Rain Man: Analysis of the British GP

Silverstone saw a truly astonishing performance from Lewis Hamilton. He not only finished 68 seconds ahead of his closest rival, Nick Heidfeld, but he lapped everyone up to third place. Both of those statistics are extremely unusual in the modern era, when the cars are so evenly matched and safety car periods often serve to close up the field.

And yet this was a strange race. Curiously Heidfeld actually set a quicker fastest lap than Hamilton, and Kimi Raikkonen's best was a full 0.677 seconds faster than that achieved by the McLaren man. What's more, when he set that time, Kimi was closing in and seemed destined to take the lead. And then a poor strategic call by Ferrari turned the Finn's race upside down.

The irony is of course that had it been dry on Sunday, the outcome for Lewis could have been very different. From the start of the weekend, he was outpaced by his teammate, who really found the Silverstone groove. Beaten in all three practice sessions and Q1, Lewis only got ahead of Heikki Kovalainen in Q2, and then only by a tiny margin. Of course last year we saw him pop up and blitz Fernando Alonso when it really mattered, but in Q3 this year he made his own life difficult by running wide on his first run.

Without a banker time he had to really make it count second time around. But he only made fourth, and it would surely have been sixth had both Felipe Massa and Robert Kubica not had problems that prevented them from running a full session. Lewis was 0.786 seconds behind Heikki. The race was to prove he was two laps heavier on fuel, but that didn't come close to accounting for the difference.

"To his own high standards Lewis underperformed," said Martin Whitmarsh. "And to be that far behind Heikki was disappointing for him. He was lucky to be on the second row, in reality. So if you mess up and you're on the second row, it's not too bad! The thing that I sensed, having known Lewis quite a few years, is how confident he seemed, and how relaxed he seemed about the situation. He could have beat up on himself, applied more pressure, been disappointed, allowed that to get to him.

"But he was very, very gracious about Heikki and you could sense that behind all that graciousness was a steely commitment to beat Heikki, which was very evident in the first few laps of the race..."

It certainly was. Lewis got ahead of Kimi Raikkonen and Mark Webber on the run to Copse, and had a look down the inside of Kovalainen as they swept into the first turn. But the Finn was not about to waste his pole.

Lewis Hamilton gets a jump on Mark Webber and Kimi Raikkonen at the start © XPB

The pair actually touched, and when he ran out to the damp kerb, Heikki got sideways. He held it all together, but if he had lost it, Hamilton would have had nowhere to go, and the day might not have been such a joyous one for McLaren. Nothing went wrong, so everyone was able to smile about it later.

"The start was fantastic," said Whitmarsh. "And to get it right up there and attack Heikki... Heikki didn't give any quarter either. That was very, very tough for both of them, but clean."

"Just a little tap," said Heikki of the contact. "It reminded me of the Turkish GP, and I was feeling whether I'd got a puncture or not, because it was a similar kind of thing I got in Turkey, [when] half a lap later the team told me I'm losing air from the tyre. Apart from that it was no problem, it was no danger to any of us."

Initially concerned that he'd broken his wing, Lewis wasn't about to sit back and wait for his chance. For four and a half amazing laps he pressured Heikki, until finally getting past at Stowe.

"The first lap was very tough," said Lewis when I asked how those early moments had gone. "I got a great start. I was on the inside and I had no grip, so I sort of slid into Heikki. I just managed to stay behind him. I was quite a lot quicker than him. I was quite a lot quicker than him, but managing it and making sure we didn't make any stupid mistakes was key. Fortunately I did, so I got past."

It was great stuff, and vindicated what Ron Dennis has always said about the lack of a hierarchy at McLaren.

"I don't think there's anyone who doubts McLaren's philosophy on allowing our drivers to race," said Whitmarsh. "It was fairly nerve wracking for those of us who were watching, but I think Lewis just believed that this was his race to win.

"We had clearly some discussion within the team about whether we have to tell the guys to cool it a little bit, but frankly we resisted that temptation. In hindsight I'm glad we did, because I think we let them do what they wanted to do.

"When you're fighting like that and you've got someone whose fighting and got the grip, you can push too hard and fall off. Heikki fought pretty strongly, but was then intelligent enough to realise that you can maybe hold him up for another few laps, or you can look after yourself."

In fact almost from the off, Kovalainen found himself struggling. In wet races keeping your tyres in ideal condition is absolutely paramount, and it's a complicated equation that involves temperature, pressure and grip levels.

Heikki Kovalainen spins in the Abbey chicane © XPB

"The problem for Heikki in this race was that he appeared to be damaging his rear tyres more than Lewis, and rear grip was going away," said Whitmarsh. "Heikki has been phenomenally quick all through the practice sessions in the last sector of the circuit. But during the race in fact he was struggling, because his tyres were damaged and he was really struggling for grip and traction.

