Talking Points: Behind the scenes of the Chinese GP

We've had some entertaining races this year, but the Chinese Grand Prix was in a class of its own, beating even Hungary in terms of the thrill-a-minute factor.

Just consider that Fernando Alonso was so fast at the beginning that he was 11.555 seconds ahead of sixth placed Michael Schumacher after just three laps, and still pulling away. And yet an hour and a half later, when it really mattered, the Ferrari man was in front by 3.121 seconds. And this in a race where safety cars played no part in compromising the action. A full study of the ebbs and flows in fortunes among the top runners would probably take a book.

Straight after the race, I bumped into Bernie Ecclestone. How does he still manage to produce such a great show?

"It gets more difficult, I tell you," he grinned. "You can't judge it. I tried to get it closer, to be honest, but it didn't happen! Three seconds at the end was too far away. It should have been one second...

"We couldn't ask for anything better, so what the hell? Two races to go, and they're level on points."

After Hungary, everyone knew that the wet tyre situation was incredibly complex. It was clear in that race that Bridgestone was in serious trouble with its intermediate [nee standard wet] when the track was wet, but not enough to require the use of extreme wets. But during the crossover period to dry-weather tyres, Bridgestone was in pretty good shape, as Schumacher had demonstrated at the Hungaroring. The jury was out on extreme wet performance; in Hungary, Felipe Massa and Rubens Barrichello had tried the Bridgestone and Michelin respectively, and neither had much luck.

With the testing ban and overall lack of time since then, Bridgestone had relatively little chance to improve the situation, although there had been some limited running at Paul Ricard and Fiorano. In races, Bridgestone could at least take comfort in the fact that at some point things would turn in their direction. But the nightmare scenario was a wet qualifying where there was only one shot at it and the track wasn't drying fast enough.

And that of course is what we got last weekend. The sight of the ten Bridgestone runners lined up in the ten bottom places at the end of the first session said it all. But it was drying to some extent. In the second session, the Ferrari drivers started on extremes, and then switched to inters.

Schumacher qualifying the Ferrari © LAT

It was always going to be tricky, but Schumacher pulled off a stunning lap to get himself into the top ten, and in effect buy himself some time. The track was getting better by the minute, and with a lot of cars running on it during the fuel burn phase, the Bridgestones inters got closer to their preferred working environment. In the end Michael nabbed that sixth place, not great but far better than even the most optimistic Ferrari insider had predicted at the start of the afternoon.

Alonso's engineer Rod Nelson was caught on the team radio TV broadcast telling his driver that he was first, teammate Fisichella was second, and "poor old Michael" was down in sixth. As is so often the case, it was dangerous to count your chickens...

Sunday brought more rain, and there were miserable faces in the Ferrari camp. It was mostly drizzle, but at lunchtime it really tipped down, and that brought some cause for optimism, because it was felt that such conditions would be more favourable, as the extreme wet had been OK. As the start drew near, however, there was no new rain, and the track was far from what Ferrari needed.

The key to Schumacher's race was the start. He was awesome on the first lap in Hungary, after his grid penalty, but he was helped by having fuel to burn and doing a succession of pre-race laps to study the track. This time, he didn't have that luxury. Kimi Raikkonen and the Honda drivers were never going to make life easy for him, so really it was a question of damage limitation, not losing any places or even worse - any bodywork.

In the event, he did exactly what was required, keeping his sixth place and putting himself in a position where he just had to count down the laps and wait for the tyre advantage to go in his favour. And finally, it did. He passed Barrichello on lap 8, Jenson Button on lap 13, and Raikkonen when he pitted on lap 16.

The crucial thing, of course, was his gap to Alonso, and that peaked at 25.353 seconds on lap 14 and then began to drop away as the stops approached. It had fallen to just over 18 seconds when Schumacher made his stop on lap 21, to be followed by Alonso and Fisichella over the next two laps.

"That was a fantastic drive," said afterwards Ferrari's technical director Ross Brawn. "Because we couldn't afford to drop a pitstop to Fernando, it was a crucial part of the race, which he did very well, and then everything started to come to us."

