Fantastic Four: Bahrain GP Analysis

The 2007 season continues to fascinate, and it's already clear that we are in for a vintage battle over the coming months. It's hard to recall another season where we had four drivers in two teams capable of winning races and winning the championship, while there's a third team that is close enough to keep the pacesetters on their toes and take advantage of any slip-ups.

The fact that it is so close exacerbates any problems, to the extent that someone can win one weekend and be as low as fifth the next. Anyone expecting control tyre racing to be boring has been proven wrong - making the car work to perfection on hard and soft tyres on the same afternoon is no easy matter.

It says a lot about the competitiveness of this season that in Bahrain Fernando Alonso found himself in the unusual (for him) position of finishing in the points, but not on the podium. That meant no FIA press conference or TV unilateral interviews. But full credit to the man, he was still willing to talk when he emerged from the scrutineering weight check, and he put on his best face.

"I was not competitive today, and I was not able to have the right pace," he shrugged. "For sure, the goal is always to be on the podium, the target, and today I didn't achieve that. I found no confidence in the car, and overall grip was quite poor. I was having understeer and oversteer, and I was not able to sort it out throughout the race.

"In a way I feel happy, because it's another four points, and after the first part of the championship, three races, we are leading the drivers' championship, which is the thing. But it's frustrating, because I did all I could in the race, and I was not able to be on the podium, so that's no good.

"I think on Friday everything was OK, but on Saturday morning I lost a little bit of pace, and overall grip, and was not happy with the car. I lost a little bit of the confidence, and that's all.

"I think when you are starting a race, you are always convinced you can do a better job, but once I saw after six or seven laps that I was not able to follow anyone, I thought that it was a tough race, and it was.

"You have good days and bad days, and good races and bad races, and this one was one of the bad. And hopefully that's the only one we will have in the whole championship. Nothing to worry about."

He kept a brave face throughout, his composure cracking only slightly when asked - more than once - what he thought of Hamilton's race. Not surprisingly, he didn't really have anything to say. It was clear that the afternoon had given him plenty of food for thought.

Martin Whitmarsh, a little later on, said: "We've got no doubt about the capability of Fernando. He will apply his own very high standards, and he will be disappointed by the outcome of this weekend. He also has the self belief and confidence capability, and I'm sure he's going to be very strong in Barcelona.'

Fernando's brake problems

So what did go wrong for Fernando? Small things are making a big difference this year, and there was something in the balance of the car in Bahrain that just didn't work for Alonso. He even suggested that it might have been a result of the incident in the garage on Friday night, when the lighting gantry fell on his car, although it seems unlikely that the team would not have traced and sorted all possible damage.

In fact another key issue for Alonso in Bahrain was the brakes. It's easy to forget how important brake feel is to driver comfort, and teams spend a lot of time honing their systems to the preference of the drivers. Last year, for example, Rubens Barrichello wasted the first part of his season trying to persuade Honda to provide something that gave him the confidence he had enjoyed at Ferrari, where he had clearly been spoiled.

It appears to be a similar situation at McLaren, where on switching teams Fernando had to find something that made him as comfortable as he was at Renault. He did, but the problem in Bahrain was that it became apparent on Friday that wear rates were too high with his preferred arrangement of pads and discs. He had to switch to the disc and pad set-up that Hamilton had been using.

"He was not as comfortable with the brakes as Lewis over the weekend, and this is a circuit where there are some very big brakes into high speed corners," explains Whitmarsh. "If you look at qualifying, his Q3 time fuel corrected was almost spot-on the same as Lewis. Over one lap if you get it right, you're OK. But in the race if you're not as comfortable, it tells.

"All drivers would like to have brake material which gives good initial bite, and then you can modulate. To oversimplify it, typically the soft material is easier to modulate, but you can't use it at a heavy braking circuit. You've got to go to a harder material, and you lose some of that braking feel.

"Harder materials, are slightly less forgiving, and slightly more difficult to modulate, so Fernando didn't have his most favourite materials. We weren't able to get to a condition with the set-up of the vehicle and the set-up of the brakes that gave Fernando the comfort that he would want to be able to push as hard as you need to over the course of a race distance.