"The wet tyres are delicate. On a circuit like this you've got tremendous loads in the high speed corners, and if you slide a little bit too much repeatedly you will damage your tyres. Once you've damaged them a bit, then the tendency is to slide and the tendency to damage them a bit more, and you fall out of that sweet spot. He just wasn't quite in the same sweet spot as Lewis."

"I just struggled with my rear tyres all the way through the race, to be honest," said Kovalainen. "They were going away and I was damaging them excessively, and the car control became difficult, and I had to slow down. This was the reason why I couldn't keep up.

"My tyres started to go straight away, my rear tyres especially were starting to go very, very fast. I couldn't save them enough. I was battling with him and I had to give it too much, and the rears were just going. By the time he got past it was quite a big struggle.

"It looks like on low grip conditions I put more load on the tyres. We saw that a little bit in Canada, I had more tyre wear compared to Lewis. And again in the rain when the grip is lower I put more load on them, especially the rear tyres. It's probably something that I need to look at. Perhaps we can do a little bit on the set-up, but I think I can improve that area as well."

Heikki slipped back from Lewis, and lost second place to Raikkonen on lap 10. At that stage Kimi was exactly 6.0 seconds behind. And then an interesting thing happened. The quickest man on the track at this stage, he began to reel Hamilton in. The gap went like this:

Gap Hamilton to Raikkonen

Lap 10: 6.0 seconds
Lap 11: 5.2 seconds
Lap 12: 5.0 seconds
Lap 13: 4.5 seconds
Lap 14: 3.8 seconds
Lap 15: 4.1 seconds
Lap 16: 4.2 seconds
Lap 17: 3.3 seconds
Lap 18: 2.3 seconds
Lap 19: 1.6 seconds
Lap 20: 0.9 seconds
Lap 21: Both cars pit

Initially it seemed that Lewis was happy enough with his advantage and realised that he didn't have win by a mile to get 10 points. But clearly he then suddenly realised that Kimi was getting too close for comfort, and he responded around laps 15 and 16, before the gap shrank again, to the point when it seemed that Kimi would try to find a way by. The Ferrari man's advantage was in the second and third sectors, rather than the fast stuff at the start of the lap. In fact like Heikki, Lewis was in tyre trouble, so a pit stop couldn't come soon enough.

Lewis Hamilton pits for new intermediates © LAT

"I don't know if it was my line or what," said Lewis. "As soon as I got out of Turn 8, I was struggling really. I don't know if my rear tyres were worse than his, they probably were because I was pushing quite hard at the beginning. Also I didn't want to go off. I was in such a god position, I didn't want to go off, so I was taking it easy in the last two sectors. I didn't actually know that he was catching me at the beginning, so I began to take it a little bit easy. I was comfortably quicker, and then he began to pick up pace."

But then on lap 21 they came into the pits together. In contrast to Canada, where the 'posh' end of the pits is at the exit, at Silverstone it is at the entry. This time McLaren's place in the middle proved advantageous, and helped Lewis to squeeze out still in the lead.

But while they were on identical fuel strategies, the two teams made very different calls on tyres. Lewis got a fresh set of standard wets (intermediates), while Ferrari left Kimi on a set that had done 21 laps, or more than a third of the race distance. The team must have known within half a lap that it had made the wrong call. Instead of coming round next time still on Hamilton's tail, Kimi had dropped back. Over the next few laps, it was as if they were driving in different formulae:

Gap Hamilton to Raikkonen

Lap 22:  3.1 seconds (lap includes pit stops)
Lap 23:  4.6 seconds
Lap 24:  9.8 seconds
Lap 25: 15.1 seconds
Lap 26: 21.8 seconds
Lap 27: 30.3 seconds (Kimi passed by Heidfeld at Luffield)
Lap 28: 34.8 seconds
Lap 29: 42.1 seconds
Lap 30: Kimi pits again for new intermediates

The numbers don't reveal exactly how much more time Kimi lost on that final lap before he stopped again, but it was approximately another 9-10 seconds. In other words he dropped over 50 seconds back from Hamilton over the course of nine laps - a quite extraordinary sequence of events.

It's important to bear in mind that all this happened before the huge deluge - around lap 35-36 - that really caused problems. But there was a reasonable shower around laps 22-23 (I know because I was standing in at the complex and put 'big rain' in my notebook!), and that was enough to make Kimi's worn inters utterly useless. To make matters worse, the tyres would have lost temperature while sitting on the car in the pits, and on the way in and out. On lap 20 they'd been good enough to allow him to outpace Lewis, but by lap 22, they were well past their sell-by date. It was like a switch.

Kimi Raikkonen struggles on his used intermediates © LAT

In contrast the previously struggling Lewis had a nice fresh set with full tread - just right for the conditions - and which had been prepared with the optimum pressure and temperature.

