Double Big Mac Fries Ferrari

Alonso and Hamilton took a one-two for McLaren - as Massa made a double-whopper botch of it. By MARK HUGHES

The pieces slotted into place beautifully, made a madly exciting Sepang Sunday. The various circumstances of the weekend brought the race all the tension and excitement absent from Melbourne. Those circumstances were many, but central to them was a dramatic one-second-per-lap swing in McLaren's favour compared to the first race.

At Sepang the MP4-22 was every bit as fast as the Ferrari - the same Ferrari that had been more than one second per lap ahead of the field in Melbourne. There are very solid technical reasons for this, but first the point needs to be made that those various elements were stitched together by a brilliant pair of drives from McLaren's Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton. Brilliant individually; brilliant as a combined force.

Hamilton effectively built the victory for his team-mate in the first of the three stints. The Ferraris and McLarens looked pretty much equal in startline performance, but both Ferrari drivers seemed half-asleep into the first turn.

Full marks for trying, but Felipe Massa's second move on Hamilton led to disaster © LAT

Just as Alonso was slotting into the McLaren-sized hole Felipe Massa had left to his inside, so Kimi Raikkonen left a similar gap that Hamilton immediately filled. Not only that, but Lewis hung on around the linked turns of one-two, going clean around the outside of Felipe through turn two. It was a repeat of the wonderful, instinctive racecraft we saw at the start of Melbourne.

Alonso, already feeling good for winning the start, felt even better when he looked in his mirrors and saw no red, only silver with a yellow helmet. "That opened up a little bit the dream to win the race," said Alonso, who'd not been certain that the Ferraris weren't going to simply disappear once the lights went out. But it hadn't worked like that.

On a circuit where overtaking has become very difficult, Hamilton's delaying of the red cars as Alonso escaped gave the race a very different complexion from what had been expected. Which posed the first couple of questions: actually how quick was Ferrari relative to McLaren here? And why have the previously plentiful Sepang passing places dried up?

Massa's pole for Ferrari over Alonso's McLaren had been by the margin of around 0.15sec once the differing fuel weights were accounted for. In the race it was only in the first stint that Hamilton ensured the Ferraris were not in clear air. At various subsequent stages both Massa and Raikkonen had opportunity and motive to fully stretch their cars.

The impressive Rosberg (right) challenges Kubica for sixth place © LAT

Yet Massa's best lap was almost 0.5sec slower than Hamilton's, both laps done on new, soft tyres with a fuel load of 17-18 laps. The evidence says the Ferrari was simply not as fast as the McLaren in race trim. So where had the qualifying superiority gone? And, even more significantly, where had Ferrari's Melbourne one-second advantage gone?

It was all to do with the extreme engine-cooling demands of this place. An ambient temperature of 33-34C, combined with lots of full-throttle running, demands more engine cooling than at any other venue. Cooling ducts cost aerodynamic performance, and so tightly packaged is the Ferrari F2007, so marginal its cooling even for less extreme venues, that it needed considerably more ducting than normal. It was losing a significant chunk of its aero performance as a result. It always used to be McLaren which fell into this trap at Sepang.

"Yes, that's right," accepted McLaren COO Martin Whitmarsh. "Last year we lost a quarter of a second in lap time to unplanned extra cooling." But not this year. On Saturday the McLarens had even stood for three minutes, engines running, at the end of the pit lane waiting for Q3 to begin. That was unheard of - and was all achieved with relatively little extra ducting. So that was where some of the performance swing came from.

But there was more: in order to keep the heat-rejection figures within reasonable limits, the Ferraris were running reduced revs. The last 1000rpm of their range - where the heat-rejection curve takes a sharp upward turn - was not being used in the race. So running fewer revs, and with more holes cut into their body, the Ferraris were significantly compromised.

Kovalainen's 'brother' didn't turn up this time, so Heikki took a point © LAT

Furthermore, the McLarens had been considerably tweaked since Melbourne. "In the last two years we have had cars that used their rear tyres very lightly," said Whitmarsh. "It was an advantage two years ago and a disadvantage last year. In configuring this car we looked at working the rear tyres harder. This gave us good qualifying performance, but we realised after Melbourne that we had probably gone too far and were surrendering race pace."

