Falling from Grace

This time last year it all seemed so easy for Lewis Hamilton, and everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. It's easy to forget now that 12 months ago we were impressed when he was within sight of team-mate Fernando Alonso in qualifying, and before long, of course, he was doing rather better than that.

It's ironic that his flying start in Grand Prix racing means that he is inevitably being judged against the standards he achieved last year. He is no longer the rookie underdog, and instead he is many people's title favourite, the man to be shot at and whose every error will inevitably attract a negative focus. He's feeling the pressure, all that sort of thing.

Bahrain was his own worst nightmare come to life. A huge practice crash was followed by finger trouble on the grid that wasted his respectable qualifying position.

And then a second lap accident led to suggestions that he tried too hard too soon to make up ground, when damage limitation - in the most literal sense - might have been more prudent. It seemed somehow appropriate that when he crossed the line after a hard afternoon's slog, he was in an unlucky 13th position.

Despite the disruption that Friday's huge accident caused to his weekend, Hamilton still qualified third. Having one of the Ferraris behind him gave him some cause for optimism, and it was also good to be ahead of Heikki Kovalainen again, having been behind him - with a lighter car - in Malaysia.

He was on the cleaner side of the track, and Robert Kubica's own sluggish getaway meant that he could have had a clear chance of getting up to second.

That would have left us with a Hamilton/Massa battle through the first couple of corners, and you'd have to say that Lewis would have had at least some chance of winning that one. Quite how things went wrong at the start only Lewis can say, but when the lights went out, he barely moved.

A fascinating snippet of video turned up on YouTube this week. Taken by a fan in the grandstand who happened to have pointed his camcorder at the first couple of rows of the grid, it clearly shows how awful Hamilton's getaway was.

Lewis Hamilton has a slow getaway at the start © Reuters

Before he even crosses the start/finish line Raikkonen and Kovalainen have got past him, and as he straddles it, both Nick Heidfeld and Jarno Trulli are already coming alongside and travelling with significantly more momentum.

So in little more than the length of two grid spots, four other cars have got him. Nico Rosberg, Jenson Button, Fernando Alonso and Mark Webber also managed to sweep past.

After the race Hamilton made no bones about it - he admitted that it was his mistake:

"The anti-stall kicked in. Basically I hadn't hit the switch early enough, and therefore we weren't in the launch map, and I went straight into anti-stall. Everyone else was in their launch mode, and I wasn't."

Incidentally Hamilton also became one of the first drivers this year to openly admit that his team still uses a special launch map, something that we already knew everyone is doing. Kovalainen was also heard referring to it in a snatch of McLaren team radio conversation in qualifying in Malaysia, although presumably he didn't know that the world was listening!

The FIA has tried to steer teams away from pushing the limits by ensuing that any special map engaged for the start is locked in for 90 seconds, which is more or less a lap, depending on the circuit.

Having not yet spoken to Lewis, and unaware that he had already made that confession, Martin Whitmarsh initially pursued McLaren's usual 'win as a team, lose as a team' philosophy.

"Something went wrong in terms of the engine settings," said Whitmarsh. "And we need to understand why the car went into an anti-stall routine. A mistake has been made, and we need to understand how it happened. It was not a software fault, it was a procedure fault, so we need to understand how the procedure went wrong."

He refused outright to concede that Hamilton had made a mistake.

"I didn't say that, I said it was a procedure! The team's involved in it, and we don't single out any individual in public on this. We've got to look at it and understand. If someone's made a mistake we need to make sure if they have, or whether it's something else."

Whatever the reason for his error, Hamilton was in ninth place at the end of the first lap, having passed Webber and benefited from a puncture sustained by Button, who got a tap from Alonso. It was bad, but clearly not a total disaster, because he was still on the cusp of the points. Any hopes he had of scoring any ended when he hit the back of Alonso's Renault.

"I was very, very close and it looked like I could overtake," he said. "He went to defend his position, and I went up the back of him somehow, but that's racing."

It was a strange accident, and the brief TV replays didn't give anybody - including folk from the two teams involved - much of a chance to fully assess what happened. But given the 'previous' of the two men involved, inevitably there were early suggestions that Alonso had, shall we say, indulged in a little gamesmanship.

Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton after their accident © Reuters

This was absolutely refuted by Pat Symonds after the race, and he took the trouble to print out the telemetry trace of Alonso's second lap by way of evidence.

"That's the impact, that's the throttle," he said. "Fernando was flat, he was in fifth gear, he was at 227 km/h, and the impact from Lewis was nearly half a G. And that says that their torque accelerating out of that corner, or their speed out of that corner plus their torque, is massively better than ours ..."