Ferrari wasn't the only team to get it wrong, because Renault (seasoned practitioners of the 'keep the old tyres on' strategy) did it with Alonso the lap before Lewis and Kimi stopped. Fernando had a lot less to lose, and it was worth a punt. You could argue that Ferrari should have kept a closer eye on how Fernando's car performed on its out lap before committing to keeping Kimi's old tyres on, but Alonso was some way behind, and Ferrari probably had only his first sector time as evidence.

Ferrari got it spectacularly wrong. In the past we've seen drivers keep intermediates on while a track was drying and grooved conditions were still a few laps away, and sometimes that strategy has paid dividends. Ferrari, like everyone else, relies on the FIA's weather information, and the team was convinced that it would not rain again. At Monaco the team came to the exact opposite conclusion, fuelling its cars up on the premise that it would rain. On that occasion it didn't, and this time around, it did. Clearly, the team is doing something wrong. Sometimes you can rely a little too much on science...

More to the point, the team failed to acknowledge its mistake until too late - Renault capitulated with Alonso a full four laps earlier, just six laps after his previous stop. Clearly there was going to be a penalty involved in terms of pit stop time in coming in, but the team spent too much time calculating the pros and cons of stopping again instead of getting on and actually doing it.

There was also presumably much discussion about whether to fuel him to the end if they did bring him, the risk being of course that if it dried enough for grooves, he'd have carried that extra fuel for nothing. Which is of course what happened in Monaco. In the end they did give him enough to get to the flag with when he finally came in on lap 30.

The curious thing is that Ferrari ran exactly the same strategy with Massa - he was so far behind that they could pit both cars on the same lap - so the Brazilian also pitted on laps 21 and 30. With little to lose, the team could easily either have A) given him new tyres since he was clearly struggling or B) rectified the mistake a lot earlier and gained information which would have helped with the decision making process on Raikkonen's car.

The bottom line was that Hamilton's main rival was now out of the picture, and having survived the strongest possible pressure immediately before the stops, he now had to focus on Nick Heidfeld, who had taken new inters a lap after Lewis had. The gap to the BMW man stayed within the 23-27 seconds range for the next few laps as Hamilton consolidated his position.

Nick Heidfeld took a safe approach to second place © LAT

That's not to say Heidfeld was doing a bad job. In fact the very thing that has screwed him in qualifying this year - not using his tyres hard enough - probably meant that he was in much better shape than many of his rivals, whose more aggressive driving style meant that were just never in the zone. The name of Massa springs to mind...

Hamilton's serene progress was very nearly derailed when the heavy rains came on laps 35-36. This gave Lewis and the team a serious headache, because it happened just before his second stop was due. Others went to extremes, but McLaren gave Lewis another set of inters and fuel to go to the end. It was a difficult call, because it was already obvious that extremes were the ideal choice, but you had to be sure that the gain would outweigh a potential extra stop to go back to inters.

The astonishing progress of Rubens Barrichello (and the pace of both Williams drivers) gave plenty of food for thought, but when you're leading choices aren't always so clear cut. In fact had he gone for extremes at that stop, overall he would most certainly have been better off, and hindsight shows that he could have made it to the flag on them. He would also have been at far less risk of sailing onto the gravel.

"We didn't think it was going to rain that much," said Kovalainen, who really struggled when the track was at its wettest. "We just thought it was going to be a shower, and clear skies were going to come, and the extreme tyres were going to be a worse option. Perhaps we could have done it differently."

In fact a look at the times shows that Hamilton did an astonishing job with the inters he had. Significantly slower than the guys on extremes, he was miles quicker than anyone else on inters. It was at this stage of the race that he secured his win, if nothing else simply by staying out of trouble, apart from one grassy trip at Abbey on lap 36, right at the start of the heavy rain. It says a lot that after his second stop his advantage over Heidfeld grew from 36 to 68 seconds in the last third of the race, at a point when he was clearly pacing himself, at least by his standards.

"It was hardcore, as my friend Adrian Sutil would say!," smiled Lewis. "It was incredible tough, conditions changing always. Sector One is dry, Sector Two is a little bi wet or dry, and Sector Three completely wet, so knowing how to judge it... Then I couldn't see much, because my visor was a big problem. I was just trying to stay calm with no mistakes, and that's why I kept building and building the gap."

It was an incredible performance, one that - after Fuji and Monaco - confirms beyond all doubt that Hamilton is one of the greatest wet weather specialists we've seen. The chassis/tyre/strategy package has to be right, but you still need to get the job done.

Lewis Hamilton accepts the cheers of the crowd in parc ferme © LAT

"During the race Lewis was very much in the sweet spot of performance," said Whitmarsh. "His tyres stayed in good condition, we felt we had it covered and the team made all the right tactical and strategic decisions during the race.

"I think Lewis had really found the grip today that others weren't finding. For most of the race we were trying to slow Lewis up, and he could have driven the race a lot quicker than he was going..."