And here is of course where Alonso's nightmare began. While nearly everyone else was following the now common practice of leaving used intermediate tyres on, and taking advantage of their gradual progress towards slicks, Alonso changed only the front tyres. It was his decision, and it wasn't arrived at lightly, but as the team now readily admit, it was the wrong one.

Alonso could see that his fronts were badly worn, especially the left, and felt that another stint on them would be too much to ask. The problem was a legacy of the fact that he had simply been pushing so hard and perhaps his famously aggressive driving style, which does ask a lot of the fronts. Fisichella, in contrast, had no worries.

"It could be his style," The Italian confirmed later. "I talked to my engineer and I said 'we should keep the same set of tyres'."

For Alonso, the unusual mixture of old rears and newer fronts simply didn't work, and there was nothing he could do to stop Fisichella and Schumacher catching up. Straight after his stop, the Spaniard had a 15-second advantage over the German, having lost three seconds on his out-lap. Thereafter, it went tumbling down by the same margin on each lap.

Fernando Alonso holds off Renault teammate Giancarlo Fisichella and the Ferrari of Michael Schumacher © LAT

The sight of the three drivers circulating together, the two championship contenders with Fisichella in the middle - and not quite sure what he should do - was an amazing one.

"It was quite tricky, because Michael was behind me, Fernando was quite slow, so I was a bit worried about that," Fisichella said. "On the good line, the normal line, the circuit was dry. Just inside it was wet. Once I tried to overtake Fernando, I was on the wet, and I had rear locking, and I lost again the position. The lap after, I just overtook him in the straight, and I went on the right line. The car balance and the grip were very good, so I was able to control the race."

At all costs, Schumacher had to avoid contact with the blue and yellow cars, whether deliberately or not. He couldn't put himself in a position as in Hungary, where twice he hit other cars. He chose his moment well, and began to pull away from Alonso.

Meanwhile, some drivers began to use their scheduled stop to make a change to dry-weather tyres, but it proved to be premature. The Toyota drivers were first, with Ralf Schumacher on lap 24 and Jarno Trulli a lap later. Both were soon in serious trouble and were slithering around. BMW's Robert Kubica and Spyker's Christijan Albers both came in on lap 25. Albers was in straight away next lap for more intermediates, while Kubica's adventures were well captured on TV. It really was impossible on the Michelins.

"Certainly at the first pitstop we did a misjudgement," said BMW motorsport director Mario Theissen. "It was his choice - we didn't expect it to work, or we were on the conservative side on the pit wall, but he strongly requested grooved tyres. It was lack of experience, although I have to say in qualifying grooved tyres worked at a slower lap time than we were at the time Robert requested them.

"On Saturday, you could switch to grooves at about 1:44.0, and today (on race day), Robert requested grooves when we were at 1:42.0 already. We were not sure on the pit wall. We thought it would be risky, but it wasn't out of the question. But the pitlane was still so wet and cold that he lost tyre temperature already."

Dries were not yet an issue for the two top teams because of their fuel strategy, but they had to keep on eye on things.

"You see people going out on dries at mid-race, and you still couldn't use them," said Brawn. "It's very peculiar because the compounds we're using now are very sensitive to temperature, and if you don't generate the temperature in them, you struggle. It's not a question of going slow, it's catastrophic."

For Schumacher, the next problem was dealing with Fisichella, and the timing of the second round of stops was crucial. Just to make things even more interesting, the window for changing to dry tyres had by now opened properly. And Ferrari showed that they learned a crucial lesson in Hungary and this time used Massa as a guinea pig to try the dry tyres.

"We put Felipe out on slicks to see how it looked," Brawn confirmed. "We didn't want to make the same mistake as Hungary. He was reporting back on how the tyres were doing. He said the warm-up is very difficult, but after one or two laps, they're good."

Massa changed on lap 34, only five laps after he'd made his scheduled stop after a long opening stint. Alonso then bit the bullet and got rid of his troublesome intermediates on lap 35. The team made their second mistake when there was 'finger trouble' over a wheel nut, and around 12 very expensive seconds went to waste. However, he was soon up to a decent speed.

