Talking Points: Behind the scenes of the Spanish GP

Renault vs. Ferrari, Round III

Most people will agree that the Spanish GP was not a classic, but then we have been spoiled this year by a run of entertaining races. And Barcelona races are invariably by nature boring, a fact made obvious on Sunday morning. Despite the reversed top eight for their sprint event, even the usually spectacular GP2 boys could only muster a dull procession.

But that didn't make the main event any less stressful for its participants, and at least until the second round of pitstops were out of the way, there was a pretty interesting race underway. In fact, any contest involving Messrs Alonso and Schumacher - and it seems clear by now that they are fighting for the title - has to be worth watching.

Even Renault's director of engineering Pat Symonds admitted he was surprised by the apparent ease of the victory: "I honestly didn't think we were going to win it, when I looked at yesterday. The tyres worked really well, the car was quick, and it was won on speed, not on strategy."

As ever, the race swung on qualifying, and it's worth having a quick look at how things unfolded.

We've seen this year how the middle session is absolutely crucial in determining strategy. The teams have to assume that the opposition have declared their hands and shown their true one-lap, no fuel pace. How you compare with the guys you're fighting with has a clear influence on how much fuel you put in the car for the final session, although there are of course other factors at work.

Were Ferrari tricked, either deliberately or by circumstances, into believing that the Renaults weren't as fast as they proved to be? For whatever reason, Fernando Alonso in particular underperformed in that middle session.

Between Q2 and his quick lap at the end of Q3, the Spaniard found some 0.476 seconds, while Giancarlo Fisichella improved by 0.057 seconds. Now, the point is that in theory Alonso's fuel load when he did each of those laps should have been identical, i.e. just a lap or two was still in the tank. We know what he had in Q3 because he registered 16 laps in the session, and ran 17 in the race. Fisichella went one lap longer and thus had one lap more in the car when he qualified.

Michael Schumacher (Ferrari 248 F1) © LAT

So what of Michael Schumacher? He went 0.333 seconds slower between Q2 and Q3, and that reflects the fact that while he did 16 laps in qualifying, he ran to 23 in the race. In other words, he finished qualifying with at least seven laps of fuel in the car, or probably six more than Alonso. In Barcelona, this represented around 15kgs, which is quite a penalty.

But one assumes that Ferrari put that load in the car in the hope that Schumacher would still have a shot at the front row, and that the team had no way of knowing Alonso would find nearly half a second. Having said that, Fisichella's Q2 time was a much better indication of Renault's real form.

"We weren't sandbagging," said Symonds. "I think we were looking for grip, and every time it got warmer we were finding a bit. Obviously you don't lay it on the line in Q2. They weren't great laps, to be honest, for either driver, but it certainly wasn't intentional."

Whatever, Schumacher went to the start in a disappointed third, knowing that he had the capability of going several laps further than Alonso. It should have been enough to jump him at the first stops, but this time Fisichella was in the way. And while Renault do not have the start advantage over Ferrari and others that they used to enjoy, it was always going to be hard for the German to get ahead of the Italian, which is what he knew he had to do.

Nevertheless, Ferrari's technical director Ross Brawn remained convinced that come Sunday, Ferrari would enjoy enough of a tyre advantage over long runs to take care of the Fisichella situation and still beat Alonso. "The race will come to us," he said. Fellow Bridgestone man, Williams's technical director Sam Michael, reportedly felt the same, and even in the Renault camp there were serious concerns.

"Last night I overestimated them a little bit," Symonds said after the race. "I thought we had a very, very difficult race on our hands. I'm not saying it was easy, but it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Our pace was better. This wasn't a race about strategy, really. This was a race about pace. Very much like Nurburgring was.

"I was surprised in the first stint. I didn't think we'd pull out that much. But neither did Fernando. I was saying let's try for a five-second gap coming into the first stops, and he said, I don't think we can do it. I said I know! So I was surprised there, as I say the pace into the stop was great."

