The Silver Service

As usual, I watched the Australian GP from the first corner, and there was no escaping the fact that it was not the most exciting race I've viewed from that spot over the last 12 seasons.

A safety car would have helped to liven things up - especially with the random element provided by the new rules - but for once we didn't get one at Albert Park. Nevertheless, it was an intriguing event with which to launch the post-Schumacher era and I would imagine that it came across reasonably well on TV, especially for British viewers who literally woke up to the fact that we have a genuine superstar on our hands.

Indeed, it says a lot about the impact of Lewis Hamilton (and especially the context provided by his intra-team battle with double world champion Fernando Alonso) that Kimi Raikkonen's first time out Ferrari victory was largely overshadowed by what was happening at McLaren. With due respect to Kimi and his team, I make no apologies for following that trend, because it really was the story of the weekend.

Lewis was on the case from the start, and especially in qualifying - under the most extreme pressure - he really showed what he was made of. Consider that he was fractionally faster than Alonso in Q1, and was again just in front after their first runs in Q2. Lewis never made a second attempt, but curiously, Fernando did.

"We didn't need to, and you could say it was a mistake," said Martin Whitmarsh. "When Fernando was at the time in second place, he went out and did another lap. During Q1 and Q2, you're conscious of making the cut. You go out on a prime tyre in the first run and decide not to run again. Then in Q2 there was an arguably over-cautious decision taken, which was to go and do a time again with Fernando, which used an extra set of tyres. With Lewis, we didn't."

That ensured Fernando set a quicker time and ended up ahead of Hamilton going into the top 10 session.

Did Alonso go out again for any practical reason other than that he was a little rattled by his novice teammate's pace? Of course, it may just be that McLaren operate on the basis that whoever is quickest in Q2 gets first choice of the optimum fuel strategy for final qualifying, and Fernando wanted to guarantee priority...

Anyway, he was to prove quicker in the crucial top 10 session. However, after the race it became apparent that Hamilton was carrying two laps' worth of extra fuel, and that pretty much accounted for the difference in lap time.

Melbourne may not be the most challenging, technical track, but the bottom line is that on his very first appearance Hamilton bettered or matched Alonso over one lap on equal terms, and even his biggest supporters within the camp hadn't expected that. Nobody, that is, except one man.

"He has believed since testing that he can outpace Fernando," said Lewis' father Anthony after the race. "I'm sure Lewis is going to go back and think OK, I've still got things to learn so I need to keep cool and keep calm, but he's quick, and he knows it."

A brilliant start

Things didn't quite go according to plan for Alonso at the start. Even allowing for his lighter fuel load and soft tyres, Heidfeld got off the line extremely well and came out of the first corner in second. Behind him Hamilton pulled off an amazing move to extricate himself from a blind alley on the inside, and switch to the outside, in so doing squeezing his teammate down to fourth.

"Fernando is very intelligent, very confident in his own ability," said Martin Whitmarsh. "He's a racing driver, and being overtaken by your teammate, who's come from two places back, at the first corner isn't what you want to happen.

"Nick was light and had the option tyre, but he also had good traction off the line. That created a situation, and Lewis was very quick thinking and decided, 'How do I respond to this?'

"He responded by going to his left and going out round the outside, by the time the situation evolved - and I don't think he got anything wrong - Fernando was boxed going into that corner, and that allowed Lewis to come by. He would, at the time, not have been delighted by that..."

It was game over as far as taking the battle to Kimi was concerned, and that was a great shame. BMW might have improved, but even with his lighter fuel load Nick was holding up the McLarens. It didn't look that way because they weren't exactly breathing down his neck, but such is the way of modern F1 and passing so hard in Melbourne that Lewis and Fernando were effectively obliged to hang back, bide their time and wait for the BMW to stop. Back in the McLaren pit, there was some serious frustration.

"I think from an outcome of the race perspective, our race was very much damaged by the Heidfeld strategy, which we just didn't understand," said Ron Dennis. "Twelve laps (it was actually the end of lap 14 when he came in) as the opening part of the race was not the way to go. Once we were boxed in we just lost touch with Kimi.

"All the time you're behind Heidfeld you're struggling in dirty air, and the cars are so sensitive to that. Unless you've got a good one-and-a-half-second advantage you are not going to be able to take them on, or you have to wait for the tyre situation to deteriorate and then attack. We didn't have to wait too long, because Heidfeld was in the pits in 12 laps. Twelve laps versus 22, he was carrying 10 laps less fuel. That's well over a second a lap."

