The Race of Champions

A season is about 18 races, but the Turkish Grand Prix could prove to be the decisive factor in the outcome of the 2006 title battle.

When Michael Schumacher's initial second place became third behind rival Fernando Alonso, the German in effect lost four rather than just two points, because that's the real swing represented by their change of position. And at this stage of the season, that is a very significant margin.

At the start of the weekend it looked as though Ferrari would have a massive advantage over Renault. The Bridgestone tyres seemed to be spot-on, and Renault's choice of the softer Michelin didn't pay off. Taking a good look at how other Michelin runners performed - there is a genuine pooling of knowledge between the four works teams - Renault were confident that the harder tyre would be a good alternative. Despite apparently wasting a day by focusing on the harder tyre, Renault soon caught up.

"We lost a little bit on Friday," admitted Renault's director of engineering Pat Symonds, "But we had a really good day on Saturday. With just a couple of changes it worked really well, so we didn't lose as much as we might have done."

Nevertheless, there was no way that Renault could match Ferrari's one-lap pace, and the advantage was such that it seemed that the red cars could annex the front row and still have a fuel load to run further in the race.

Except thanks to the safety car, we never saw how the fuel mileage would have unfolded, and the Ferraris didn't line up in their expected order.

Schumacher simply got it wrong in qualifying, making a big mistake on his first set of new tyres and a slightly less serious one on his second, from which he still managed to recover second place. Stuck on the dirty side of the grid, and with both Renaults behind him, he was always going to have an exciting first corner.

Pole-sitter Felipe Massa couldn't exactly move over and say 'After you', as the Renaults were bound to be right there, and he was probably quite surprised at how close Schumacher got to him, the German having successfully edged out the blue and yellow cars.

Ferrari had been prepared for Michael to lose a place to Alonso off the line, so to keep him in front was a real bonus. Even better, both 248 F1s pulled away from the Spaniard with apparent ease.

It was something of a surprise to see Schumacher drop behind his teammate, even allowing for the likely difference in fuel loads. But there's no doubt that the Ferraris would have swapped positions at or around the first stops.

The gap had opened up to 3.6 seconds by lap 7, but then Michael began to reel his teammate in, slowly but surely. Over successive laps, it came down to 3.4 seconds, 3.2, 2.8, 2.5, 2.2 and then on, what turned out to be an unlucky 13, 1.9 seconds. Massa's pitstop was fast approaching, and Schumacher's was to follow it.

All he had to do was have Massa in his sights and they would neatly change positions. It worked perfectly at the first stop at Indianapolis, after all, although funnily enough Schumacher stopped first on that occasion. There was almost a place change too at Hockenheim, although Massa dutifully let Michael by and slipped behind.

Things looked pretty good at this stage for Ferrari, but there was one thing that could upset the apple cart. On the grid, I bumped into Ferrari's strategy guru Luca Baldisserri, Ross Brawn's main ideas man. Pointing at the two Renaults I said that all they needed was a safety car to screw everything up for Ferrari. Well aware of that possibility, he smiled.

My thinking was that with Istanbul's wide run-off areas we might see a car stranded far away from the marshals, and that's more or less what happened, although I thought a collision would be the more likely trigger.

Renault's stroke of luck

Everything changed when Tonio Liuzzi spun at the first corner. It was incidentally a result not of driver error, but a traction control glitch that gave him little chance of recovery. The system gremlin also contrived to stall the car even before he had stopped moving.

Anyway, the end result was that he was stuck pretty much on the racing line between the first and second turns, and without doubt, it was a hazardous location. Up in race control, Charlie Whiting and Herbie Blash had heard reports of debris at Turns 4, 8 and 11 - passed on to them from the drivers via the teams - and they were thus perhaps more open to the use of the safety car than they might otherwise have been.

They duly called for its deployment. Just as Bernd Maylander swept out of the pitlane and on to the track, the marshals were already pushing the stranded car out of harm's way. Within a matter of seconds, it was safely tucked away behind the barriers. So now we had a safety car looking for the leader and the incident already cleared up.

From where I was standing, on the inside of Turn 1, it certainly looked a little unnecessary, but to be fair the SC boards went out a few seconds before the Mercedes went past me, and that time was just enough to give the marshals tackling the Toro Rosso a little extra protection from oncoming cars.

