GB: Schuey is just two good

The main talking point of course wasn't qualifying, but pre-qualifying: cars crawling around trying to go slower than those before them, Michael Schumacher deliberately spinning, Rubens Barrichello running wide, others creeping up to the finish line to the deep bemusement of those who had paid their money to watch the world's fastest, most agile cars being driven at the limit. F1 doesn't quite know if it is a participant's sport or public entertainment.

Even worse, it was all for nothing. The expected downpour in the second half of the qualifying hour never arrived, and so the method behind their madness was never revealed. The controversy also shaded what was of much more significance: McLaren's first pole since October last year, and the full scale of its comeback.

By the end of the first sector - where Ferrari had ruled all weekend - Kimi Raikkonen was 0.4sec down on Rubens Barrichello's benchmark, both fuelled to three-stop. But sectors two and three reward slow-speed direction change and the MP4-19B was utterly superb in that regard. Flicking left-right with track to spare through Club, clacking easily over the kerbs at the Abbey chicane, full-on Kimi commitment through Bridge, those slow-corner direction changes again through the complex. That 0.4s and more was all clawed back, never mind that the track temperature had dropped 6C since Rubens' run.

The revised car here was very good the first time Kimi tested it. He followed that up with fastest time in three of the four practices through Friday and Saturday morning.

Relief was writ large on his face. "The balance has been great all weekend. What can I say? After the start to the season we have had, this feels very good. These are just the first races with this new car and I'm sure we can make it even quicker. I'm looking forward to the rest of the season."

Juan Pablo Montoya had been first of the serious runners to make his run. The revised Williams had looked promising at times in the practices, but one thing it didn't like were crosswinds - and this session was full of them, mad swirling things that gathered momentum across the fields and the old airfield and which changed direction almost as often as the cars. "I came out of Copse," said JPM, "and only just managed to hang on to it."

The wind was high when he made his run, and was shooting up and across the pit-straight. The tailwind element reduces downforce by a surprising amount - a 12mph tailwind on a car travelling at 200mph gives a downforce reduction as high as 13 percent. The crosswind element means the wing endplates partly mask the airflow over the wings, reducing downforce yet further and inducing 'apparent yaw', a rather unsettling phenomenon for the driver. The Williams is particularly sensitive to it, leaving JPM down in eighth.

Michael Schumacher was next out, and he put Montoya's time into perspective, the Ferrari 0.5sec faster. Not that Michael was having an easy time of it. Track temperatures of around 28C were suspected of aggravating the first-lap performance deficit of the Bridgestones; he twice spun at Priory in the practices. Feeling pole was out of reach, Ferrari had put him on a two-stop strategy, 16kg heavier than Barrichello (around 0.5sec worth).

The Brazilian's lighter Ferrari duly shaved 0.4sec off Michael's time, knocking him off provisional pole. Both were on the softer of their available tyres, but they surrendered grip at the end of their q-lap as rear tyre pressures came up too high, although the Ferraris were still untouchable through the first sector (from the startline down to Stowe).

The Renaults were not quite the force they'd been at Magny-Cours and, even on a softer compound of Michelin to that used by McLaren, Williams and BAR, were around 0.4sec down on Barrichello. Jarno Trulli's lap ended up fifth quickest, a good effort on a heavy-ish load, Fernando Alonso was sixth, although the Spaniard was penalised 10 grid places for an engine change after a failure at the end of that morning's practice.

After Raikkonen snatched pole from Barrichello, only Jenson Button remained a threat. The BAR hadn't had a great balance on Friday, but was now somewhere close. After the first two sectors he was just 0.1sec down on Raikkonen. But the front end didn't get a great bite into Luffield and you heard the hesitation on the throttle as he was forced to wait for it to settle. Pole was gone, as was second. But it was still good enough to demote Schumacher down to fourth. "It felt great through Becketts," he said, "but at the other high speed corners it felt different. I put it down to the wind." That and a re-invigorated McLaren team.



There were 19 laps to go when Jarno Trulli's Renault suffered an apparent left rear suspension failure through Bridge. A big, big accident unfolded that thankfully left Trulli unharmed but which destroyed not only the car but all of Michael Schumacher's hard-won leading margin.

The safety car the incident triggered converted what was set to be a 19/20-second lead into a negligible one, as Kimi Raikkonen was able to dive into the pits and get his third stop for free, wiping out the advantage of Michael's two-stop strategy. But for Michael it was worse than that. There was the tyre situation to consider as well. Just as at Magny-Cours, the Ferrari's Bridgestones were generally superior but the Michelins still had that early-lap performance advantage - especially new Michelins, as now fitted to Raikkonen's car.