For Sepang the weight distribution was moved forward and appropriate aero changes made to bring the centre of pressure forward with it. It was still using its rears a little harder than the Ferrari - we could see this from observing how the new white stripes used inside the grooves of the soft tyres wore off faster on the McLaren - but less so than before.

The combination of Ferrari's compromised configuration and McLaren's progress was what lay behind that dramatic performance swing from the last race to this. Many paddock observers assumed it must have been the new floor-flexibility tests, but actually Ferrari had to make only the tiniest of changes to accommodate those.So Alonso pushed on, pulling away at almost 1sec per lap while Hamilton had his mirrors filled with Massa's lighter car.

If the opening lap had shown Lewis in attack mode, now we were seeing him in defence - and he was flawless, putting his car in just the right places to frustrate his opponent. And, with Raikkonen sitting right with them both and Alonso disappearing up the road, Massa began to get ragged.

On the fourth lap he took advantage of the McLaren's exit oversteer through turn two to get a run through three and down the inside of four. Hamilton saw him coming, stayed out to the left and braked late.

What on Earth: Button's Honda was passed by the Super Aguri of Sato © LAT

Massa sliced by on the inside, but on his compromised line had to catch a big oversteer twitch as he tried to turn in, allowing Hamilton to simply slice back ahead of him as they exited. It used to be that evenly matched cars could pass and repass at the end of the two long straights into the final and first turns. But we saw precious little of that this year.

Even though Massa was carrying relatively little wing, he still couldn't get into Hamilton's slipstream at the critical places - something not helped by his restricted engine revs. Hence his slight desperation.

"As soon as you get within 100 metres of the car ahead of you, you're in severe turbulence," said one driver. The heavy reliance on downforce from outer body winglets/turning vanes/shoulder vanes etc has made this a characteristic of the cars for the last couple of years.

"But now it is combined with how we have to run the cars with these tyres," explained Ferrari's Luca Baldisserri of another downside of having no tyre war. "Because they have less grip, we have to use downforce to extract more of their performance. We have to use more wing here than with the old tyres. It's something that needs to be looked at."

It took Massa only a couple of laps to get back onto Hamilton's tail and again he tried for a run into turn four. This time Lewis moved across on him, just enough to distract and unsight him, but all the while being very careful to pick out his braking point. It completely suckered Massa, who arrived on the inside going way too fast to make it round.

Wurz drove a feisty race. Here he passes Schumacher to chase DC © LAT

As the Ferrari clattered across the grass, Hamilton serenely took up his place once more. Raikkonen and Nick Heidfeld's BMW also nipped by as Massa was sorting himself out. So, one Ferrari dealt with, now Hamilton had Raikkonen on his case.

"At this point I thought, 'Oh-oh'," said Whitmarsh, "because I thought Kimi would be maybe tougher to resist, but Lewis was just absolutely perfect." He was further aided by Raikkonen being slower on the straights than Massa had been.

"We needed to compromise too many things, and we lost too much speed because of those things," said Kimi. "I could get close but never in a position to pass."Alonso meanwhile set fastest lap after fastest lap all alone up front, putting in the hard grind of victory laps. When he made his first stop on lap 18, he was over 15sec clear, the rout of Ferrari having gone from possible to likely.

There had been a brief scare in the McLaren pits as they lost radio contact with Fernando just before the stop was due. Ron Dennis was giving extra gesticulation to him as they hung out a pit board telling him to come in. But they weren't sure he'd seen it. He had, of course, because this is Alonso, not Jean Alesi. The radio was fixed during the stop even before the refuelling had finished.

A touch more front wing was added too, as the rubbered-in track was shifting the balance to understeer.Hamilton was last of the frontrunners to stop, at the end of lap 20, two later than Alonso and Raikkonen.

