took a body blow with the loss of two Renault engines - one on Saturday morning and another which spelled the end of his race. His chances of points were already gone by that stage, a fuel rig problem at his first stop meaning that he had to stop again next time round.

"I think we could have beaten Kimi today and taken some good points out of Jenson, so that was very disappointing," Christian Horner admitted.

Mark Webber never quite had the pace. He fuelled longer than Vettel and was heavier than any of the top 10 qualifiers save Rosberg, who did another strong job for Williams - half a kilo heavier, 0.05s quicker and two slots further up than Webber. The same fuel rig that had proved problematic for Vettel was used for Webber and his second stop was a couple of seconds slower than it should have been, ceding the final point-scoring position to Kubica's BMW.

The big news in Valencia on Saturday was that the Red Bulls would go back to the factory before Spa and that the team was looking at fitting a KERS system.

What did Webber think about that?

"That would be nice, we'll see. We're looking at it."

Was he worried about reliability issues, in view of the fact that you can't test?

"I'm worried about losing 15 kilos. You won't recognise me mate! Seriously though, we're going to be sensible about it and see how we go about it. We're a racing team, we're competitive, there's a lot of good people in our team and we're trying to bring this championship home as hard as possible."

The Red Bulls of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel © LAT

There's no escaping the fact that fitting a KERS to the Red Bull would favour Vettel more than Webber given the Aussie's additional size and weight. It was for that reason that Heidfeld could run the BMW system while Kubica could not.

Was it possible to put a KERS system on Webber's car and go quicker than without one?

"Errr, not far off..." he said with a wry smile. "We'll see." By Sunday night, after their disappointing race, Horner was admitting that disruption was a concern and that we were unlikely to see KERS on a Red Bull at Spa, a race they are favourites to win anyway.

He admitted too, that Vettel's engine situation was a big concern.

"He's got two new engines left (of the eight permitted per driver per season). We can use the old ones but we are a bit high on mileage and it's going to be very difficult based on the fact that we've already gone through four engines with Sebastian. It's almost inevitable that we will have a grid penalty at one race. We might need KERS if we haven't any engines left..." he joked.

As far as the below par Valencia performance level went, Horner attributed it a little to the track layout and a little to the temperatures, with the RB5 known to be hard on the super-soft tyre.

Webber added: "Our traction wasn't too bad but we didn't seem to be able to run the downforce levels some of the others could. They had reasonable top speeds but to run those speeds we had to have very low wing on the car, which make it quite difficult. It was a hard track for us to nail. We haven't had many tough circuits like Brawn has, but this looked like ours."

Spa, of course, should give us a completely different equation to solve. It will be interesting to see if McLaren's recent progress translates at a quick track, which was the team's Achilles Heel earlier in the season. It will obviously be better but whether it's an outright front-runner will be the issue.

Whitmarsh explained some of the philosophy behind the recent progress.

"It was very painful to be at Silverstone without KERS and so slow. We've got a fantastic mechanical package - a great engine and a good KERS. But, to have the KERS we have a relatively small amount of ballast and having selected and developed with the wrong weight distribution there was little we could do about that without removing KERS and putting ballast forward.

"We did that, we knew we were hurting ourselves but having established that, we worked on weight saving and an axle position change, which we've seen here," he said. "And I think we learned from that.

"But at the same time, not really as a consequence of Silverstone, we were able to implement a new aerodynamic package in Germany which had an extreme double diffuser and that's given us a new set of avenues to develop the car around and we've made progress at a faster rate than when we were in a more confined technical concept."

There's that slightly less than classy old motor racing adage that says you can't polish a turd. But McLaren's dollop now seems to be shining majestically, having gone from back to front in half a season.

Eau Rouge © LAT

But, "we will only know about our Spa form when we get there," Whitmarsh admitted. "The car was always better in slow speed corners than high speed. The weight distribution and wheelbase change were aimed at that, we put more downforce on the car and I'm sure we will be relatively more competitive but I can't say how competitive."

Hamilton though, is confident. He raced with a slightly different front suspension and nose than Kovalainen in Valencia but that was only because Heikki's parts only arrived in time for Saturday and he didn't want to risk getting lost on set-up with a car he'd been happy with.

"I think the car will be good at Spa," the world champion said. "For sure we are going to go to circuits that are not as tight and where it's high speed, efficient downforce that's needed. Clearly, while we were on the front row here we didn't have the best car, maybe the second or third best, but I think the KERS we have overshadows the level of downforce we have compared to, say, the Brawn.

"Rubens was maybe three tenths faster than us in qualifying (fuel-adjusted), with maybe an even bigger gap if we took KERS off, so I think we've got to focus on improving the car still." As a team that loves winning races they will do that but not, Whitmarsh says, at the expense of compromising the desire to come flying out of the blocks in 2010.

Finally, I guess, having said last time that we shouldn't knock Ferrari for putting Luca Badoer in, I shouldn't sign off without some look at his weekend...

On the surface the conclusions seem all too obvious but it should be said that Luca's own personal choice would have been to prepare more and race the car at Monza. His fellow drivers, particularly those at McLaren, seemed largely sympathetic.

Kovalainen said: "I think the situation he was put in was difficult. It was a top car, so high expectations, and at a street circuit it's quite difficult to get grip, so if you haven't driven the car it was a tall order from the beginning. I don't really know what else you could have expected.

"The tyres are quite complicated - sometimes they warm up, sometimes they don't, sometimes they overheat and it's much more complicated than a few years ago when they brought a tyre that worked out straightaway, with different conditions. It was probably different compounds but now we are much more limited. I think that knocks the driver's confidence quite a bit. You can't push if you don't feel you've got the grip.

"And it's so close that if you lose that edge you are going to be last quite quickly."

"I think he's done a good job to keep it on the track and not put it in the wall," Lewis Hamilton agreed. "It was a tall order with no testing when you haven't raced for 10 years. I think anyone would struggle and bit by bit he'll catch up."

Badoer himself expects to be much better at Spa.