By the time Heidfeld came in on lap 14, Hamilton was 14.4s down on the leader and Alonso was a further 1.6s behind. Only a recurrence of Massa's qualifying gearbox failure could halt Kimi now, but the McLaren fight was just getting interesting, and we eagerly awaited the first stops.

Fernando had cut the gap to a second when he came in at the end of lap 21, and Lewis followed a lap later. Fernando's in and out laps were quicker - this stuff is still new to Hamilton but traffic may also have played a part - but that single extra lap with a light car was enough to ensure he stayed ahead.

Fernando's Mobil Economy Run

There's a little more to that first stop sequence than meets the eye. Intriguingly, Fernando was supposed to stop two laps ahead of Lewis, when traditionally the difference between teammates has been one. The new safety car rules, and the penalty inherent in being caught out when you are about to refuel, caused the team to spread the risk.

"We had already agreed that we would keep them apart," said Whitmarsh. "You don't ordinarily want the drivers on the same lap and in fact with the new safety car regulations having them on successive laps is not a good thing. So we wanted them apart by a couple of laps.

"If you had your cars on broadly the same strategy - i.e. separated by one lap - which often teams did in the past, you would suffer. Let's say you have one on lap 14 and one on lap 15, if on lap 13 the safety car comes out, you then get both of your cars penalised, and it's game over.

"I find that not very palatable. I never liked safety cars because they always randomise the race. Maybe they're good for the show, but I'm not a huge fan of the new regulations personally. Maybe I just react badly to change!"

By having Massa do one stop from the back of the grid Ferrari automatically kept its options open, and the same consideration also played a part in BMW having Heidfeld come in well ahead of Kubica (a short early stint also allowed Nick to have his compulsory run on the unfavoured soft tyres early).

Anyway, as far as McLaren was concerned the race fuel decision was made on the assumption that Fernando would be in front of Lewis from the start. Now that he was behind, the Spaniard knew that he would have very little chance to reverse the situation at the first stops.

He did his best to improve his chances by cutting the fuel deficit from two laps to one by dint of some economical driving and fuel mode knob twiddling - adding that one lap to his original 20 equated to a 5 percent gain.

"Lewis was going to be a couple of laps later," said Whitmarsh. "But we were able to make a bit of fuel on Fernando's car. It's a combination of the driver and the engineers working together.

"Fernando is very intelligent, very confident in his own ability. He knows how long F1 races are, he knows how you win F1 races, and sometimes you've got to have the intelligence to bide your time, conserve tyres, conserve fuel, and do what you have to do. Fernando's got that strength. But Lewis has demonstrated that he's got all those attributes, and he's well able to run his race in a super intelligent way as well."

Fernando stopped on lap 21 only one lap ahead of his teammate, still not enough to get him in front, but worth a try. However, the race was effectively decided by what went in the cars at those stops. Fernando took enough to get himself to lap 45 (with some more economy driving helping out), while Lewis could go only to lap 43. As usual, the last man in had the advantage, and Fernando easily jumped ahead at the second and final stops.

In effect McLaren had decided which of the two drivers was going to finish second, assuming no mistakes by either of them, and Fernando got the nod. It could be argued that this was a 'correction' that made up for Lewis unexpectedly getting ahead at the start, but Dennis insisted that the stops panned out for Alonso simply because they had always been planned that way

"Our strategy was pre-set, we didn't vary from it," he said. "The three or four laps covering the last stops, it was a little like Michael at Silverstone last year, where he was on the tail of Kimi, then the pit stops took place, and he was something like four seconds ahead. Fernando just pushed very aggressively. He conserved his tyres, knew he had a fuel distance advantage and used it to overtake his teammate.

"You've just got to have a realistic approach. You're not going to close that gap (to Raikkonen) and therefore you're then into engine and tyre conservation. Fernando was sat patiently behind Lewis, dropping back occasionally to ensure that the engine stayed cool. And really the outcome was as good as we could have expected given the circumstances."

Whitmarsh added: "What happens as the race progresses is that you can tune by getting an opinion on what the pace is. You can lean off, and whatever. So we already had an outlined strategy. The race didn't pan out that much differently. We hoped to have got Heidfeld and been closer to Kimi, but we didn't really change that, it was how we wanted to run the race."