It was. Alonso drove a great first stint, and when pitted at the end of lap 17, he had 10 seconds on Fisichella, while Schumacher was a further 2.8 seconds behind. Barring a serious tyre issue in the middle stint, or some other unforeseen problem, he was looking good.

When choosing lap 17, Symonds had a joker up his sleeve - if circumstances demanded, he could have switched Alonso to a more risky three-stopper, but in the end he didn't have to.

Fernando Alonso pits his Renault from the lead of the Spanish Grand Prix © Reuters

"As the first stint was developing, we could see that we didn't need to take a risk. The first stint was the key. The in- and out-lap on the second stint were fantastic for Fernando. He did a 16.8 in and 17.0 out. It was really good, but the cushion was already there."

Of course, the inevitable question was had Fisichella been asked to run to a pace to block Schumacher? That's certainly something that occurred to Brawn. However, Symonds denies that the Italian was asked to do anything untoward but admits that it had been a possibility.

"We obviously discussed it - you have to - but if we'd done that I think the overall effect on the year would have been negative. It's a terrible thing to ask a driver to do. It's one thing to do it in the last race when you're fighting for the championship, but to do it in round six, with a guy who's already won a race and got the potential to finish high in the championship, it's just not the way to go racing, is it? I won't say it wasn't discussed, but the discussion was very, very short."

Fisichella was entitled to go as fast or as slow as he wanted, so even if orders are issued or a 'suggestion' made, there is nothing untoward in slowing down another car. In any case, he could have made up his own mind as to what he needed to do to make life easier for Alonso.

Also you can't ignore the fact that Fisichella was up against the driver of the moment, seeking his first win at home, and that anyone would have had a tough time matching him. Then there's the engine question. Alonso's engine was on its second and last race, Fisichella's has to go to Monaco. Fernando was able to back off in the latter part of the Nurburgring race and may well have saved high rev laps that he was able to take advantage of in Spain. One source told me a few races ago that normally the Renault guys have access to 20 such laps per Sunday.

Whatever, Brawn had his suspicions: "I think you have to look at Fisichella's times when he was free. He was a little bit slower than Alonso, but at times he was a second a lap slower. Maybe he had problems - who knows?"

It's worth looking at the numbers to see if they back up his argument. Could Fisichella have gone any quicker?

Difference in lap time Alonso to Fisichella

Lap  1: + 1.694 
Lap  2: + 0.574 
Lap  3: + 0.733 
Lap  4: + 0.817 
Lap  5: + 0.435 
Lap  6: + 0.840 
Lap  7: + 0.454 
Lap  8: + 0.315 
Lap  9: + 0.695 
Lap 10: + 0.719 
Lap 11: + 0.214  (traffic - Franck Montagny)
Lap 12: + 0.666 
Lap 13: + 0.561 
Lap 14: + 0.684 
Lap 15: + 0.058  (traffic - Tiago Monteiro and Christijan Albers)
Lap 16: + 0.640  (overall gap to Alonso is 10.099s)

Alonso pitted on lap 17, Fisichella on lap 18. By the time their respective in and out laps are completed, and both men are running in clear air, we see the following:

Lap 20: - 0.181 
Lap 21: - 0.533  (traffic - Ralf Schumacher)
Lap 22: + 0.365 
Lap 23: + 0.431 
Lap 24: + 1.730  (Schumacher comes out in front of Fisichella)

So what does all that prove? Well, having pitted, and aware that Michael could jump him, Fisichella ran as fast as he could for these few laps, and for a couple of them he showed he could go faster than Alonso, and on the others he was closer to his teammate than before - although it must be stressed that Alonso did hit some traffic at this stage.

Giancarlo Fisichella (Renault) runs ahead of Michael Schumacher (Ferrari) © LAT

Once Schumacher got in front, Fisichella knew there was nothing he could do to recover second place. We shall never know how much, if anything, he really had in reserve in that first stint.