"Nowadays the level of competition is such that small differences make that difference. He wasn't as comfortable throughout the weekend, and Lewis was. A lot of the drivers, with heaving braking and slippery conditions, were locking tyres at various times. With the set-up we had, Lewis was perhaps more comfortable to deal with it than Fernando.

"The fact is that we've got to do a bit more work there, so we'll be looking at the brake system, the brake materials, and various other aspects."

That's a fascinating insight into the current balance of power at McLaren. Three races into his F1 career, Hamilton is able to extract the maximum from a car that Alonso struggles with. Of course, it may well be completely the opposite next time, but there's certainly a suggestion that Lewis if freer in his thinking and able to adapt to different circumstances. In that sense he perhaps has something in common with Michael Schumacher, a man noted for his ability to drive around problems and adapt to all circumstances. And that is how you win championships...

Hamilton's lost opportunity

It says a lot for Hamilton's rapid ascent that there was almost a little disappointment that he hadn't been able to give Massa an even harder time than he did. This time there was no first corner miracle, but he pushed the Brazilian hard through the first stint and was right there, just 1s behind, when he stopped on lap 19.

"Who knows what he could have done if he wasn't behind Massa," rued Ron Dennis. "Don't forget he set several fastest laps behind Massa. If we had got to the first corner first, who knows what the outcome would have been?"

Massa went to lap 21, and once he re-emerged his advantage had grown to around 3.4s. There was to be no fight back from Hamilton, and instead that gap gradually stretched out to over 10s as the stint went on.

In fact Lewis had taken on five laps more fuel than Massa, and simple maths accounted for some of that increasing margin. He also probably found the car a little different to drive with 25 laps' worth on board, as opposed to the 19 he had at the start of the race.

What's really interesting is that having outpaced Alonso through the weekend, for the first time Lewis was given priority on the lighter Q3 fuel load and earlier first stop.

"We thought that we'd give Lewis the opportunity to give it a go in qualifying," said Whitmarsh. "At the first stop we went fairly long with Lewis - based on the first stint performance we thought the best way to have a go at Massa was to run longer than him.

"The second stint in Malaysia was a very strong stint for Lewis. This time we didn't have such a successful second stint and therefore couldn't use the fact that we were running a little bit longer. Also Lewis ran into a little bit of traffic at the end of that second stint as well.

"The maths is simple. If you've got more fuel on board you will be heavier. Our car is reasonably balanced and tolerant of fuel load changes. He wasn't complaining of any particular issue, he just didn't quite have the pace and the grip that we wanted in that second stint."

Whitmarsh admits that the team could have made changes at the first stop that might have improved the situation, but opted not to. It's always difficult to second-guess changing track conditions.

"Each stint you're trying to make a judgement between the data, the driver's view and the engineers' view as to tuning pressures and aero balance, for instance. You make some adjustments, and sometimes very small amounts are all it needs, as the track's evolving. We maybe could have done a better job there.

"You have a limited number of tuning devices, you look at the data, you listen to the driver, you take a view as to how the race is progressing, and you make those adjustments. I don't think we feel we made tremendous mistakes, but you can always do it slightly better.

"In fact we tweaked a bit in the last stint, and Lewis was very quick there. I think both of our guys were quicker than the Ferraris in the final stint on the prime tyre, but that's either good fortune or good judgement."

As Whitmarsh suggested, Hamilton felt more comfortable in the third and final stint, kept pushing, and brought the gap down. As ever Ferrari ensured that Massa went only as fast as he needed to, especially as his engine has to do the Spanish GP, but the fact that it was so close at the end suggested that he probably didn't have a massive amount in hand.

Dennis added: "I think our drivers did a good job. I don't think we optimised the car this weekend, especially with Fernando, so I think there's a bit of self-criticism needed. When we put the prime on we really got the competitiveness back. I don't think we were uncompetitive in the end of the race or the beginning of the race, we were just a little bit slow in the middle.

"We had a good strategy so we weren't at all concerned with that, but at the end of the day the school report would say 'must try harder'. But it's wonderful to come away from the first three races leading all the championships. After 2006, we can hardly complain."

Massa: Getting the job done

There's no doubt that Massa did an impressive job to bounce back from his Malaysia disappointment, and it was probably just as well that he had only a few days to mull over what happened there. It was telling that when asked if he wanted to dedicate his win to anybody, he said: "To my girlfriend. This week was not so easy but she had a lot of patience with me."

