Dodgy Business

Bahrain was an absorbing motor race from beginning to end, and something of a slap in the face for those who held that 84-time winner Michael Schumacher had mutated into an old has-been.

Granted, Michael had a mellow, relaxed air about him. Maybe it was the imagination, but he did seem to lack a bit of the old intensity. He seemed to be enjoying it all so much. Much more than he used to enjoy finishing second with a car capable of winning. But then again, after a season like 2005, perhaps he had every reason to be wearing a smiley face.

Renault and Fernando Alonso did a great job from first to last but no disrespect to them, so many eyes were on the Ferrari performance. It was strong enough to have brought a debut victory for the 248 if the pendulum of fortune had swung the other way.

Qualifying was virgin territory for everyone, of course, and understanding the nuances will be key to a season that has every sign of being a classic.

"I'm really pleased with the result," Schuey said, "but I have mixed feelings because it seems that we could have been ahead and won the race. Considering how it ended up, it's now clear that the qualifying lap that wasn't acknowledged was the decisive factor that played against us. It's a pity, because yesterday I had to back off because of the traffic."

Michael Schumacher celebrates his 65th pole position © LAT

Focus, now, on the last 20 minutes of qualifying, the top ten shootout. Teams decide how much fuel they want to put in for the first stint of the race and go out with that quantity of juice. So, if they want to run a longer first stint, they will have the penalty of the extra weight making them slower in qualifying.

After the session, on Sunday morning, they get back the fuel used in qualifying at a pre-announced level. In Bahrain, it was 2.75kg per lap. So, say a driver has done ten laps in the top ten shootout, his car goes on the weighbridge and his team wheel their fuel Bowser down the pitlane, set it at 27.5kg and dump in the fuel.

If the rule was left at that, drivers would naturally go as slowly as possible throughout most of the shootout to save the fuel in the car, using much less than the 2.75 kilos each lap, realising a net gain when they were refilled. And the perplexed TV viewer would be left with the spectacle of the world's best drivers seeing who could go the slowest before bolting on a set of new rubber and doing one flying lap.

To stop that, the FIA ruled that every lap the driver does in the shootout must be within 110% of his qualifying time. If it isn't, then he is docked that lap from his total.

So, say he's done 10 laps, then instead of getting 27.5kgs of fuel on Sunday morning, he only gets 24.75kgs. Which means that he will have to pit a lap earlier than otherwise in the first stint. Which is what happened to Schumacher.

It was thus fascinating to watch the press room timing screens as everyone went out for the shootout. Of course, you didn't know what the pole time was going to be and hence you couldn't multiply it by 1.1 (110%) in advance, but if you figured that it was going to be somewhere close to one minute and 31 seconds (it was actually 1:31.4), then the cut-off was going to be 1:40.

Amazingly, some drivers were immediately lapping at 1:39.5, which did seem to be cutting it a bit fine, while others settled down to around 1:34 to 1:35. If anything was surprising, it was that Ferrari and Michael, normally absolutely spot-on with anything involving strategy, fell foul of the system. Juan Pablo Montoya was perhaps not too much of a surprise, but the lap that cost Schuey was his 'out' lap after putting on new rubber.

The other slight surprise was that Ferrari used two sets of new rubber in the shootout. Perhaps they knew they didn't quite have Renault's pace and that getting pole with a lighter car was an important part of the strategy. Felipe Massa had been encouragingly quick and his ability to put the other car alongside Michael on the front row, just four hundredths adrift, could have been a serious headache for the Renault men.

Tyre in a heating blanket © LAT

Felipe did a fine job of blocking Alonso into turn 1, but Fernando was in a hurry to get by and made an equally good fist of pinning Massa tight into T4 and passing him on exit. If he'd had to spend a decent number of laps behind the Brazilian at the start, catching Michael would have been a problem.

So close was the race that it's fair to assume that when Honda and McLaren join in as well, races are going to be turned by the smallest advantage. The ability to save new sets of tyres for the race, for instance. The leading Michelin runners reckoned that a new set of tyres after a pitstop netted a gain of three seconds versus an old set over the first three laps or so.

As you only have seven sets for the weekend, you have to think about it. The seven sets include the alternative tyre choice and so, at some stage, you have to make a tyre comparison. Normally, this is done on Friday. That's not ideal because the track is often dirty but, if you do it in the second session, then at least some rubber has gone down and the temperature should be something close to what you will have at race start time. So, on Friday, most people will use two sets of rubber.