In any case, all of this could be academic. Was Schumacher really being held up at all? Brawn made a big point of it, but the German himself was less vocal on the subject, hinting that the pace just wasn't there. After all, he was carrying six laps' worth of fuel more than Alonso - as noted earlier, that amounted to some 15kgs, using the FIA standard for Barcelona.

Brawn said that Schumacher had deliberately hung back a little from Fisichella to save engine, tyres and so on - sticking to the Italian's gearbox would have achieved nothing since, as we know, passing is impossible - but it certainly appeared that he couldn't have gone very much quicker than he actually did.

"We had a discussion on the pit-wall," said Symonds. "We know they are going long, are they saving their tyres or anything? Just watching the car, I got the impression that [Schumacher] was driving as fast as it could go.

"Five laps in or six laps in, we were above our target line [in terms of the required gap]. Sometimes after five or six laps you can't see what's happening, it's still a bit of a mess, but it was actually establishing itself quite well quite early. We could see that we had nice straight lines, and we were above target lines.

"The gap we had coming into that first pitstop was more than I expected. If that had been followed by a poor stint, we still wouldn't have made it. It's hard to pull out a key to the race, it really was a real race all the way up to the second stop. I think if anything, getting that 10 seconds gap up to the first stop, I think that was the real key."

Schumacher made a pretty good effort in the middle stint, but Alonso was equal to him. The Ferrari was still too far behind to take advantage of six extra laps on near empty tanks after Alonso's last fill-up. The pace wasn't quite there, and the ever-fickle Barcelona track had on this day tipped the balance in favour of the Renault/Michelin package.

"The tyres were really, really good," said Symonds. "On Saturday, when it was cooler in the morning, we'd seen that the Bridgestone degradation was better than ours. When the temperatures came up, the Michelin was just perfect. Degradation was very low, we still had the first lap performance, even though we only had one new set of tyres. It just worked really well.

"We made our choice after the Silverstone test... Probably a little bit more experience with this circuit allowed us to take things to the limit.

The Michelin tyres of the Renault R26 © XPB/LAT

"Barcelona is not easy to choose tyres for. If it's cold, you get a lot of graining; if it's hot, you get blistering. Yes, we had a hard and a soft tyre, but they were really chosen one more to minimising graining, one more to minimising blistering.

"The funny thing is that although it's ended up pretty hot, you'd think you'd take the one to minimise blistering, but we went the other way. But the stiffness of the tyres is similar."

Montoya's mare of a weekend

The second qualifying session has claimed some high profile victims of late, and after two consecutive disappointments for Giancarlo Fisichella, this time it was the turn of Juan Pablo Montoya not to get through.

It was clear that something wasn't right when he aborted his crucial final run in that session and returned to the pits before going out again. It later emerged that fuel was an issue - in fact he didn't have enough on board to do his out lap, flying lap, and return safely to the pits.

So how could that happen? In its post-session press release Ron Dennis noted that "a mistake was made with the refuelling," which left the door open for it being a rig failure of some sort. But on Sunday morning he filled in the gaps, admitting that it was a human error.

"Two things occurred," Dennis explained. "The first thing is there was a red flag incident, and he was on his lap and therefore we lost a set of tyres. We were a little marginal on time. When he came in for his final set of tyres, they were fitted and he called for a front wing adjustment. In the practice session we set up two separate pit areas with the refuelling rigs, and the roles of the mechanics change in this situation where they are split between the two.

"As he came into the pits, he wanted a front wing change. The guy that was instructed to do it was also the guy who is supposed to control the dead man's handle on the refuelling rig. The fuel nozzle went on and off, but the fuel didn't go in, because the safety system was activated. So it was a team error.

"We had enough fuel to do the lap, but the tyres had cooled off. We could have called for another set of tyres, but the decision was not to, and that meant in the first part of the sector the tyres were too cold for him to do the lap properly. So it was a combination of red flag, team error, and cool tyres. Obviously he was a bit upset at the time, but we function as a team, and that was a very clear mistake."