My first thought was that the safety car deployment would at least shut up those critics who complain that the FIA favours Ferrari and/or a closer title fight, because this time the Scuderia was obviously going to be the big loser. Funnily enough, after the race, one Renault insider pointed to a supposed delay in putting the Mercedes out as further evidence that said bias does indeed exist. There's no pleasing some people...

For anyone who had qualified at the sharp end of the top 10, and who had started with a compromised fuel load, a stop at this point in the race was a no-brainer. And that's where it became difficult for Ferrari.

In such circumstances, a stacked double stop is the only solution, but the team were in the unexpected position of having the cars the 'wrong' way round. Alonso was a useful 10.7 seconds behind Schumacher at the end of lap 13, but it was obvious to the team that there still was not going to be enough time to get both cars in and out of the pits before Alonso jumped the German.

After the race, many people asked the question why the cars hadn't traded position as they raced back to the pits. Well, it's pretty clear that overtaking isn't allowed under the safety car.

But once the cars arrived at the pit there was nothing to stop the team leaving Massa to one side, servicing Michael, and then pushing the Brazilian into the pit box. He would obviously have dropped to third, but Jenson Button was another six seconds behind Alonso, so even allowing for a bit of chaos and confusion, Felipe wouldn't have dropped back behind the Honda.

It was would have been a perfectly legitimate trick to pull, and in the tight circumstances of the championship, I think many people would have understood why they did it. Some may even have cheered it as a strategic masterstroke. But a lot of other folk would not have been very sympathetic.

What goes around...

Since the infamous lead swap in Austria in 2002, Ferrari have been paranoid about being seen to employ obvious gamesmanship to help Michael's cause. In Hungary, there was a clear opportunity to 'retire' Massa just after Schumacher's demise three laps from home, in effect giving an extra point to the title chaser. Of course, parking a healthy car is frowned upon, as it has to be assumed you are trying to earn a new engine for the next race, so that could have got a bit messy. But it could have been done.

On that occasion Ferrari did the decent thing, and they did the same in Turkey by making Schumacher wait and not compromising Massa's race. Would Renault or McLaren have done the same in identical circumstances, with every point worth so much - and perhaps fewer concerns about public opinion to worry about? We'll never know.

Ferrari are still paying the price for their short-sighted actions at the A1-Ring. What upset everyone most at the time was that the race was in May, Schumacher already had a huge championship lead, and gifting him two extra points at the expense of Rubens Barrichello seemed so unnecessary. Strange to say it, but a silly decision taken four years ago could yet cost Michael the 2006 title.

Ferrari's technical director Ross Brawn admitted that there wasn't much else the team could do: "You're not allowed to overtake under the safety car, and I think swapping cars in the pitlane might not have been too popular. So I don't think there was, no."

At his regular post-race press gathering, team principal Jean Todt pointed out that had the team done something really controversial, he might have had to face five times as many questioners...

As the man with the ultimate say in such circumstances, Todt may well have thought twice about putting Massa in the sort of situation he was always happy to put Eddie Irvine and Barrichello in. He has a special relationship with Felipe, like that of a second father, and his son is not just the Brazilian's manager, but one of his best mates.

There was also no denying that Massa was ahead of his senior teammate on pure performance, and to deprive him of his hard-earned advantage in such a blatant manner might not have been seen as acceptable this time around.

The other angle to the story was that Ferrari had every reason to expect that Schumacher could recover his second place fair and square. In just 13 laps he had pulled 10 seconds clear of Alonso.

The team naturally assumed that once the safety car went away, the German would have had the pace to sit on Alonso's tail, and possibly even find a way past. If he couldn't do it on the track, he would do it by stopping later and putting in some suitably quick laps. That still might have been tight, depending on Fernando's pace after taking on fuel, but it should have worked.

In other words, at the time leaving Massa in front in the pits was not the disaster it appeared to be later on.

Michael drops the (Turn 8) ball

What Ferrari didn't factor in of course was Schumacher's unexpected loss of form on his second set of tyres. On the first flying lap after the safety car, the Ferrari driver lost a full second to Alonso - some of that might have been down to the need to get past the lapped Nick Heidfeld - and from then on the Renault driver edged away by 0.3 seconds there, 0.2 seconds there. It soon added up to a significant margin, and as ever tyres were the decisive factor.

