Sepang Talking Points

The race itself might not have been an edge-of-the-seat thriller like Bahrain, but the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend had plenty to recommend it. It really underlined the fact that for a variety of reasons, this is going to be an intriguing season.

There are now so many interwoven layers involving engines mileage, new tyres, fuel weights and qualifying strategy, that Formula One is more complex than at any time in the recent past, and therefore a greater challenge both for engineers and those of us trying to keep up with what they're doing.

The new qualifying procedure is great, and the sight of Michael Schumacher and Jenson Button racing each other in and out of the pits at their second tyre changes - missed by the cameras - was a spectacular one. The system continues to throw up surprises, and it's fascinating to see how the teams deal with them.

Penalty time

It was inevitable that, given the novelty of the V8 engines, we would soon see some ten-place penalties. Nevertheless, the rash awarded in Malaysia caught everyone by surprise.

To recap, David Coulthard suffered a failure on the slowing down lap in Bahrain, and subsequent examination of the works Ferrari engines revealed a problem on Felipe Massa's car. So both men went into the weekend knowing they had a penalty.

The key thing is that this year it's much harsher than ever before. Let's just suppose you have a penalty and go all the way through Q1, Q2 and Q3 and end up on pole. That would put you down to eleventh. Although Kimi Raikkonen proved anything was possible last year, given the present level of competitiveness, the chances are that to get pole you're going to be lighter than many others further down the top ten.

Then consider the fact that all those outside the original top ten qualifiers can refuel as much as they want. So there you are in eleventh, in your light-ish car, and the bloke you've bumped up to tenth can be as heavy as he likes, as can all those behind you. Unless you make a great start, you are basically screwed. It's even worse if you end up fourth, and drop back to fourteenth...

Eleventh place qualifier (prior to engine change) David Coulthard, Red Bull Racing Ferrari © LAT

In other words, why bother at all to make the top ten? Far better to keep your powder dry, and save new tyres and engine miles by making only a token effort in qualifying.

Ferrari thought about what might happen to Massa, and took a great strategic decision. From the start of the weekend they decided that the Brazilian would take a second engine change before the race. Whether he went back ten or twenty places was a moot point, because he wouldn't even try to make the top ten.

By going that route he could run as many laps as he wanted on Friday and Saturday, and do a lot of set-up and tyre work. He did 61 laps in all, acting pretty much like a third driver, before getting another fresh engine for the race - and since that would also have to last into Australia, so much the better.

The team had doubts about Michael Schumacher's engine all weekend as well - there was even a suggestion that rivals running acoustic tests had already concluded that his engine was past its sell-by date - and sure enough, it was changed on Saturday lunchtime.

One can imagine that Schumacher wasn't too keen on skipping a serious qualifying effort and going to the back, and you'd be a brave race engineer to impose such a strategy on him. He was going to go for it, come what may.

Also in the engine wars was Rubens Barrichello, who felt his Honda going out of kilter, and beat the engineers with what turned out to be a correct analysis. He didn't change engine as such, but jumped in the T-car, which amounted to the same thing.

This rather complicated matters. We now had Massa guaranteed to start at the back, and Schumacher, Barrichello and Coulthard all on ten-place penalties. There was now some incentive for all of those guys to not just make a token effort, but to actually try to beat each other, and try to start 19th or 20th rather than 21st.

Thus, Barrichello and Coulthard went further into the qualifying process than they might otherwise have done. Just to add to the fun, Ralf Schumacher's problem at the end of Q2 meant that he and not Massa was guaranteed to start last, so all the others moved up one spot.

It was pretty obvious at the end of qualifying that Coulthard, Barrichello, Massa and Ralf would fill the last four places on the grid, but where to put Michael Schumacher?

The German ended up fourth, which meant he'd be demoted to 14th. But among those ahead of him were Ralf, DC and Rubens, all of whom were penalised, so wouldn't that make him 11th? Even Ferrari were thinking along those lines at first, but quite logically the FIA took out all the penalised cars, shuffled everyone else up, and then put a frustrated Schumacher back in 14th.