It was really just one of those things, the opposite problem of the one Fernando Alonso had in Malaysia, when he was sent out with double the fuel load he should have had. Both cases indicate just how pressured the teams are under the current qualifying system, and mistakes can happen even to the best-organised teams. You can be sure that McLaren will have made sure it won't happen again.

Kimi Raikkonen passes the stricken McLaren of teammate Juan Pablo Montoya © LAT

The team have plenty more to think about, however, because Spain was another disappointing weekend. A year ago, Kimi Raikkonen dominated this race, having retired while leading comfortably at Imola. He would go on to win Monaco and was leading again at the Nurburgring when his suspension broke on the last lap.

This year's package simply doesn't have the pace, and of course it's impossible to say how much of that is down to McLaren underperforming, and how much is due to Renault and particularly of course Ferrari making a step forward.

Raikkonen qualified only ninth in Spain, but made amends with a brilliant surge off the line and some heroics on the way to Turn 1 that saw him emerge in fifth, which is where of course he finished. Without that great start the chances are he would have finished behind one or possibly both Hondas, so putting new tyres on for the first stint - something that teams very rarely do - clearly paid off.

But things didn't get any better for Montoya, and an early spin saw him beached, rather embarrassingly, on the kerbs. He complained afterwards of a possible traction control glitch, which is one of those excuses that drivers of the modern era sometimes have trouble convincing their own teams about. Slow punctures, suspension failure, there's always some evidence, but freaky electronic stuff doesn't always leave a trace that exonerates the driver.

"No, in the data we've looked through there's no traumatic event on the car, at least before he was beached!" said team CEO Martin Whitmarsh. "The fact is at an upshift you get a slight kick, and if you're right on the limit that can be enough to just pitch it over. The driver's got to gauge it, even with the traction control system he's got to drive within the limits of the grip that's available to him.

"As a team we'll work together on this one. I don't think he will say that there's any great event on the car that caused it, and we can't say that we can't have made smoother shift that would have made him not lose it."

To change or not to change

I couldn't help wondering if McLaren would have been better off had the cars ran more than a handful of token laps on Friday, when as we've seen with such as BMW Sauber and Williams, there was a determined effort to save engine miles.

The difference is those two teams have a third driver clocking up the miles and logging data, while McLaren do not, and in this case relied on testing info from way back when. Would both drivers have been better off in qualifying had they ran more miles the previous day? The team would never admit it, but you'd have to guess that the answer is yes. But such strategies are an inevitable by-product of the two-race engine rule.

Mercedes-Benz F0 108 engine © McLaren

The team now have to consider their engine options for Monaco. Montoya's V8 did few laps in practice and only 17 in the race. The team now have the right to change it without penalty, but is it worth keeping it in the car for Monaco, a race known to be less stressful than most?

That would make sense. But that in turn means the Silverstone engine would have to go to Montreal, two engine busters in a row. But at least there would be a new one for Indianapolis, which is the really tough one... But what if they took a new engine for Monaco so that it went to Silverstone barely used? And so on and so on. Those are the sorts of conundrums teams now find themselves in.

"We're sealing the engine," said Whitmarsh. "We'll have a look at it, and we can change the engine obviously without penalty. You've got to make a decision. Monaco is a relatively lightly loaded engine circuit, we've got a part-used engine that we can take to Monaco and that's attractive.

"Or change the engine and you'd have a lightly loaded first race in Monaco, and then you'd go to Silverstone with more capacity in the engine. We have to do the maths. Unfortunately now you can't intuitively make that judgement, you have to do the maths, because it's quite complicated these days."

Engines, tyres, qualifying... complicated doesn't even begin to describe F1, 2006-style. At least we're now heading to Monaco, where for once the art will outweigh the science.