Felipe Massa pits for dry tyres © LAT

The Ferrari mechanics appeared to be getting ready for Schumacher at one point, before heading back into the garage. When he finally did stop on lap 40, the crew came out very late. The obvious implication was that Ferrari were trying to confuse Renault, although Brawn denies that.

"We were just debating whether to anticipate the stop, we weren't sure whether we would be quicker on new dry tyres for one or two laps, so we left it a lap.

"The second stop was pretty much when he was due in. It was tricky, it was a difficult call, but it almost went out of our hands. We made the decision at the first stop on how much fuel to put in. There was a little surprise that we had to go all the way on the fuel, but we did, and everything worked out very well for us."

Perhaps the single most dramatic moment of the race was Schumacher's opportunistic pass on Fisichella upon exiting the pits.

Nearly everyone had trouble coming out of the pitlane, especially when they made the move to dries. Michael himself had a wobble, and took note. The team had also noticed that Michelin runners seemed to have particular problems, and thought that it would be the same for Fisichella.

"We said to Michael, with Fisichella, your chance is going to be on the first lap when he comes out, because the Michelins struggled," said Brawn. "We were watching the lap time of Fisichella, and of course Michael did take it easy on the dries when he came out, we asked him not to push too much..."

Having run 41 laps on his intermediates - remember Alonso's fronts only went to lap 22 - the Italian had a good in-lap, and arrived at the pit exit in plenty of time to get out ahead. His engineer told him he'd made it, and Fisichella too was convinced that he was now well set. He slid just a little bit off line, and saw a flash of red on his right as a totally committed Schumacher went for a gap that didn't really exist, with two wheels over the kerb. Maybe he would have been able to squeeze through in the next couple of corners in any case, but nevertheless it was one of the great Schumacher moves.

"The pit lane, especially at the exit, was wet," said Fisichella. "You cannot go on the left hand side because of the white line. As soon as you go into Turn 1, you get the tyres completely cold, and you are on the wet side. So I was very cautious, but even with that I lost the car and Michael was able to get past. I knew he was behind me, but not there! [race engineer] Alan [Permane] told me, 'You are OK, you are in P1'. He had been able to do one lap and keep the tyres very warm, and there he was just quicker than me."

Fisichella began to go backwards at that point, fully aware that his job now was to await the arrival of Alonso and cede his second place, although of course it wasn't made too obvious on the radio traffic with Giancarlo. It didn't have to be.

"They called me and they said go down with the revs, and just go to the end of the race, which is the important thing."

So Alonso closed in on Schumacher as his dry tyres began working well, while the Ferrari man meanwhile was going as fast as he needed to. Rain in the last few laps added to the fun. In general, the Michelins seemed to suffer a little more, and Alonso couldn't afford to make a mistake, so his charge wasn't as spectacular as it might have been. Schumacher had it under control, but a couple of more laps would have been very interesting.

Fernando Alonso (Renault R26) © Reuters

The sense of relief and surprise in the Ferrari camp was palpable afterwards as the podium celebrations began. "Poor old Michael, eh?" smiled Ferrari's press officer Luca Colajanni. Revenge is sweet...

Meanwhile, a beaming Ross Brawn watched the podium ceremony with an arm round wife Jean, drumming his fingers along with the Italian national anthem. He really enjoyed this one.

"I think in a race like this you know you're going to get windows of opportunity," summarised Brawn. "We had a bad window yesterday, and then we had good windows today. With no further rain, we knew the track would come towards us, and in those conditions we knew the tyre would be very good. The key thing was Michael didn't drop a pitstop to Fernando, which would have made life very difficult. But I must say in these conditions, the tyres were fantastic.

"It was a great result after yesterday, but I had a good feeling about this weekend, because the car was very good when we had a chance to try it. Circumstances meant that we weren't able to display it. It is tricky to judge, but I think we've got a chance."

Ecclestone meanwhile is not quite sure what he wants.

"It's good and bad for everything. If Michael wins and he leaves us, then we've left the world championship out there, but on the other hand I'd like to see him go out a winner..."