Then there was the matter of how the safety car was being driven: slowly. "He seemed to be putting no effort into his driving at all," Schuey later complained.

Slow warm-up laps suit the Michelin characteristics perfectly and are the worst thing possible for the Bridgestones. Michael was surely going to be vulnerable when that safety car came in.

The hope in his rear view mirrors took the form of two lapped cars - those of Cristiano da Matta and Christian Klien - between him and Kimi. The safety car's lights went out on lap 44 - the signal it was coming in at the end of the lap. Michael took some deep breaths and prepared to do his stuff...

An hour or so earlier, as they lined up on the grid, there appeared to be more than just Raikkonen ready to spoil Michael's day. A whole row ahead of Schuey, up at the front next to Raikkonen, sat team-mate Rubens Barrichello. What the world at large didn't know was that the Ferraris were on different strategies, that Michael was loaded up with around 16kg more fuel, enough for an extra six laps, and set to stop one time less.

When the combined sum of its average weight sensitivity and gentle fuel consumption is considered, Silverstone rates only 10th out of the 17 known Formula 1 circuits in terms of responsiveness to light fuel loads. Add in a long pitlane and fairly gentle tyre degradation and it's one of the few circuits at which a two-stop is theoretically within reach of a three.

The current qualifying format mitigates against two-stopping, of course - too costly in grid position - but what if you're not so hot in qualifying? What if the characteristics of your Bridgestones means you don't get the maximum effect from the lighter fuel because they don't heat up quickly enough, and thereby probably deny you the chance of pole? Then, at a circuit like Silverstone, two-stopping starts to look okay.

Besides, with all the front-running Michelin drivers bound to go for a three-stop (theoretically quicker, better qualifying and best suited to the tyres' strong early/weak late stint performance), a two-stop would get you out of sequence - allow you to use your Ferrari's greater performance. The two-stop at Silverstone, in other words, allowed Ferrari and Michael to do what a four-stop at Magny-Cours had done. The only difference was the circuit characteristics. For Ferrari, it was the prime strategy - and Michael got it.

But there did seem to be a window for a three-stop, albeit a narrower one - if Barrichello could have got pole on his lighter fuel load. "That was the thinking," said Rubens. "If I could get pole and do nine qualifying laps and really open up a gap - like Michael did at the Nürburgring. Of the two of us I was the one who got the car sorted on new tyres so everyone thought, 'Okay, let's try to get Rubens on pole'."

"I didn't feel so comfortable to be able to go for pole after seeing the times of our rivals," said Schumacher, "so we thought it better to try a different approach." So it was that the potential Barrichello intra-team challenge - at a time when the soft scoring system meant he was only 22 points adrift with 80 still up for grabs - was contained.

"Besides," said Rubens, "even if I had got pole, Kimi would have given me tremendous problems on the first lap because getting our tyres up to temperature in these [cool] conditions was really difficult today." That would then have wrecked the plan to do nine qualifying-style laps unhindered.

Raikkonen, naturally keen to play his early-lap advantage to the full, took the grid round on a slow formation lap - and blasted into an immediate lead. Barrichello took up behind him as Michael chopped ruthlessly across the track to block the expected quick getaway of Trulli's Renault. Into Copse Michael had a look down the inside of Jenson Button's BAR but was given a chop every bit as ruthless as any he would've pulled, the Ferrari losing a lot of momentum in avoidance and coming out fourth, with Trulli, David Coulthard and a battling Takuma Sato and Juan Pablo Montoya behind him.

McLaren suspected Michael was on a two-stop and Kimi knew he had to build as big a lead as possible in these early weak stages of Ferrari's performance. He was stunning, 3.5sec clear of Barrichello at the end of the first lap. So hard was he pushing he had a bit of a moment through Luffield on the second lap, yet still increased the gap to 4.3sec. The Bridgestones finally kicked in on the third lap and Barrichello was able to hold the gap steady. A couple of laps after that and he began to leave Button behind.

Ah, Button; the other guy who looked like a possible Schuey threat. It never quite gelled. "I was expecting a lot more," he said. "We weren't even in the same race the way our cars were handling. We've dropped off since earlier in the year, for sure." New aero parts, including a new diffuser, might have made that difference had they been fitted, but they'd been found to be too sensitive to cross-winds and therefore had to be discarded for qualifying and - under the parc ferme rules - thereby the race too.

Button was nonetheless in much better shape than team-mate Sato, whose two-stop strategy - an unusual choice for a Michelin runner here, shared only with the Jaguars - did not appear to work. At no stage in the race did he look pacey and, after clattering across the grass exiting Becketts on the second lap, was passed by Montoya. For the rest of the stint he was holding up Mark Webber.