Another set will probably be used on Saturday morning ahead of qualifying. The super-quick teams will obviously not need to waste a set in the first session of qualifying to get into the top 16, but they might be worried about running a used set in the second 15 minutes.

If, at the moment, you take Renault, Ferrari, McLaren and Honda as the Big Four, would you be happy going out on used tyres if you thought that a Webber, a Heidfeld, a Trulli or, on the strength of last weekend, a Rosberg, were bolting on a new set? You could easily find yourself bumped from the top ten.

If you opt for safety, you're into the top ten shootout and you've used four sets of tyres. Then, you will use another one or two sets in the shootout itself, leaving you just one or two new sets for the race. If it's a two-stop, three-stint race like Bahrain, that's okay, but if it's a three-stop, four-stint race, you'd like some more.

How might you save tyres? Well, if you have a team with a definite number one and number two, and the number one has reasonable confidence in his partner, the number two might do the tyre comparison on Friday while the number one twiddles his thumbs and saves rubber. If your men are Schumacher and Massa, this would probably work, but if your name's Ron Dennis, you'd have an almighty Colombian strop on your hands.

As I say, I found myself watching the timing screens more intently than the actual track pictures in the Bahrain press room, and I did wonder how it was if you were sat at home without any. Certainly in the pits, where the action was manic, the new qualifying format seemed a great success.

"There's no question that the first two sessions were exciting," said Williams's technical director Sam Michael on Saturday. "The last session, well, I think the first 12-14 minutes when everyone was just burning fuel was a little bit boring. But that's the only change I'd make. I would just have the whole lot on low fuel. It would then be like the first two sessions the whole way through. But I've spoken to a few people who watched on TV and they thought it was fantastic."

Michael Schumacher and Felipe Massa © LAT

What did he think about the 4-5 seconds disparity among the drivers early in the fuel economy run?

"Well, you don't know what your qualifying time is going to be at the end and you never really want to go near the 110% bogey time because if you are just one second wrong, you lose the fuel."

And what about Renault's risk in the second session, when they came out right at the very end, meaning that if there had been a yellow flag they might have been in the poop?

"They just went for one timed lap. It was a risk, but actually what they did was right and we should have done it as well. Nico would have gone two tenths quicker so he might have made it into the shootout, but at that time we weren't confident we could do the time on one lap.

"And maybe we couldn't have done, because we're on Bridgestones and they're on Michelins. We didn't know enough about how to get the best out of the tyres in that situation, so we decided to be conservative. We did very few laps in practice so that during the qualifying we could do whatever we wanted on laps. That was our strategy."

Was he surprised that Ferrari had burned two sets of rubber in the shootout?

"I thought it was a worthwhile gamble, but it didn't really pay off. If you looked at Michael and Massa, they both went about a tenth and a half quicker on a car that would have had three tenths less fuel. From when Michael did his first run to his second run, he'd done an in-lap and an out-lap, and for every lap you do it's about a tenth of a second worth of fuel, so he should have been two tenths quicker even if the lap was exactly the same.

"The fact that he was only a tenth and a half quicker meant he was actually half a tenth slower. So they didn't gain anything from running the second new set. But when they first did it, I have to admit I thought, maybe we missed this, this could be a problem here. It definitely wasn't worth it, but it might be different somewhere else."

Still there? If you're getting a little scrambled by now, I apologise. We'll finish with something a bit lighter.

Erstwhile colleague Joe Saward had upset the Bahrainis by writing a story saying that they hadn't actually sold very many tickets and that some of those taking advantage of free visas were staying on to work in the world's oldest profession, whatever that may be...

Anyhow, they were not best pleased. At Sakhir, they issued a press release detailing some facts about the race. If one took the first letter of each paragraph from start to finish, by an amazing coincidence, it spelled out: 'SAWARD IS A KNOB.'

Schadenfreude being an ever-present in the press room, quite a few people had a titter at that and it was related, alongside the poor man's mug shot, in the Red Bulletin, Red Bull's paddock gossip paper which is published every day at a GP.

Libel! Defamation! Normally it's perpetrated by a journalist and not against a journalist. And there's not much point suing because, being a journalist, the offender is penniless anyway. But hey, Joe! The Bahrainis and Red Bull! Think of their combined kittys! Retirement beckons. Close the laptop. Yachts, perpetual G&Ts, dream!

"Well, maybe," smiled Joe, never one to take life too seriously, "the only problem is, if it gets to court they can probably defend it on the grounds of fair comment..." And off he chortled. Fair play to the fella.