Hamilton dropped away from Alonso in the latter part of the race, but he had a huge margin on Heidfeld and nothing to gain by staying right behind Alonso, especially as everyone now has to take their engines to hot and humid Malaysia.

"All three of the lead drivers were leaning off there and taking it easy on their engines, which is sad but true in F1 these days," said Whitmarsh. "After the second stop you start thinking about the next race, which personally isn't something that I enjoy, but that's how it is. Thereafter it was a question of how easy they wanted to be."

There was another reason why Lewis lost a bit of performance relative to Fernando. He had a spare new set of soft tyres left after qualifying, whereas Alonso had used up all of his because of that extra run he'd made in Q2.

So for the last stints, Hamilton took his remaining new set, and Fernando had no choice but the take a set that he'd used on Saturday. As it happened, those scrubbed tyres proved more consistent, so Fernando had an easier final stint. All part of the learning curve for team and drivers as they get used to the Bridgestones.

Whitmarsh explained: "They both had a bit of graining, but the slight difference was that Lewis had a new set of options, because of how qualifying panned out, and it would almost certainly have been better if they had been cured and scrubbed beforehand."

McLaren might not have won the race, but the team leads the constructors' championship, and the driver combination has more than lived up to the promise it showed on paper.

"The unseen things are really that we didn't have a thing go wrong on either car throughout the whole weekend," said Dennis. "That bodes well for our campaign. We have so many things that we are putting in the system to increase the pace of the car, we're at a point now where we have a stable platform and an enormous amount of work to do in Malaysia (testing). Hopefully we will emerge from Malaysia with an advantage, into the Malaysian race, so the outcome is pretty good.

"Our efforts are intense, and we rarely go to a Grand Prix with a car that's not quicker than the previous event. Now the motivation in the team is so intense. The messages coming from the drivers in cool down laps in qualifying and slow down laps after the race, the guys are motivational. They are appreciative of the effort of the team. It just really gets everybody in a different frame of mind, and it's very refreshing.

"We have a clear understanding of what we need to improve and how we can improve the performance, and we'll see how we go in Malaysia and Bahrain."

Even with the evidence of the first race to hand, Ron didn't want to make a judgement on how the team stands vis a vis Ferrari.

"It's just too early to know where we are. Clearly they have an advantage, but the progress or lack of progress of Massa through the field just shows you how difficult it is to move forward. You need such a monster advantage. If you find yourself in a position where you are 14-15 seconds behind, you have to say to yourself, 'Is there any realistic prospect of catching him?' Then you think save the engine, save the tyres, and come home a safe second and third."

A last word on Ferrari

The silver cars may well have been in cautious mode, but not too many people believed that Kimi was going flat out on Sunday, especially as he had gearbox conservation very much in mind.

Given that he didn't have a working radio, these days the equivalent of racing with one hand tied behind your back, it was a faultless performance from the Finn. He did have one embarrassing grass-cutting moment when he allowed his mind to wander - something that his illustrious predecessor was not averse to when on cruise control.

From the outside it appeared that he had cannily let Massa push the envelope in testing and waited until it mattered before stepping up a gear. Of course, Felipe's weekend was ruined by that gearbox problem, and next time out could be a different story.

But Raikkonen already has that crucial momentum, and has staked his claim as the team's title contender - which is of course what he and Jean Todt expected him to be when he first signed up, long before Massa emerged as a 2006 race winner and testing pacesetter.

Full marks too to Luca Baldisierri, for many years Ross Brawn's number two strategy guy, and now with the full weight of responsibility on his shoulders. First time out he took the bold step of putting the engine-penalised Massa on a one-stopper with the soft tyres - which so many were cautious about using - on from the start.

Jean Todt took a lot of persuading that that was the way to go, but 'Baldo' correctly sussed that Felipe would spend the early laps in traffic, and thus the soft tyres wouldn't be particularly stressed.

Using them first meant there would also always be the option of coming in early and taking the mediums if there was a problem, but the back-up plan wasn't needed, and in any case the boys were utterly confident that the soft tyre would be just fine. A clear indication, if one was needed, that Ferrari is completely at one with the 2007 Bridgestones.

By the way, Massa had that engine change penalty as a result of the gearbox problem that ruined his qualifying session, Ferrari engine boss Gilles Simon noting that the V8 had been subject to 'overrevs'. One assumes of course that it didn't go beyond 19,000rpm....

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- The Autosport.com Team

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