For Symonds the engineer this was a genuinely perplexing revelation that gave him plenty of food for thought. There was more to the story, however. Alonso said he hit the oil left behind by Sebastian Vettel's crippled Toro Rosso, and shots from Hamilton's on board camera appear to show him running a little wider than Lewis both into and out of the corner.

Then there was the strange story of Hamilton's bridge wing. After he spoke to me Whitmarsh was shown data that indicated that it had failed some two seconds before the impact. Indeed, a look at the on-board footage we saw in the live feed - and which starts that starts at around that point - shows that a big chunk of the left hand side of the wing appears to be missing.

Then this week, as autosport.com reported, still pictures and then extra on-board footage emerged, which proved that the missing piece of the wing had departed a lot longer than two seconds before the incident. In fact, when he made a bold dive down the inside of Webber on the first lap, Hamilton hit Alonso square in the back.

He must have known he'd hit him, not least because bits of the bridge wing flew over his head. For the rest of the lap the remaining two pieces of the bridge wing, each now only supported on one side, can be seen flapping around. That cannot have helped aero stability.

The loss of a big chunk of the bridge wing must have contributed to the car behaving a little differently to what Hamilton had expected when he was tucked in behind Alonso. It's certainly more evidence to refute any suggestions that Fernando did anything untoward, but it also exonerates Lewis to some extent, at least in terms of his culpability for that second collision.

Yes, he had already tapped Fernando and yes, he damaged the car more comprehensively when a slightly more patient approach might have been more prudent, especially when he must have known he had already some front end damage. He also very much had overtaking Alonso on his mind, as his earlier quote showed. But he didn't screw up in a tyre-smoking dive down the inside of someone who was not going to give way.

What we'll never know is what would have happened had he not had that second collision - how the car would have behaved with the broken bridge wing, and to what extent Lewis could have adjusted to it. Of course, had the cameras picked it up, the FIA might have ordered the team to bring him in to the pits as soon as possible because of the risk that the remaining bits of the wing might break off, and that would have ruined his race anyway.

After the race he was keen to shoulder the blame.

"As a professional [if] you start off bad you need to pick the pieces up and still deliver at least some points. I didn't do none of that for the team, I had the collision with Fernando which really lost us the whole race altogether. I'm always the first to blame it on myself, and to be honest I feel that's the right way to go."

Giancarlo Fisichella battles with Lewis Hamilton © LAT

That sort of response after one of the worst days of his career to date was pretty impressive, especially bearing in mind the sort of afternoon he'd endured. There were few retirements to help him up the order, and more to the point, the car wasn't handling as it should.

"Further damage meant the car was understeering for the rest of the afternoon," said Whitmarsh. "The deflectors were taken out at the front, they were munched off in the collision."

And here's a statistic that you just might have missed. Despite running to the flag, Lewis set only the 19th fastest lap, ahead of only Takuma Sato and retiree Jenson Button (Vettel didn't complete a lap). His best was a full 2.327s behind Kovalainen, who in contrast logged the fastest lap.

That is a huge gap by current standards. The switch to a one-stop strategy and two heavy fuel loads contributed, as did the fact that he often got stuck behind people because he didn't have sufficient momentum to get past. But the bottom line is the car was crippled, and he couldn't do much with it.

The trouble is that people have short memories in this sport, and Hamilton's brilliant performance in Australia already seems like a long time ago. It's easy to forget that Raikkonen had a nightmare of a race in Melbourne, twice going off. Even Felipe Massa's erratic performances in the first two races were to a large degree eradicated by his faultless performance in Bahrain.

The fact is that it's tough out there, and the top cars are so evenly matched now that these guys are performing on the very limit, and none of them are infallible.

Equally the tightness of the midfield pack is reflected by the amount of pushing and shoving we are seeing on the first lap as drivers fight to regain what they think is their rightful place in the pecking order, and Hamilton found himself unexpectedly thrust into that group.

I am sure that Bahrain won't be the last time this year that we see a few cars heading pit-wards for attention at the end of the first lap.

Hamilton himself is smart enough to keep it all in perspective. He's been through troughs before in other categories, and the mental strength that got him to where he is today will surely allow him to bounce back in Spain, just as Massa did last weekend.

"It's not a huge concern to me, to be honest," he said after the race. "I think we've got the pace - I know I've got the pace - and I think in the next race we will be quite a bit quicker than we have been this weekend.

"The confidence is still there, and it was inevitable that this was going to happen eventually. I've had such a good run already in F1, and this is all part of it. There's still a long, long way to go, don't count me out just yet ..."