Massa gets right to the point

Pole, fastest lap and his second win on the trot - Ferrari star Felipe Massa didn't mess around in Spain. By MARK HUGHES

There was a moment in the final seconds of qualifying when Felipe Massa wasn't in charge of his own destiny last weekend, when team-mate Kimi Raikkonen looked as if he might have snatched pole despite a heavier fuel load.

But even that was probably an illusion and the fact Kimi's final few corners were lost to oversteer was probably due to how hard he'd pushed the tyres to get the super-quick sector one and two times.

The reality was Massa bent the weekend to his will, from the stunning sector three time that snatched pole from Alonso's McLaren to the way he was prepared to bang wheels with the world champion into the first corner.

It was almost inevitable that Alonso - the man who has imposed his will on race weekends for the last two years - came off worse in that split second, because Fernando had been chasing rather than shaping events since the moment the cars began running on Friday. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that much of Alonso's choices through the weekend were driven by a determination verging on desperation to beat his team-mate.

And that beating the Ferraris would have been merely a bonus. If it wasn't for Lewis Hamilton's pressure - cumulative since the moment winter testing began, ramped up when the season started but yet more intense last weekend - Alonso might not have tried an optimistic short-fuel strategy, gambling it would net him pole.

When that gamble failed he might then not have headed into the first turn with a zero-compromise plan to pass Massa - a plan that backfired and effectively ensured Massa's victory. The same qualities that made Alonso so formidable when he had the pace to impose his will worked against him last weekend when he didn't quite. And that's all it hung on.

Ferrari and McLaren each reckoned they had found between 0.2 and 0.3 seconds of lap time since Bahrain. But that still left them pretty evenly matched. The fuel corrected qualifying showed only 0.1sec between their four drivers. In the race Ferrari's advantage looked bigger, but that seemed more to do with the team's better calls on tyres.

Just as at Bahrain, McLaren made errors in judging the optimum tyre pressures - and Hamilton suffered excessive oversteer in the second stint as a result. Given how close it all was between the four - and how much McLaren wants to reassure Alonso that it's there to support him, to allay his fears that Hamilton may be the favoured son - McLaren gave Fernando the choice of strategy. He opted to run light, four laps lighter than Hamilton.

"Fernando's a driver who likes to fight at the front," said team COO Martin Whitmarsh, "and so that's what we let him do." Just as McLaren let him lead the test effort the previous week and didn't invite Hamilton. If Alonso is to win this championship, he needs to establish himself as the team leader.

But McLaren can hardly slow Hamilton down - and when he stepped into the revised car for the first time on Friday morning and lapped 0.35sec faster than Alonso, so the game began anew. Fernando realised he hadn't made the breakthrough he sought, that Lewis was still going to be giving him a seriously hard time. That seemed to set the tone of intensity for Alonso's weekend, seemed to determine that Hamilton, even more than Ferrari, became his target.

When a downcast Alonso said: "I have to beat them all to be champion, but Lewis is the one who worries me least because he is my team-mate and we are here to help each other and I worry more about the Ferrari pace than if Lewis is two points ahead of me," you sensed that he meant quite the reverse.

So as Massa took off from pole, Alonso was determined to pass at the first corner - even if it meant crashing in the attempt. This was not the cool calculation of a guy playing the long game and looking to maximise his points haul over a season. The short- game imperative of not being beaten by Hamilton took precedence over that. He had to pass Massa.

Because if Hamilton could just stay vaguely in touch, his longer opening stint would ensure he'd beat Alonso. Felipe defended the inside line on the long run down to the first turn, Alonso put himself hard in the Ferrari's slipstream, ducked out around the outside at the critical moment and tried sitting it out around the outside of turn one.

Maybe he thought he'd bully Massa out of the way, maybe he had no thought in his head but to not yield no matter what. There came a split second when it became apparent that Massa wasn't up for being bullied - and there was still a chance for Alonso to duck out of the move. But he remained committed.

There was contact, Massa's front left hitting Alonso's right-hand sidepod, and the McLaren took to the gravel, slightly damaging its floor as it did so. We'd just witnessed one of those significant sporting moments that tells you everything about a competitor's state of mind.

It wasn't hubris, but a logic driven by competitive desperation, backed up by frightening commitment. It might just also have been the first pressure crack of the four title contenders.

Later he half-heartedly tried to shift culpability onto Massa. "If you look at my car, my sidepod at the rear has tyre marks on it, showing who arrived first into the corner. I was more than half a car ahead."

Massa, quite rightly, was having none of it: "I don't really understand his point. I'm always the first to admit when I make a mistake, but don't tell me today that I made a mistake. Come on, this is racing. This is F1 and this is the first corner."

