The Fantastic Four: Behind the Scenes of the British GP

Walking past the back of the McLaren garage after the end of the British GP, I was surprised when a senior team member called me over.

"Hey, there's something I want you to see," he said.

I followed him into the inner sanctum, and there it was, sitting on a workbench - the trophy that Lewis Hamilton had won for third place. And what a feeble little piece it was. I couldn't help but laugh, but actually it wasn't very funny.

It really did look like something that you could order in your local high street. All it needed was a little figure of someone playing snooker or badminton stuck on the top, and the picture would have been complete. Alonso's second placed trophy wasn't much better, and nor apparently was that of race winner Kimi Raikkonen, although it was a little larger.

As the McLaren guys made clear, it was an insult. All those millions spent, all those hundreds of people working flat out at Maranello and Woking, all that commitment from the title-chasing drivers that was so evident at Silverstone, and at the end the reward was a cheap looking piece of tin that will look rather out of place in a trophy cabinet that contains some wonderful, priceless items. It was not calculated to make anyone friends of the British GP.

Of course, drivers don't worry too much about these things, and in the end Silverstone was all about the points. And this latest shuffling between the top four confirmed that each member of the leading quartet could yet win the championship. The remaining eight races are, with luck, going to be quite something.

Silverstone was one of the best yet in terms of the sheer intensity of the competition. It also caught us out a little. While we'd all spent the weekend distracted by Stepneygate and all its implications, the real story was about tyres. Among the guys who ran the full distance, no fewer than five different permutations of hards and mediums were used as everyone sought the best way of juggling around the tyre that suited their car most with the need to at some point use the one that didn't.

And just as McLaren gained the upper hand with the supersofts in Monaco and Montreal, so Ferrari was on top of the game at Silverstone.

Qualifying: Hamilton's big day

Silverstone was the first track since Barcelona at which the teams had enjoyed a chance to test their race tyres at a race venue (bar Honda and Super Aguri, who went to Jerez).

But the place is notorious for its fickle weather, and come race weekend the strong winds and overcast conditions made it hard to get a real handle on the tyres on Friday. It was warmer on Saturday, but come qualifying, even McLaren had doubts about exactly which way to jump.

"It was interesting," said Martin Whitmarsh after the race. "It was probably the least conclusive weekend with regards to tyres, you'd have to say yesterday coming into qualifying there wasn't a strong conviction either way, so in order to evaluate those unusually in Q1 Fernando went out with the option tyre, really because we just weren't sure of it.

"When he went half a second quicker than anyone else, we took the view that this is quite good! Again Fernando is a tremendously experienced driver on these occasions, because he then on the radio calmly said 'I know you're going to ask me what I think, but in fact I don't know'. We then put on a prime for Q2, and he was quicker still!"

Inevitably everyone used the option medium tyre in Q3. It was a great qualifying session, and Lewis Hamilton of course fulfilled the expectations of thousands of fans with a brilliant pole lap. Not for the first time this year, Alonso had been quicker throughout the day, only to lose out when it really mattered.

After Lewis was bumped down to second and the dirty side of the track at Magny-Cours, with disastrous results, there was a concerted effort to get a McLaren on pole at all costs - as Ron Dennis said in France, the front row has become more important than ever this year.

The race was to reveal that after several weekends of giving the driver an equal chance with matching fuel loads, McLaren had this split the drivers. Fernando would eventually stop four laps later than his teammate. That was worth up to 0.3 seconds, and in qualifying Fernando ended up 0.15 seconds behind Lewis - although one of those four laps might have been generated by his proven ability to save fuel, so their weights might actually have been a little closer together in qualifying.

Lewis was also a couple of laps lighter than Kimi Raikkonen, and those 0.15 seconds were reflected by the 0.102 advantage he had over the Finn, who had also made an expensive mistake on his quick lap.

So Lewis had a weight advantage over his main rivals, but the team were also well aware that he was not entirely happy with the balance of the car and had a different set-up at the rear compared with Alonso. Given the commitment required to go fast at Silverstone, McLaren had no doubts that it was a great lap.

"The astounding thing this weekend is how he performed in qualifying," said Whitmarsh. "In the first two bouts of qualifying it was very clear that Fernando was very strong by comparison to Lewis, but a sign of a great, great driver is that when it counts, they can push forward, and I think he did an astounding lap given where he had been at that point in the weekend.

"He hasn't been as comfortable with the balance of the car as we would have liked him, or he would have liked, to have been."

The race: Tortoise and the hare

The tyre question continued into the race. Unusually, McLaren and Ferrari made different choices. All the top runners had saved a set of the mediums, and Ferrari chose to put them on at the start. The McLarens went for new hard tyres.