It wasn't just the victims who were affected by all the penalty activity. Christian Klien became the first man to take the option of sitting on the sidelines, saving engine mileage and new tyres, after making the top ten.

Aware that Ralf and Michael Schumacher were not in the picture, Red Bull knew that Klien would start eighth. Figuring that was the best they could hope for, he did a token two-lap run to record a time, and then parked it.

McLaren also responded to events. Although the team may always have planned to go run heavy in Q3 and go long, the fact that so many quick cars were out of the running made that policy even more worthwhile. Perhaps even seventh and eighth would have been regarded as satisfactory, but the problems for Fernando Alonso - and Klien opting out - meant they actually started fifth and sixth. Better than planned?

The great Renault refuelling disaster

Renault's refuelling rigs © XPB/LAT

Fernando Alonso was the last man on a hot lap in the crucial third qualifying session, and when a decent time didn't materialise, we were left scratching our heads.

While his 'appy teammate was whisked away to the FIA pole position press conference, the sombre looks in the Renault camp revealed that something had gone badly wrong. Accosted by a Spanish radio interviewer as he strolled from parc ferme to his garage, Alonso muttered something about having too much fuel. That seemed a little odd, but it turned out to be the real story.

The Renault pit happened to be under the window of the press room, and at the end of Q2 I'd made a point of going over to see how they coped with refuelling two cars in a hurry. There seemed to be an awful lot of pushing back and forwards going on, but I didn't appreciate at the time that there had been some serious confusion. But when Fernando was late out of the pits at the start of Q3 - a real slip when drivers are so keen to get as many laps in as possible - it was apparent that things hadn't quite run smoothly.

It may or may not have been a coincidence that Renault was cutting things dangerously fine throughout qualifying. The Raikkonen red flag incident in Bahrain was proof, if any were needed, that it didn't pay to risk being bumped by hanging around in the garage for too long, and afterwards Pat Symonds admitted that was a useful warning.

However, there didn't seem to be a change of policy in Malaysia. Alonso and Fisichella went out right at the end of Q1, and while they sailed through in 11th and 12th places, they didn't leave much margin had there been a late red or yellow flag. It was the same at the end of Q2, when Giancarlo and Fernando went second and third in the dying seconds of the session.

They made it through easily, and there's a lot to be said for waiting to see what your true target is, and especially whether you need to use a set of new tyres.

Schumacher showed that going too soon can also be dangerous - in the closing minutes of Q1 he was back in the garage and on the bubble in 16th, and it was lucky that none of the Toro Rossos, MF1s or Super Aguris found a sudden burst of speed to pitch him out. Of course you could argue that he'd got it just right...

But it's not just about the risk of getting caught by a red or yellow flag. The extra dimension at the end of Q2 is that you then have to finalise your race strategy and put your race fuel load in the car during the five-minute gap. Except that it's only really five minutes if you are back in your garage when the flag falls - as were the McLarens, after they'd set times quite early in the session.

In contrast, the Renaults crossed the line just before the flag came out - with some 35 seconds to spare in Fisichella's case - which meant by the time they'd got back to the garage, the interval was down to a lot less than four minutes. That, in turn, put the pressure on the crew to get the cars refuelled and turned round for Q3. If something goes wrong, there is not much time to get it sorted.

The time pressure must have played a role in what happened at the turnaround, when the team had problems with the Intertechnique fuel rigs.

"Initially we thought it was a problem with Fernando," said Pat Symonds after the race. "Then we saw a problem with Fisi, then we got Fernando back, then we got Fisi back. There were two real problems, and only one of them did we recover from properly."

Giancarlo Fisichella and Fernando Alonso in qualifying © LAT

The bottom line was that Fisichella was OK, but Alonso got two fuel loads. He knew as soon as he drove out of the pits that something was wrong, and at the same time, the team did the numbers and realised what had happened.

It didn't really matter how much fuel Fernando burned off as he put in his credit laps - by the end of the session he was still going to be so heavy that he had no chance. His good fortune was that Schumacher already had a penalty, Klien opted out of the fight, and Ralf had suffered a blown engine and thus did not make the top-ten shootout. All that left the Spaniard seventh, when he could well have been as low as tenth.