Although Alonso quickly steered it back on course, Hamilton - who had got a great start and out-jinked Raikkonen down to turn one - and Kimi flashed by. The implications weren't lost on Alonso: "So now I was in fourth place and running shorter on fuel than the others, so I knew the race was now very complicated for me."

With the adrenaline clearly flowing freely, he tried putting a move on Raikkonen going into turn 10, but Kimi was having none of it. Massa completed the first lap already 1.6sec clear of the heavier car of Hamilton. "I was surprised how easily I pulled away from him," said Felipe. "I knew he was running more fuel but I was pulling away sometimes by 0.5sec per lap."

This was around 0.2sec more than accounted for by their respective fuel loads. By the time Massa made his first stop at the end of lap 19, he'd pulled out almost 10sec on the McLaren. "I knew I'd claw some of that back by running longer," said Lewis, "but it was only going to be around 4sec." Which is exactly how it panned out.

Raikkonen's raw pace was never revealed. He was adamant he could have gone quicker than Hamilton despite a similar fuel weight, but even the slower entry onto the pit straight didn't create any additional Barcelona passing spots and he simply had to track the McLaren.

Kimi reverted to the patented 'wait until the stops' tactic but never got that far because on the ninth lap a wiring fault in the Ferrari's alternator left him with only just enough spark to crawl back to the pits.

Stuck at Hamilton's pace he too would have been 10sec behind Massa by the first stops if he'd made it that far, which would have been a near-impossible deficit to wipe out before the second stops. Had he been able to fend off Hamilton down to the first turn, he might have been able to use his strategy advantage to beat Massa. It's possible the problem had been introduced to the car when the race chassis was stripped on Friday night and the parts transferred to the T-chassis (see Qualifying, p40).

Within a few minutes Kimi was in civvies and heading for home. Reminder: Raikkonen is the replacement for the driver who used to stay in debriefs until 8pm or later - especially when there'd been a problem. Even in guest mode on Sunday Michael Schumacher was still at the track long after Kimi left.

Alonso stopped on the same lap as Massa. McLaren decided on a double gamble in an attempt to bring him back into play. He was fuelled for a long middle stint of 29 laps - and they opted to put him on the hard tyre that was generally expected to be slower and which everyone else was delaying for a short final stint. "I wasn't going to go forward doing the same thing as the others," he said, "so we took a chance." It didn't work.

Over the course of the middle stint, Alonso dropped around 10sec to Hamilton - and even briefly made himself vulnerable to Robert Kubica's BMW. Once Alonso was on his soft tyres for the final stint and Kubica was obliged to run his hards, Fernando pulled himself out of danger to take the final podium place, well adrift of the man he'd been determined to beat.

Aided by Jarno Trulli's Toyota having to start from the pitlane due to a lack of fuel pressure on the grid (which caused an extra formation lap and eventually led to his retirement), Nick Heidfeld had been in touch with team-mate Kubica until it all went wrong at the first stop.

The lollypop man gave the go signal before the right-front wheelman had finished his task. Nick completed a lap at much reduced pace and pitted again, dropping him out of contention. He later retired with a gearbox failure.

Gearbox was the concern for David Coulthard too, during another strong showing in the Red Bull. The seamless facility was switched off quite early in the race to help with durability even as he was fending off Heikki Kovalainen's Renault for what would later become fifth.

DC did all that was needed to emerge from the first stops still ahead and was given some breathing space when the Renault had to stop just 10 laps later because a rig problem had caused not enough fuel to be delivered, obliging Heikki to do a three-stop race.

Three laps from the end Coulthard lost third gear and told the team over the radio that he was about to retire. Adrian Newey had already taken off his headphones as DC thought again and worked out how he might nurse it home and stay just clear of the closing Williams of Nico Rosberg and the recovering Kovalainen. Coulthard hung on for a great fifth place finish to give Red Bull its first points of the year.

Giancarlo Fisichella suffered the same rig failure as team-mate Kovalainen, though ran behind him throughout. Forced to make a late third stop, he had to surrender eighth to Takuma Sato who in a hard and error-free drive gave Super Aguri its first ever point.

Massa won by as small a margin as was comfortable - though he could easily have been 20sec ahead of Hamilton at the flag had he pushed. Lewis struggled with incorrect tyre pressures in his middle stint, though his fastest lap was just 0.19sec slower than the fastest of the race, set by Massa.

Afterwards they hugged and slapped each other like a couple of matey teenagers, each delighted with his accomplishment. One of them had just won his second consecutive grand prix and Lewis had just assumed a clear lead in the world championship. Alonso looked on unmoved, wanting just to get the ceremonies out of the way. For the first time the youngest world champion looked a little old.