Dodgy Business

There was a mistaken perception that Fernando Alonso showed superior pace to easily catch Michael Schumacher during the second stint of the San Marino Grand Prix. And from there it was easy to conclude that Renault made a strategic error by pitting before Schumacher when the evidence suggested that Fernando would overhaul Michael by the simple expedient of running further.

If you were watching TV, that's certainly the way it looked. Fernando had been bottled up behind Massa's Ferrari while Michael stretched out a 13-second gap. Fernando had then run five laps further than Schuey before his first pitstop, which was timed at 9.1 seconds as against Schumacher's 8.3-second stop.

When Alonso caught Michael on lap 34, therefore, you figured that it was a simple case of waiting for the Ferrari to pit before Alonso turned in another blistering six or seven laps, made his own stop, pitted out ahead and won his third race of the year.

So Fernando stopping earlier than the Ferrari was, on the surface, unfathomable. Yes, Michael was going very slowly, but there was no danger from behind, no chance of Alonso being backed up into someone else's pitstop window. So what was Renault doing?

Not for nothing does Pat Symonds enjoy a reputation as one of the very best strategists in the pitlane. For Renault to do what they did had to be more than a basic error. There had to be solid logic. And there was.

On Sunday evening, with half the press room starting to churn out Schuey is back/Renault screws up stories, Renault's PR, Bradley Lord, was certainly earning his corn. His task was to convey the finer points of the day's events to a bunch of hacks whose grasp of strategy generally extends to an appreciation of when to time the lunch time run to the motorhome serving the smoothest bottle of red.

TV's on-screen pitstop times are often misleading. They are total stop times and don't tell you how long the fuel rig was attached - the crucial element in how far a car can run. The teams all know, of course, because they have a man standing on the pitwall timing it.

Renault strategist Pat Symonds © LAT

Alonso's first stop was a mite longer than Schuey's but it hadn't been a quick stop and, Renault figured, they only had the potential to run a couple of laps longer than Schuey in the second stint.

How so, when he had stopped five laps later? The answer is that Fernando was relatively short-fuelled to make sure he jumped Massa and to try and gain some track time on Michael. Renault was not anticipating catching the lead Ferrari so quickly.

That they did so was not a reflection of huge Renault superiority. The Renault was marginally quicker but it was close. Alonso's fastest race lap was 1:24.569 on lap 23, Schumacher's a 1:24.624 on lap 19.

Schumacher, in fact, slowed dramatically in the second stint. He had started the race on used rubber, saving two new sets of Bridgestones for stints two and three. From lap 7, which was the first time that Michael dipped into the 1m25s, until his first stop, every one of Schuey's laps were in the 1:25s.

Bridgestone's early lap new rubber pace was highly impressive and, despite having refuelled, Michael's first four laps of the second stint were also in the 1:25s. But then he had graining problems. The next four laps were in the 1:26s and then he started to drop into the 1:27s. Alonso, obviously, ate him up but, this being Imola, was never going past him.

"I had some tyre graining," Schuey explained, "not a big issue, honestly, but the car never seemed to come back."

Ross Brawn elaborated: "It's a phenomenon we saw a couple of times in 2003 and 2004. Sometimes when the track gets a lot of rubber down and a lot of grip we don't get the tyre to start to work properly.

"We see that because the tyre doesn't wear, the rubber is not biting into the surface. It can be because it gets a bit too hot and today was a lot hotter than we predicted and we were on a soft compound.

"Being on softer rubber you might suspect that we would have a wear issue but it was quite the opposite. So we can't wear the tyre, it gets too hot and we lose grip.

"The first set benefited from having a lighter fuel load, it had an easy life at the beginning with a Safety Car and also it was a used set. We're still investigating but we think with the second set it was a case of overheating the tyre and then finding it hard to get it back."

It could be that Michael pushed a mite too hard on the new rubber at the beginning of stint two, when he was not under pressure, but with Alonso on his gearbox, he now had a problem. He knew that the 'in' laps around the second stop would be crucial and so he slowed down more, even dropping in a couple of 1:28s in order to try to rescue the tyres.

We will never know what would have happened if Alonso had waited for Schuey to pit and then stayed out the extra couple of laps that Renault figured he had. But it was no foregone conclusion that Alonso would jump the Ferrari.

Renault had seen Schumacher's pace all weekend during Bridgestone's early new tyre 'golden laps.' It could all have hinged on traffic. Better, they thought, to stop Alonso early and hope that his 'out' lap on a fresh set of Michelins would stack up well against an obviously struggling Michael, whose extra lap would be done on that problematic second set of Bridgestones.

Michael Schumacher (Ferrari) leads Fernando Alonso (Renault) just before the final sequence of pitstops © LAT

Ferrari, obviously, had to respond and call Schumacher in on the very next lap. They could not leave him out there on his second set of tyres against a freshly re-shod Alonso.

The speed of Schumacher's extra lap therefore became the crucial issue. Having lapped in the 1:27s and 1:28s for the previous eight laps, Schuey banged in a 1:25.734 on his 'in' lap. It was not as quick as his first stint 'in' lap (1:25.121) but excellent given the circumstances, and good enough. He pitted out still in front. Game Over.

Schumacher's ability to go that quickly, when all the evidence suggested he was in trouble, was doubtless something Symonds was betting against. Renault had gambled and lost, yes, but there is no guarantee that staying out was a better option. We'll never know.

What's certain is that Schumacher's coolness and racing brain (the approach to the second stint) and his outright speed (his pole lap) are all present and correct.

The Ferrari may have performed relatively better at Imola than it will in Nurburgring or Barcelona but the fact is that Michael won a race in conditions which were hotter than expected when the tyre choice was made. Renault and Alonso may be favourites for the title but you can bet that Michael and Ferrari will push them hard.

The question in everyone's mind of course, it whether the competitiveness is enough to convince Schumacher to race on beyond the end of the year. For now, he doesn't look like a man with retirement in mind.