Dodgy Business

The Lewis Hamilton Show goes on and on and you can't be other than deeply impressed. But again at Indianapolis the drivers expected to do the business for McLaren and Ferrari - double world champion Fernando Alonso and the mega-buck salaried Kimi Raikkonen - finished behind their teammates.

As far as Hamilton and F1 goes, we're coming from a position of zero reference. Lewis might well be the next Ayrton Senna, we don't know. If so, Alonso is doing very well.

But at Ferrari, the picture is more perplexing. We do have previous reference for Felipe Massa. We've seen him relative to Giancarlo Fisichella. And we've seen him relative to Michael Schumacher. He looked good, but not exceptional.

Raikkonen was perceived as a rocket who liked a party or two. You might not get the focus that sets apart the Ayrtons and Michaels, but the basic speed was never in doubt. So why isn't he blowing Massa's doors off?

One team principal told me in Montreal that he's against control rubber in F1. Yes, he understood the argument. The contact patch is the most critical part of the overall performance equation, and did we really want a sport dictated by the performance of a tyre company? And constant tyre testing?

The benefits of control rubber are obvious, but there are downsides too, he reckons. Formula 1 is the pinnacle and it should be possible to develop rubber around the strengths of a driver and his particular style.

Bridgestone tyres in Indianapolis © XPB/LAT

Take Ralf Schumacher. Ralf's no idiot. In a Williams, on Michelins, he started the Monaco Grand Prix from pole position. This year he lined up 20th. His Toyota teammate, Jarno Trulli, is always superb in Monte Carlo and won the '04 race for Renault. This year, he was an also-ran.

Jarno is a tremendous qualifier, always has been. For the first half of '04, before he fell out with Flavio Briatore, he got the better of Alonso at Renault. Ralf was close to Jarno in qualifying performance last year, but this time around he's nowhere near.

Autosport's technical advisor, Gary Anderson, was watching the Toyotas at Barcelona and said you could visibly see the difference.

Jarno was being delicate with the front end, as you have to be this year, while Ralf was asking too much of it and the car wasn't having it. He was loading up the front too much and the car was responding with more and more understeer.

Which is the gist of my team principal's argument. In Formula 1, he reckons, a driver's performance should not be limited by the tyre. By all means have control rubber but let's have higher spec control rubber.

Ralf is a driver with a pathological hatred of understeer. So is Kimi Raikkonen, and so is Fernando Alonso.

In the week between Montreal and Indy, Alonso started a bit of a media rumpus when he said on Spanish radio that he was not entirely comfortable at McLaren but refused to elaborate.

The media, always looking for aggro, speculated that he would be unhappy at not having clear No. 1 status, would want strategy priority befitting a double world champion and may not want his data open to a rookie with Hamilton's obvious ability. Shades of Michael Schumacher and Johnny Herbert at Benetton a decade or so ago.

Someone I spoke to at Renault gave short shrift to all that.

"No way," he said. "Fernando wasn't precious when he was with us. We are a leading racing team, and so is McLaren. And leading racing teams do not shaft drivers.

"The fact is that strategy is pretty obvious. There's an optimum and the drivers tend to be fuelled close to it, a lap different simply because you can't bring them in together. And that's pretty much the end of it.

Fernando Alonso muscles around the hairpin at the US Grand Prix © LAT

"If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say there'll be two things. One is that changing teams is a bit like changing tyre supplier - you've got all the data but the human and working relationships take longer.

"Fernando's done both. And Lewis has been part of the McLaren family longer. That won't be a nice feeling and the level Lewis is performing at, so soon, will have surprised Fernando and exacerbated the situation.

"Second, there's the tyre itself. Fernando has an aggressive style and had a very particular way of using the Michelin. He's only ever driven on Michelins prior to this year. The Renault had a very good back end and he used that to get the car turned in.

"This year, the cars are much more rear limited. Lewis, by contrast, hasn't had to unlearn anything. Fernando will work at it because he's a thinker, and I wouldn't mind betting that's Kimi's problem too."

"Look at that shunt Kimi had in Monaco qualifying. It looked ludicrous for a driver of his ability. Who knows, but maybe he was getting used to the reduced grip from this year's tyre and then suddenly found more than he expected on the supersoft.

"It's the only explanation I can think of for a driver of his class hitting the inside wall where he did."

All interesting stuff. The one man who could drive an inherently understeering car with indecent haste, a certain Alain Prost, is 13 years into his retirement. Maybe he should think about a comeback!

Talk to Bridgestone about it and, understandably, they get a little defensive.

"Look," says Kees van der Grint, "In a tyre war it is not surprising that companies develop their product around their best drivers. So Bridgestone tended to have tyres that suited Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso was always very strong on the Michelin.

"But obviously you have a spread of driver and car requirements. And when you produce spec tyres, they have to work for everyone. Look at the lap times and we are faster than last year in some places.

"I'd say we have tyres that perform at a high level and the comments I've had from technical directors are very complimentary. The tyres are just different. Drivers have to adapt, it's part of their job, and the best ones do."

A good point perhaps, and hard to argue too strongly with.

Pascal Vasselon © LAT

Two more things about tyres this year though, are that some drivers have mentioned a bigger graining effect when following a car closely. That, together with less grip, makes overtaking even closer to impossible than it was before.

And it's not helped by even more aero tweaks designed to overcome the limited grip, which increases further the disturbed air in a car's wake.

That all struck me watching Monaco. Hardly the mecca of overtaking, I know, but we had become accustomed to seeing two or three decent moves under braking into the harbour front chicane, given the relative lack of penalty for getting it wrong there these days.

Aggression from the likes of Michael Schumacher, Heidfeld, Webber and Rosberg spring to mind from recent visits.

This year? Zip. You'd have bet your life on an overtaker as good as Nico Rosberg, on a light two-stop load, finding a way around Nick Heidfeld's BMW with a tanker load of fuel on board. But he didn't.

In Indy, I chatted to Toyota's Pascal Vasselon about the situation. Vasselon, now Toyota's senior general manager, chassis, previously worked with Michelin for a number of years after specialising in suspension design. In short, he's well qualified to comment.

"I don't know that the aero explanation is the first factor because I'm not sure that the car wakes are massively different," he said.

"The tyre factor is probably more dominant because, for sure, the tyre's slip angle window is smaller. It is much easier to make mistakes. The tyres have less grip and it's very easy to put them outside the right operating window.

"That makes it more difficult for the driver to attack a corner with the confidence that a bit of sliding won't put him in the gravel.

"It's actually quite hard to attack with these tyres. You have to be very clean, and that explains the difficulties some drivers are having - the ones with very good car control who are used to sliding the tyres. This season it doesn't work that well."

Something for the working group looking at improving the overall package for 2009 so that it includes overtaking, to investigate?

"As I said, I'm not sure we've had a major evolution in terms of overtaking from the aero side in the last year but, for sure, if we want more overtaking in future we have to find a different compromise.

"Technically it's massively difficult because you have a basic contradiction. To be fast F1 needs downforce but, as soon as you have downforce you are sensitive to the wake of another car."

Maybe Raikkonen is suddenly going to find the form we were all expecting and take it to McLaren over the balance of the season. If he doesn't, Massa's retainer negotiations might just give Maranello a headache ...

And maybe the determined and relentless Alonso will finally overcome his young upstart teammate and secure a third title on the bounce.

Maybe. The one certain thing is that the sport we all love never ceases to surprise with its depth and complexity.