What's gone wrong for Ferrari?

The British Grand Prix was a bit of a demonstration of what I said after the last race: Mercedes now has the upper hand on Ferrari, and with Hamilton showing the form he's currently in, nobody was going to touch him.

So what has led to the Ferrari slump, if you can call it that?

Until the last couple of races, it's been able to nip at Mercedes' heels in qualifying and, if anything, had a better package when it came to conserving the tyres on race day and was always a threat and sometimes ahead.

But at Silverstone it all looked different.

Kimi Raikkonen dropped off the back of Lewis Hamilton very early in the race. Presumably Sebastian Vettel spent too much time watching to see if others were going to jump the start and made a poor start himself. But even after that, he was never really fast enough to make a comeback.

In the end, it was the tyre problems for both Ferraris that put paid to any chance of a big points finish.

Pirelli says that the problems the two Ferrari drivers had were different, but I don't see it like that. Both left-front tyres had delamination problems, and when that happens you're in the lap of the gods as to the outcome. Will the tyre stay inflated, as was the case with Raikkonen? Or will it deflate, as with Vettel?

Raikkonen's tyres were actually six laps fresher than Vettel's, while Valtteri Bottas, albeit with a different chassis, had done 31 laps on the same compound with a heavier car. So, in general, tyre life should not have been the issue.

So why, on a chassis that has been so good on its tyres until now, has this problem suddenly reared its ugly head?

At the Red Bull Ring a week before Silverstone, Ferrari introduced a new front wing with a longer-chord main plane.

This will produce more overall downforce, but have very different airflow separation characteristics, which can be much more difficult to manage.

This sort of change could lead to Ferrari running the front suspension set-up stiffer to stop that front wing getting too close to the ground.

If this is what Ferrari did, then the front tyre will be getting more of a pounding. Not only that, it can lead to more lock-ups under braking, and these local hotspots can very easily lead to delamination.

From my observations at Silverstone, both Ferrari drivers want different things from the car. Vettel turns in on the brakes, so needs confidence in the rear, which a stiffer front suspension set-up will give him. Raikkonen turns in earlier and asks for more from the front end of the car mid-corner, so he needs a more positive front end.

There will be an in-depth analysis of what happened, and as it's Ferrari there will be a few days of shouting and throwing hands up in the air and looking to the gods for the solution.

But the reality is that it's very easy to develop yourself into a corner that's difficult to get out of.

With half a season to go and the standings more or less equal, the championship is still there to be had. But a team that throws anything away will soon start to run out of recovery time.

One of the big talking points in the past few races is team-mates and the on-circuit respect between them. Or the lack of it, of course. This has been a problem since the days of chariot racing.

Give two competitive drivers two more or less identical cars and the chance of them ending up side-by-side and competing with each other for the same bit of track is more or less assured.

That's where we are now, more or less all the way down the grid. In reality, there is no way the teams can control their drivers and prevent them doing stupid things on the track and driving each other off the road. It has happened right from the front of the grid to the back - and I've been on the pitwall when it has struck my team.

From Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in Spain last year through Esteban Ocon and Sergio Perez in Canada and Azerbaijan this year to Carlos Sainz Jr and Daniil Kvyat, the most important thing to do is beat your team-mate. If you can do that (in a clean way) then the team will start to follow your direction.

But if you do it in a dirty way, you can end up paying the price and the team will decide who is the better team player, and the other will be sent packing.

Some of the younger drivers looking to move up the grid need to remember that their chances of progressing and getting a drive with a top team don't just depend on their speed.

Your pace will always show at some point in the weekend. What's vitally important is how you conduct yourself and your consistency.

Sitting at the side of the road with no wheels on your wagon does nothing for consistency, and it's only one stage away from sitting in the grandstands thinking of what might have been had you just acted that little bit differently when you had a Formula 1 career.

On Saturday morning at Silverstone, I had the opportunity to have a close look at the cars on track as they went through Brooklands, the corner at the end of the Wellington straight. This is a fairly long left-hander with a late apex.

As you arrive at high speed and want to maintain that speed for as long as possible, you will want to brake as late as possible. It's very tempting to turn in too early and brake in a straight line. But then you lose time through and out of the corner.

More or less all the cars look great and are well balanced, they are just travelling at a slightly different speed. Long gone are the days of the driver hanging the tail out as a norm - these things are basically on rails, and if you get them out of line you are either off or you lose loads of lap time scrabbling it back together. Precision is everything.

Most of the drivers go for the late entry, which means they're braking and turning in. But Raikkonen consistently turned in very early, and even on occasions clipped the inside kerb at a point where most other drivers were at least two or three car widths wider.

Kevin Magnussen was a bit random and he looked like he was trying to find the best line. One lap he would be out wide, the next hugging the inside kerb. So he looked a bit lost.

The one thing that caught my attention was Hamilton. He was taking the normal wide line sweeping into the corner, but on a couple of occasions he would just go in that little bit deeper and run a little wider. He didn't really seem to have any problems and you would normally just say he missed the apex by that little bit, the lap time was still OK. But for me it was a sign of something very intelligent.

Where most were driving around trying to go as fast as possible on their racing line, and if they made a mistake they would back out of it, he was asking the car what would happen if he was to brake five metres later and turn in five kilometres faster.

By trying it, he could go back to the engineers and say, 'I need this or that to be able to find the next two or three tenths', as opposed to going back and saying the car feels great. But it only feels great at the lap time you are doing, and he was pushing his car past that to be in possession of the solutions to reach that next step.

Love him or hate him, you can't question his talent - and what I believe I saw down at Brooklands showed me that it doesn't just happen because he's in the best car. Hamilton really does work to make that car the best and the fastest.

He and his engineer, Peter Bonnington, who is an old Jordan engineer, work very well together. A strong relationship between the driver and his engineer is crucial when it comes to maintaining that performance edge.

As for Bottas, he was the one to suffer the penalties this weekend. To come from ninth to second, albeit with a little help from the opposition with Raikkonen's tyre problem, just shows at the mid-point of the season how strong the Mercedes package is.

With one point between leader Vettel and Hamilton in the championship, it's game on for the rest of the season.

The pre-British Grand Prix event in London looked like it was fun, and more of these would be great for F1. Using them as part of F1's promotion is a very good idea, but whoever organises it needs to do it in conjunction with the following event. Don't be at loggerheads with or dilute the subsequent grand prix.

As for the British GP and Silverstone being man enough to step up and say, 'Hang on a minute, this is too expensive to be a viable business venture', it's the right thing to do. No matter what the business is, existence is dependent on making a profit, or at least breaking even, and when the numbers don't add up then it's time to shut up shop. This is exactly what Silverstone has done.

Hopefully, renewed negotiations will be positive and we will have a British GP at Silverstone for many years to come.

The one we just had shows how supportive the fans are, so now it's down to Liberty Media to make things cost effective.

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