Why Ferrari will keep Raikkonen for Vettel

After deciding to pass up the Monaco Grand Prix in favour of the Indianapolis 500, Fernando Alonso not surprisingly found driving an IndyCar around an oval very different from anything he had encountered in 15 years of Formula 1.

"For one thing," he told me at Indy, "you have to turn right on the straight, and that sends some weird messages - you arrive at a corner, and you just release the pressure in your hands, and the car starts to steer to the left..."

At the Speedway that characteristic is built into the cars' set-up, but last Sunday, for reasons Ferrari were not immediately able to explain, Sebastian Vettel found himself dealing with something similar at the Hungaroring.

The problem with his steering, he said, was there from the start, and worsened through the race, so that in right-handers he needed hardly any lock, in left-handers a great deal of it.

Sebastian, nobody's fool, is only too aware that his life would be rather less straightforward without Raikkonen as his team-mate

This necessarily compromised his pace, as also did an instruction from Ferrari to stay away from the kerbs, and thus Mercedes came into the equation to a degree the team had not anticipated.

The rule of thumb this season seems to be that at fast circuits you need a silver car, at slow, high-downforce tracks a red one. As at Monaco, for sheer pace the Ferraris were untouchable.

When one of them was hobbled, however, it was a different matter - although it needn't have been, for if Kimi Raikkonen had been given his head he could have disappeared.

As history shows, though, that's not how they do things at Ferrari: publicly acknowledged or not, there is always a firm numero uno.

Ferrari people would argue that, at any given time, one driver - be it Michael Schumacher, Alonso, Vettel, whomever - establishes himself as the natural team leader, and it makes sense to focus on the man most likely to win the world championship. You can't fault the logic, but it can make life frustrating for such as Rubens Barrichello, Felipe Massa and now Raikkonen.

The word is that Vettel, whom Ferrari wish to commit to a new contract, is making it a condition that his pal stays aboard, and one can see why.

The mood doesn't always take Kimi, as we have known for countless years, but when it does he is still a frontrunner - and at the same time not one to make waves.

Sebastian, nobody's fool, is only too aware that his life would be rather less straightforward with a Max Verstappen or Carlos Sainz in the other car.

The Hungarian Grand Prix was a humdrum affair, although it looked like coming to life in the late laps when the Ferraris, governed by Vettel's impaired pace, were reeled in by the Mercedes pair.

Lewis Hamilton, running behind Valtteri Bottas, felt he had a shot at them, but until the team's communication system was repaired he was unable to tell anyone - and the fact that this was crucial says everything about Formula 1's abiding problem: faster than his team-mate Lewis might have been, but the only way he was going to pass him was if the team instructed Valtteri to let him through.

Once by, Hamilton indeed closed on Vettel and Raikkonen, but in the end there was further stalemate. Through the final right-hander the Merc was no match for the Ferraris, and thus never able to challenge on the following DRS straight.

Unlike Sergio Perez, who in Canada denied faster team-mate Esteban Ocon the opportunity to take on Daniel Ricciardo, Bottas had immediately obeyed his team's instruction to move over for Hamilton, and when Lewis found himself unable to challenge the Ferraris he duly made good on his promise to let Valtteri past again.

Afterwards Hamilton worried about whether he had done the right thing - conceivably, after all, he could lose the championship by fewer than the points he gave up - but he might well again need Bottas's help in the future, and the two, both of whom behaved like team players, know where they stand with each other. Post-Montreal Messrs Perez and Ocon seem like strangers who happen to operate out of the same pit.

When first Formula 1 ventured to the Hungaroring back in 1986 the drivers' reaction was one of dismay. "Thank God," I remember Alan Jones saying at the Osterreichring the following weekend, "we're back at a proper circuit after that bloody kart track..."

Perhaps time has mellowed the genus grand prix driver, or maybe everyone has simply become inured to chicanes and fiddly corners. Whatever, the Hungaroring is these days regarded as a minor classic, a place where the driver can still make a difference.

However you want to slice it, though, overtaking has always been notoriously difficult there, and with the latest cars the problem was even more apparent: yes, they are indeed quicker - although Schumacher's V10 lap record, set in 2004, still stands! - but increased downforce inevitably comes at the cost of commensurate 'dirty air'.

On a 'flat-bottom' Formula 1 car, all the downforce necessarily comes from the wings and other appendages, but in the 'ground-effect' era of 1977-82 much of it came from a shaped underbody, and those cars were far less affected by turbulence and 'dirty air'.

Last week I noted that, in an attempt to improve the racing in IndyCar, next year's aero rules call for 66% of the downforce to come from beneath the car, an increase of 19%.

Very well, over there everyone races the same car, manufactured by Dallara, and such a thing would be impossible to mandate in Formula 1, where every team's car is different, but as the sport's masters, notably Ross Brawn, ponder how the next generation of cars should be, would not a sound starting point be a return to downforce generated beneath the car as well as above it?

There wasn't much wrong with the Lotus 79.