McLaren was very keen to get Hamilton out ahead of the long-running Renault of Giancarlo Fisichella and so short-fuelled him, giving him enough for just 16 laps. Lewis duly exited in front of the yet-to-pit Fisi. Raikkonen, critically, did not. He'd been stationary for a full 10sec.

"Bravo amigo!" Alonso and Hamilton in post-race love-in © LAT

This didn't add up. He wasn't necessarily going to be able to leapfrog Hamilton by running longer - as would have been the case at most circuits. Here the tyre degradation was high enough, and the golden-lap effect of a fresh set big enough, that you didn't automatically get track position over your opponent by running longer.

In some cases drivers were actually faster on new rubber/high fuel than worn rubber/low fuel. Hamilton, in fact, set the fastest lap of the race on the first flyer of his second stint. It turned out Raikkonen hadn't been fuelled as long as his stop suggested - it was just a poor stop.

Raikkonen got nowhere near Hamilton during this middle stint. He lost 1sec for each of the five laps he was stuck behind Fisichella before the Renault pitted. And for the rest of that stint he simply did not have Hamilton's pace, for Hamilton was flying now, much faster than when in defensive mode. He too had a turn of front wing added and was now absolutely in the zone.

He halved his deficit to Alonso during this stint and was just 7.7sec behind when he made his second stop and had his hard tyres fitted. Raikkonen at this stage was 13sec behind. It had been a stunning effort by Lewis, but it took its toll.

Renault and Toyota (well, Trulli) fought it out for the scraps © XPB/LAT

By the time he began his final stint he was completely out of water: "The last three weeks my trainer and the team doctor have worked very hard to monitor my fluid intake to make sure I was ready for this heat. I sweat a lot, maybe more than the other guys, so it was very important. When I ran out of water in the car I could feel myself getting hotter and hotter and it was really difficult to stay concentrated."

On his hard tyres, with his dehydration, and knowing that Alonso was still well ahead and that he'd left Raikkonen behind, Lewis relaxed. Alonso pulled away again, fully on top of his game, while Raikkonen launched into a charge. Soon Alonso was 15sec ahead again and going away, and Raikkonen was bearing down fast.

"I couldn't see Kimi in my mirrors," said Hamilton, "and it was difficult to see the gap on the pit board. I saw what was the gap to Fernando, saw it was quite big, and thought that was the gap to Kimi. Then they said he's just six seconds behind and catching at half a second per lap." Given his dehydrated state this was bad news, a potential mental body blow. "I just had to bite my tongue, dig as deep as I could while preserving the energy I had."

Again he kept his cool in the most demanding of situations. Raikkonen was with him by the last lap but, just as in the first stint, there was nowhere for him to pass. So we got the first McLaren one-two since Brazil '05, Alonso's first win for his new team, and the confirmation that in Lewis Hamilton F1 has a new superstar.

Raikkonen's charge for second came just moments too late © LAT

This all rather overshadowed some very good performances further back. Heidfeld took fourth with a great drive that bore all his characteristic calm, calculation and consistency. He shrugged off a first corner bump from team-mate Robert Kubica that caused the Pole to pit early for a puncture. He then kept close enough to the Ferraris to be able to take advantage of Massa's error, and did enough around the stops to keep Massa behind him for the rest of the race.

Massa's fifth place from pole position was not a performance calculated to bring him the team-leadership role he craves. Fisichella drove with spirit and consistency to bring the Renault home sixth, albeit a minute behind the winner.

"This is just where we are with this car at the moment," said Pat Symonds, "and clearly there is something very badly wrong." Fisi had to fend off a sustained attack editorfrom Jarno Trulli's Toyota, with Heikki Kovalainen taking the final point in the second Renault.

Nico Rosberg retired the Williams with a hydraulics failure after a strong race. After dicing with Kubica in the early laps, before the latter was delayed with myriad problems, Nico had looked set for sixth place before he stopped 12 laps from the end.

As Hamilton got rehydrated and took aboard the scale of his drive, Jenson Button took ironic satisfaction from beating both Super Aguris...