As at some of the earlier races this year, it seemed that those years of Bridgestone experience had helped Ferrari make full use of the softer tyre while their main rivals were not comfortable.

"What we saw in free practice was we were a lot quicker on the option," said Felipe Massa's race engineer Rob Smedley.

"And we didn't really have any problems. We knew that the track was a little bit slower than the test, and we took a calculated risk, and we thought that McLaren would probably go on the prime, so we thought OK, let's go for the option and see if we can get a little bit of performance on them."

In contrast, the view at McLaren was that the option was the less favoured tyre, as Whitmarsh explained: "There is an assumption, and I say that because I don't think that there's the data to support it, that the option would be the better tyre to start on in terms of getting it up to temperature. In terms of the first few corners, you're going to get it turned on quicker."

The complexion of the race changed at the start, when Felipe Massa stalled on the grid. The reason remained unknown as of Sunday night, but the driver was exonerated.

"His procedure was perfect, he did absolutely nothing wrong," said Smedley. "He did absolutely the standard procedure, and then he just informed us on the radio that he had a problem and the engine had stopped. We don't know where it's come from, whether it's engine or electronics. We've no idea."

A team spokesman has since told autosport.com that the cause had been traced to a "combustion problem", which has to be marked down as a reliability glitch, and a very expensive one at that.

It also robbed us of a key player. Frustratingly, at nearly every race this year. one of the big four names has been out of the picture from the early stages, and we await a race where all four are in contention for the duration.

Hamilton made full use of his pole to hold off Raikkonen into Copse, although it took a little ducking and diving to keep him behind. However, it didn't take long for us to realise that this was going to be a tough one for the Briton, as Kimi stayed glued to the back of the McLaren rear wing.

Indeed on lap 14 he was close enough to have a cheeky look down the inside at Priory, where I was watching. It didn't work and he lost a little bit of ground, but his chance to take the lead came on lap 16, when Hamilton came into the pits - by coincidence the same lap on which both McLarens stopped on in France.

It was then of course that things began to go awry for Lewis, and he made what I guess we can classify as the first race mistake of his rookie year. He wasn't the first driver to attempt to leave the pits prematurely when distracted by a lollipop man turning the board over, but he did a rather better job of checking himself that Christijan Albers had the week before.

"Eagerness," said Whitmarsh. "Lewis is an uncomplicated fellow. At that point he was quite keen to get back out into the fray, he crept forward a couple of times on the clutch, and it made it quite hard for the crew. I think the crew did a great job really to hang on in there in that situation. The refuelling apparatus is difficult enough to unplug from a car when you're pulling it normal to the plane of the car, but they managed to get it off, so no harm done."

However, precious fractions slipped away just as Raikkonen had clean air and was banging in a couple of clean laps. On lap 17, the only complete lap he ran after the Hamilton stop, the Finn did a 1:20.638 - a full second faster than anything he'd done when behind the McLaren. In contrast, the heavy Lewis lost pace when he returned to the track, still equipped with the harder prime tyre.

Kimi's pitstop went without any problems. Intriguingly, he spent 26.975 seconds in the pitlane, while for Hamilton the figure was 26.140 seconds - including the mishap. The difference was that Hamilton had taken on fuel to run 20 more laps, and aware that they now had the advantage, Ferrari fuelled Kimi to run 25 laps. He took on another set of the preferred medium tyre, although now the team only had scrubbed qualifying sets left.

Ferrari's satisfaction at getting Kimi ahead of Lewis was short-lived, because Alonso was still going. He did two further laps before coming in on lap 20, and again the value of those empty tank laps was shown as he snuck ahead of the Ferrari man to become the third leader of the race. To ensure he did it, however, the team had short fuelled him for just 17 laps. The team also chose to use this short stint for the compulsory run on the medium tyre.

It didn't really work out, and despite being lighter, Alonso could not pull out enough of an advantage, and as ever traffic didn't help his progress. The main problem was that the medium tyre was not ideal.

"We could have used it there, we could have used it at the end of the race," said Whitmarsh. "It was during that critical stage we took a decision, we took a gamble. It was a much more teasing decision that we've had in other races."

Meanwhile Hamilton had stayed on the harder tyre for the middle stint, and he started to go backwards: "With the set-up he was giving the rear tyres a reasonably hard time and it was a great job on his part to be able to live with that through the weekend."

Despite running with a heavier fuel load that was in effect worth 0.4-0.5 seconds a lap, Raikkonen stayed in touch with Alonso. For much of the time the margin was a little over four seconds, although it went up to 5.5 seconds on the lap before Fernando came in, because Kimi had to pass David Coulthard.