"They blistered, but I'm not sure when," said Brawn after the race. "It just didn't feel that great on the second set. We don't know when that happened. When he needed to push, obviously the pace wasn't there."

It wasn't just that Schumacher had problems, but Alonso had simply got quicker, as he noted after the race: "I think the first set of tyres I put on the car had a little bit of front graining and I was a bit worried for the next stints, but I think I started with new tyres and that was the problem. Then, in the stints, in the pitstops, with scrubbed tyres, it was much more consistent."

After a while the gap stabilised, and Schumacher lost just the odd tenth, but in order to match Alonso's times, the Ferrari ace was really on the limit. On lap 28 he ran wide at Turn 8. Interestingly, that lap was also the fastest Alonso had done up to that point, and faster than his previous lap by nearly half a second. Was Schumacher trying just a little bit too hard to maintain the gap to the car he still had in his sights?

"The second set of tyres for some reason blistered," said Brawn, "So Michael was struggling with them. If you look at the pace of Felipe in that middle part of the race, Michael wasn't able to hold the pace. He was trying to push and he went off in Turn 8."

On that fateful lap 28, the gap increased from 3.6 seconds to 8.3 seconds, a differential that must have been extremely demoralising for Schumacher. Nevertheless, he was soon lapping even quicker than before, but he was always just fractions slower than his rival. The tide turned on lap 34, when he began to consistently chip away at Alonso's advantage before the Spaniard came in for his pitstop on lap 39.

Schumacher still had another four full laps of fuel on board, and he did his very best to negate Alonso's advantage. But there was never going to be enough time.

"I think he was quicker, but you've got to be a lot quicker to do anything," said Brawn. "We obviously went longer than Fernando with the fuel, so we were hoping that Michael would get a bit of a window in the second stint.

"We didn't know how much longer, but we hoped, and he did, but unfortunately the tyres had blistered and there was nothing left to push on, so he wasn't able to take advantage of that little gap, and he had his mistake at Turn 8. So it was a combination of everything."

As he charged out of the pits on lap 43, Schumacher could see Alonso rounding the first corner. You could sense the frustration in the cockpit. He had a huge wobble in the tightening pit exit, which he somehow managed to catch. Just as well, as a trip over the white line would have been very embarrassing...

It was so, so close. Next time round we got the real picture - Schumacher was just a second behind Alonso, with 13 (there's that number again) laps to go. After the race, someone asked Michael if his Turn 8 moment had cost him second place, and he didn't duck the issue: "I think you can say that if you want to, yeah."

That last part of the race was gripping, as the gap ebbed and flowed and Alonso ensured that the door remained firmly shut. All the while he was playing with the rev limit, using a little more power as and when he needed to. It was a brilliant defensive performance from a man with an ever so slightly slower package, and there was little Schumacher could do.

A passing move, even a botched one, would have been great entertainment. But Schumacher had more to risk than Alonso, and just as at Imola last year - when the German really had nothing to lose and still didn't look like getting past - he almost seemed to be a little out-psyched by the Spaniard.

Symonds regarded this particular second place as a win, and in the sense that Alonso made that two-point gain over his rival, it was.

We've also had two races in a row where the title contenders have run together on the track, and that really is good news. In recent times, even in the years when we've had close title battles, it's been rare to see the main guys at each other's throats. Let's hope we get more of the same over the next four races.

Brawn certainly didn't feel that Schumacher's mistake was a sign that the pressure is getting to him: "I think he was pushing hard with a difficult car. We know he's a great driver, and I think there are still lots of opportunities for the rest of the year.

"The encouraging thing is that we've got a great car, great tyres, and Felipe can win races. It's a good chance to take points off Fernando. I think because of the car advantage we have, it's still very open. It's a fabulous result for Felipe, and a great result for the constructors' [championship]."

It was a shame that the battle for second took attention away from Massa's superb victory. What better way to win your first race than taking pole and heading home a pair of world champions?

After the flag, I bumped into Todt as he headed down to the podium. "You don't need Kimi now," I joked. He didn't really react. Wonder if the same thought had already occurred to him...

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- The Autosport.com Team

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