Fernando Alonso had made little progress from his 16th grid slot, getting stuck behind Marc Gene in 12th, and so the team brought him in as early as lap eight, seven fewer than planned.

"It was like the M25 out there," said the team's engineering director Pat Symonds, "and we thought even with a heavier fuel load he'd still be able to lap quicker than that. But it seemed today that no matter what we did, he got caught in it."

"It was a shame," said Alonso, "because the car felt pretty good." This was at odds with what Trulli felt about his; Jarno, in fifth, quickly losing touch with Schumacher and falling back into Coulthard's clutches. David would later leapfrog the Renault at the first stops but never really got into the groove, with a best lap a full second slower than his race-leading team-mate. "I wasn't happy with my own performance today," said DC, "and I was struggling with the balance of my car, especially in slow corners."

McLaren hopes brightened when Barrichello pitted at the end of lap nine, having got the gap to Raikkonen down to no more than 3.5sec, with Kimi able to go for a further two laps. Button stopped at the same time as the McLaren and suddenly Schuey had a clear track ahead. The best lap to date had been Barrichello's 1m19.4s.

Now came the wonder laps. All was right with Michael's world at this point. Despite running two-stop heavy, he'd lost only 7.4sec to Raikkonen when the McLaren had pitted. He had another four laps to let rip: 1m19.2s, 1m18.9s, 1m18.7s and a stunning in-lap.

Furthermore, while Michael was doing that, Raikkonen hadn't been getting the best of breaks in the traffic after his stops - the classic penalty of a three-stop. He encountered first Sato then, more damagingly, the two battling Minardis. Michael, despite stopping for a long 9.3sec - on account of putting in enough fuel for a second stint of 22 laps - exited four car lengths ahead of the McLaren.

This was better than he could have dreamed. "I was not expecting that, honestly," he said. "I was expecting it would happen later in the race, not at the first stops."
With his performance advantage and strategy, he'd ensured the cards were in his favour, but in those four laps he'd given us a little reminder of why the team is built around him. He had effectively now won the race, barring any problems - like a late safety car. Raikkonen's sparkling showing had illustrated the MP4-19B's very real pace and Barrichello, even considering his strategy disadvantage over Michael, had not produced the same level of performance.

Barrichello, in fact, lost a place at the stops to Button - on account of his earlier and longer stop and the relative out-lap pace of Michelin and Bridgestone - and now lay fourth. Montoya had jumped Coulthard and both had jumped Trulli. But all three were behind two-stopping Giancarlo Fisichella, yet to pit from his back of the grid slot. The Sauber ran until lap 23 and put in some very fast laps in the meantime, the aero revisions to the car working well in conjunction with the great consistency of its Bridgestones. Although on a different strategy, he in effect brought himself into battle with Montoya for fifth place. It was a superb performance from team and driver.

Just behind the points-scoring positions Webber was playing a delicate game of tyre conservation while keeping at various times the faster cars of Alonso and Felipe Massa behind him. Along with Schumacher, Raikkonen and Fisichella, this was another star performance.

With Schuey's bigger fuel load Raikkonen was able to close right up on the Ferrari during this second stint, but at no stage was he able to put a serious move on the leader. The second round of stops for the leading three-stoppers stretched from laps 27-30 and resulted in Barrichello repassing Button for third, the BAR then losing touch with the Ferrari.

Schuey pitted for the second and final time on the 37th lap and - as in the first time around - emerged just in front of the McLaren as he exited the pitlane. Again Kimi bobbed around in the Ferrari's mirrors but could do no more than that, while Barrichello watched from four seconds or so back.

Four laps later came Trulli's very violent shunt - and free pit-stops for Raikkonen, Barrichello, Button, Fisichella, Montoya, Coulthard and the rest. Renault just failed to call Alonso in time. He was past the pit entry before the call came, to lose what would have been eighth. Also unlucky was Webber; he'd pitted just four laps earlier. Otherwise he could have leapfrogged DC for seventh. Unluckily for Fisichella, the Sauber's hydraulics needed to be repressured, losing him fifth place to Montoya.

Tension was at fever pitch on lap 44 as the safety car put out its lights. Which is where we came in. But those two backmarkers that lay between Schuey and his pursuer ultimately took the sting out of the late stages. By the time Raikkonen had forced his way past Klien and da Matta, Schumacher had built up a cushion and had the chance to warm his tyres. Game over: Schumacher, Raikkonen, Barrichello, Button, Montoya, Fisichella, Coulthard and Webber.

As he climbed out of his car in parc ferme, Michael's victory celebrations with Ferrari's Ross Brawn were particularly warm. They are the uncrackable nut.