And then the Ferrari man reaped the benefits of that extra fuel when he had a mammoth six laps on near empty tanks with which to jump Alonso, and he did with ease. His last three laps were especially quick, and of course he didn't have to take on as much fuel as Fernando had, so he was stationary for less time. Traffic didn't help the Spaniard's cause, but it was always going to be difficult.

"This race was a race to that second pit stop," said Whitmarsh. "And by that stage Kimi had a 2.5-second gap, and after that it was very difficult to change the race outcome."

Raikkonen had made his compulsory move to the hard tyre, but any loss of performance for the remaining 16 laps was incidental, because he was in front and there was nothing Alonso could do about it.

"The mediums were absolutely fine to be honest," said Smedley. "They gave you a little bit less understeer in the first couple of laps, because you don't have graining, and they're absolutely fine."

The gap drifted out to as much as 7.7 seconds at one point, before closing up right at the end when Kimi began to coast. Not surprisingly, Raikkonen had a big grin on his face on the podium, one that even the sight of the rather tacky trophy could not remove.

In that third stint Hamilton disappeared off the radar to finish 39 seconds down on the winner, but all that mattered was another helping of points.

"In the last stint there wasn't great pressure," said Whitmarsh. "The fact is with modern F1 racing if you're in the first weekend of a two-race weekend then if you're not under threat and you're not about to threaten anyone, you don't give your engine a hard time.

"I would imagine the first three drivers in this race were mindful of that and they were conserving their engines. I don't think Lewis was struggling, I think he was taking a cautious view. He wasn't about to challenge for second place and he wasn't about to be challenged for his position."

The fourth man

So for the second race running, Raikkonen slipped into the lead of a Grand Prix by pitting later than the guy ahead at the final stops. He hasn't done much wrong these last two races, but it would be foolish to ignore the Massa factor.

Felipe was caught out by heavy traffic in France, and thanks to that stall at the start, he never had a chance at Silverstone. He made the most of a super quick car and his own commitment however, and that charge up to fifth - stopped only by a determined Robert Kubica - was quite an achievement. He could well have won both these races, and the points' differential to the McLaren drivers would look very different right now.

"It was a shame because the car was fantastic," he said as he walked from parc ferme. "The car was flying during the whole race. It was a shame to lose the engine at the start. I had a great car to fight for a good position and I had a great strategy as well. It's a shame because today was a great race, but it was supposed to be even better."

His engineer had no doubt that his man had done his best.

'He drove fucking fantastic, to be honest," said Smedley in his typical forthright way. "And you can quote me on that! He was passing car after car.

"When he came out of the second stop, he was obviously a lot heavier, he gave away a second on the fuel to Fisichella. But he then just couldn't get past, because that car was a lot closer to his car in terms of performance. But as you saw, in the first stint he passed car after car after car.

"Usually the first stint is all about keeping your position and sitting there until the pit stops, so it was nice, it gave us a little bit of excitement, I'm sure it gave him a little bit of excitement too!

"You can't not be frustrated having a car like that, and having to start from the back, because there was every possibility to win. Kimi was extremely quick. and I absolutely cannot take anything away from him, he did a fantastic job. But if we were there then there was every possibility to win."

Nine down, eight to go

It's impossible to predict how things will unfold in the coming weeks, as the pace of development is so rapid. The tyres may be fixed, in contrast to past years, but each circuit has its own combination of hard, soft, medium and supersoft, and that is also clearly playing as a big a role as any other factor.

"I think they've done well at high speed circuits," said Whitmarsh on Sunday. "Here, when you look at the final pitstops, there was a probably a 2.5 seconds gap we missed being out in front of them.

"Fernando had some traffic, maybe we shouldn't have put him on the option tyre, it was close to getting out in front of Kimi, we didn't quite achieve that... Overall, though, Ferrari had a stronger package here than us, and therefore the onus is on us to change that in the forthcoming races.

"That will either be the circuits coming towards us, or us developing the car. I don't think we can rely on the circuits always coming towards us, so we've got to make sure that we're developing our car at a quicker rate. It's a few tenths either way, there's an obvious sense at the moment that we're going to have a competition that's going to go all the way through to the end of the season. That's great for F1."

Smedley also expects things to see-saw in the coming weeks: "When you've got a championship so close, it completely tips. You go to some circuits, and it tips in your favour, because of the way that the circuits are, high-speed corners, low-speed corners, kerbs and all the rest of it.

"So at some circuits it tips in your favour, and at other circuits, it tips in theirs. That's why it's such a long championship. You need a very efficient car here, it's absolutely clear, and there's a lot of high speed corners.

"I think Nurburgring will be quite good for us - but I expect McLaren to be reasonably strong there too."

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- The Autosport.com Team

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