It will be interesting to see if Renault give themselves a little more time for refuelling in Australia, by ensuring that the cars don't wait until the last minute of Q2. Symonds admitted this would be a consideration: "Absolutely. We look at everything. We're very self-critical."

Damage limitation

After qualifying the Renault guys looked pretty depressed, and they had a real job on their hands. By late Saturday night, Symonds had most of the crew lined up in the team catering area, and he was leading a discussion that presumably covered what had gone wrong - and how they would recover from it.

The interesting thing was that the team had stumbled into an area of the new qualifying rules that no one had really anticipated. The emphasis thus far has always been on doing as many credit laps as possible in order to ensure that, having got them back, you can go as far as possible in the race.

Now we had a team that didn't want to use their credit laps, making use of the fact that rules say only that you may replace the fuel. Since Alonso had run 13 laps in Q3, he could now start the race with the fuel he still had in the car, with that plus his full 13 laps, or with any permutation in between.

"We'd taken the downside of qualifying," said Symonds. "The upside was that we had more options than we'd ever known in a race, so we evaluated a helluva lot of them, and came up with what might seem a slightly oddball one."

Symonds wasn't about to divulge any figures, but I thought it might be fun to try to guess how the team dug itself out of the hole they'd put themselves in.

For simplicity's sake, I'll work in laps rather than kilos. To make things easier, let's assume that when he came into the pits at the end of Q2, and when he stopped in the race, Alonso had the usual lap or so margin still in the tank, so we won't consider that here.

First, here's what we do know. He stopped on lap 26 of the race, and since teams generally count the two laps to the grid as one, on race day he must have used 27 laps of fuel up to his first stop.

The next question is of those 27 laps, how much came out of the 13 laps of credit that were on offer? Impossible to say, without more hard information.

Fisichella stopped on lap 17, so let's just take a wild guess and assume that the team had originally planned to stop Fernando on a very aggressive lap 16. I've tried it with higher numbers - after all, Alonso did pit three laps later than Fisichella in Bahrain - but it doesn't quite fit together.

The one thing in favour of an early stop is that Fernando only qualified fourth in Bahrain, having gone for a 19-lap first stint. He saved his race by getting past Jenson Button and Massa at the start, but the team could not risk the same thing happening again, even with the Ferraris out of the picture on penalties. In an ideal world he'd get pole - Button was the most obvious threat - and then disappear at the start.

To stop on lap 16, the team would have intended to put 17 laps' worth of fuel in the car before Q3 (including the laps to the grid). If he then really did get two identical loads, he must have ended up with 34 laps rather than 17 in the car at the start of qualifying.

We can only guess that it all went in, of course, as people in the team (including Fernando) said. There was no suggestion that the tank had brimmed, and thus not the entire second, unwanted load went into the car, although that may have been the case.

Anyway, he used up 13 official 'credit' laps during Q3, and let's throw in one for a relatively quick in-lap after the flag, to leave 20 in the car at the end of the session. If that was the true figure, he was seventh on the grid with fuel to go to 19 laps. That was a nonsense strategy for a potential race winner, especially as he risked getting stuck behind one or two very heavy McLarens. The team knew that they had to take some of the 13-lap allowance and push his stop further into the race. But how far?

Fernando Alonso pits on lap 26 © LAT

They settled for a stop on lap 26, enough to ensure that he could probably outlast the McLarens and maybe get ahead at the first stops, and hopefully jump the Williams pair and perhaps Button as well, depending on how the race had unfolded and how many cars he didn't get past at the start.

We can also assume that in deciding to go to lap 26, the team also left the door open for either a two-stop with a long first stint, or a one-stop if circumstances pointed in that direction - Symonds admitted that one had indeed been given consideration.

So to bring him up to the 27 we know he had on board for the race and the laps to the grid, he would have taken seven laps of the 13 available.

It's all speculation, of course. Maybe the team was originally aiming for lap 15, maybe for lap 18, maybe both drivers are allowed to start qualifying with identical fuel loads and then the team decides who gets to stop later.