He took a lot of stick for being outfoxed by rookie Hamilton in Malaysia, but the bigger picture underlines what a good job he has been doing of late.

Consider the fact that he has been on pole for four of the past five Grands Prix, missing out only in Australia, where he had a mechanical problem. Go back as far as Turkey last August, and it's actually five poles out of the last eight races - three of which he converted into near faultless, lights-to-flag victories. Not bad for a bloke who not so long ago was perceived as a solid number two.

He's been helped along the way by his race engineer Rob Smedley, with whom he has been partnered since the middle of last year. The no-nonsense Englishman has done a great job to get his man to make the most of his strengths and believe that he can really do it. He helped to talk him through the post-Malaysia blues.

"To be honest with you we took a lot of criticism," said Smedley after the Bahrain win. "But I think we understood the problems in Malaysia, we understood there was a problem at the start, we understood there was a problem with him trying to overtake where he did.

"It didn't really detract from the fact that he's been bloody quick from the end of last year until now. We saw two pole positions, two clean pole positions - even with the fuel he was bloody quick in Malaysia and here. And here he was able to show what he could do in the race."

Interestingly, Rob acknowledged how worried Ferrari was about Hamilton in the first part of the race.

"Lewis behind him in the first stint was absolutely as quick as us - it was clear he was absolutely as quick as us," added Smedley. "We managed to keep him behind, and at the end of the stint when our car usually manages to look after the tyres a bit better, we managed to pull out a small gap. Lewis came in earlier, and from that point on we knew it was pretty much in the bag, as long as we kept putting the lap times in."

The curious thing about Bahrain was that in both teams the incoming superstar was humbled by the young pretender. So impressive in Australia, Kimi Raikkonen seemed to be a little bit at sea, and nothing characterised that more than his tardy performance at the safety car restart, where he crossed the line a mammoth 1.3s down on Alonso (in contrast some 0.6s covered the top three). The team was at a loss to explain why he had apparently fallen asleep.

Once again he didn't make the most of his grid position, and losing out to Alonso proved crucial, because the Spaniard didn't have the pace of his teammate, and Kimi lost time behind him. Later he caught Hamilton, but couldn't do anything about passing him.

"I think Kimi was right there," said Smedley. "He didn't make a very good start, or a have very good few first corners, and then after that the race was pretty much written in stone for him. He got past Fernando because of Fernando's pace, but with the pace of Lewis today I think it was almost impossible for him to go past."

Barcelona and beyond

Over the next few weeks much midnight oil will be burned in Maranello and Woking, and everywhere else as well of course. The unprecedented 'spring break' allows all the teams to push on with developments. Some will have been planned for months, while others will have emerged from these first three race weekends.

There's just a single Barcelona test during that break, and under the new testing agreement, there's just one car per team. Most will probably give one day to each race driver, and one to a tester, although they can do what they want. One day isn't a lot of time to for drivers to work on any issues they have (Alonso and brakes for example), and it probably won't help Hamilton, whose mercurial start has been helped by extensive testing - he had done a lot of laps in Bahrain.

It's clear that the situation in Barcelona will give a good indication of how the rest of the season will pan out, although the fact that everyone will have tested and be nicely dialled in may confuse the story a little, and the real picture may be more apparent in Monaco and thereafter.

"The positives is that we are leading the constructors and we are joint leaders of the drivers," says Whitmarsh. "Bahrain was a circuit that perhaps was more difficult for us in winter testing - Ferrari and BMW were bloody quick there. We knew it probably wasn't our strongest circuit. It's quite different from Malaysia, and quite different from Barcelona, but in those circumstances we also demonstrated in qualifying and the race that we've closed the gap on Ferrari.

"We've now got a four-week window, it's a window during which you'd expect most teams if they're doing their job to make probably the largest incremental improvement from one race to another. We've got the cars in the early part of their development cycle, we've got four weeks, we've got a test at the circuit we're going to go and race at, so we've got all the ingredients that would cause you to expect to be able to improve.

"We know we're going to improve, we think we know how much by, and that's reasonably encouraging. But everybody else is going to be pushing hard as well."

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- The Autosport.com Team

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