But if my numbers are anywhere near right, they say something interesting about the size of the Renault fuel tank. If Alonso did indeed take 34 laps of fuel on during that panic before Q3, then that must be the size of the R26 fuel tank, not counting the margin left in the car at the end of an all-out qualifying run in Q2.

As it happened, when he came in lap 26 Fernando took enough fuel to carry him only to lap 43, so his ultimate strategy was as Symonds said, an oddball but quite successful 26-17-13 over the three stints.

But let's say the team had gone for one stop. To get to the flag from lap 26, and complete a slowing down lap, Fernando would have needed to take on 31 laps of fuel. Allowing for having something left in the tank at the end, that's not too far from my earlier estimate of 34 for the capacity - I suspect the real figure is something in between.

If the other one-stoppers this year were full as they left their garages (we can but guess), and allowing for the pre-race laps, we can make the following assumptions about fuel tank size. This time I'll switch to kilos, using the fuel weights allocated by the FIA for the first two races, which of course don't necessarily match up with the consumption of the individual engines:

Renault (Alonso, Malaysia)     34 x 2.80kgs = 95.20kgs
Honda (Barrichello, Malaysia)  32 x 2.80kgs = 89.60kgs
McLaren (Raikkonen, Bahrain)   31 x 2.75kgs = 85.25kgs
Red Bull (Coulthard, Bahrain)  31 x 2.75kgs = 85.25kgs
Ferrari (Massa, Malaysia)      30 x 2.80kgs = 84.00kgs

Once again, these figures don't allow for the one lap or so reserve usually left in the car at a race pitstop, and as noted earlier, in reality the Renault is probably nearer 32-33. Nevertheless it seems that of the teams to declare their hands so far in 2006, Renault and Honda could have the biggest tanks. It remains to be seen how significant that might prove to be at races that favour an extra long first stint.

Toyota's 'doh!' moment

Finally, when Ralf Schumacher's Toyota engine blew up in the closing minutes of Q2, it was clear that we had an interesting situation on our hands. Not only was he now destined to start from the very back - an engine change after qualifying trumps any 10-place penalties - but for the first time we had an example of someone making the top ten, but unable to participate in Q3 because the car was out of action.

Had Ralf been able to coast into the pits, he would have been able to take the T-car - not that there was much point, as that would have entailed a penalty. As it was, he just had to stand and watch.

Ralf Schumacher lost his Toyota engine in the second session, but managed to make the final ten © Reuters

Toyota thus became the first team to fall into the interesting situation of having to commit to a race load for top ten qualifying, without actually having a car to put it in. Instead, the team had to nominate a figure to the FIA in the few minutes before Q3 started.

They knew that Ralf would be starting at the very back. There wasn't much time to do the numbers, but the figure they chose was 62.2kgs - the equivalent of 22.2 laps at the FIA consumption of 2.80kgs per lap. Now, since Ralf's engine had blown quite close to the end of Q2, it was a fair guess to say he probably had only a couple of laps of fuel still in the car, to which those 22.2 laps would be added.

So when the credit figures were published before the race, rival teams knew that the German would be stopping somewhere around the 23-24 lap mark! OK, so figures for what was available to go in other cars were also made public, but with them it was much harder to judge what was left in the car in parc ferme.

Now comes the funny part. As you will have noticed earlier, the rules use that word may in relation to refuelling. So in fact the team could have told the FIA that they wanted to take a full tank of 90kgs or so, and then spent a whole night thinking about what level they really wanted to put in the car. And whatever did eventually go in the tank would not have been known to rivals. Doh!

"Obviously we had to tell them straight after qualifying what fuel we want to put in," said a disappointed Mike Gascoyne after the race. "We haven't refuelled, because the car is stuck out on the circuit, so we tell them we're going to put in this amount.

"Then they publish it, and it tells everyone exactly where we're going to go... I think in future we will say 200kgs, and we'll put in whatever we want up to that level! I spoke to Charlie Whiting about it, and he acknowledges that it's an anomaly."

In the end, a pneumatic problem meant that Ralf Schumacher stopped earlier than scheduled. But it was a valuable lesson for anyone else who may find themselves in the same situation in the future.