Felipe Massa: Chasing Shadows

Not surprisingly, Lewis Hamilton's latest drama occupied most of the headlines after the French GP, which was perhaps a little unfair on Scuderia Ferrari.

Clearly the grid penalties for both McLaren drivers gave the Italian team some breathing space come the race, but nevertheless the one-two finish was an impressive performance.

We'll never know how hard Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen (who qualified heavy in an effort to make up for his penalty) would have pushed the Ferraris in a straight fight, but the likelihood is that the Italian team would have won anyway, such was the pace of the red cars on a track where it has been so successful in the past.

Incredibly, since the place was built in 1991 McLaren has won only once at Magny-Cours, with David Coulthard in 2000, while Massa's victory was the eighth at the venue for Maranello. Not bad when you consider how uncompetitive the team was over the first four or five years of that period ...

What might just have been different had the McLarens not been handicapped was the outcome of second place. After Kimi Raikkonen suffered his broken exhaust, Jarno Trulli was never in a position to put any real pressure on the Finn, but Hamilton or Kovalainen would certainly have been a lot closer in a straight fight, and we might have had something quite exciting to watch.

Just as the pitlane crash robbed us of a potential thriller in Canada, so those penalties denied us a great contest in France.

The sighs of relief in the Ferrari camp afterwards were all too apparent, and one look at the pictures of the heat blast damage on the back of Raikkonen's car proves just how fortunate he was to make it to the end. What's more, he did it without losing his second place.

The damaged exhaust and bodywork of Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari © LAT

The battle for the world championship is so tight that any mechanical problem is hugely expensive, and Ferrari has now had three, following the two engine failures in Australia. To that you can add Massa's costly fuel rig glitch in Canada.

Kovalainen has had a couple of problems - the broken wheel in Spain and electronic dramas on the grid in Monaco - but thus far Hamilton has pretty much had a trouble-free run, and any loss of points has been self inflicted.

When the exhaust first failed, the Ferrari guys did their best to minimise the damage, although options were limited.

"You can make certain adjustments to the engine," said Rob Smedley, Felipe Massa's race engineer. "Which we obviously also did with Felipe. And you can drive in a certain way to make sure that it doesn't happen on the other side, because we kind of understood why it happened. That's all you can do, as you're in the middle of a race."

So was there a genuine concern that it might also happen to Massa?

"Yes, I was worried about it happening to our car. I was very worried about it happening to our car! Certain boundary conditions of the exhaust, and certain stresses that we have in a race like, here and it breaks. So we were able to advise Felipe to drive in a slightly different way."

Smedley didn't elaborate, but he did say it was not affected by the heavy hit the cars take each lap at the chicane: "No it's nothing to do with the kerbs."

Ferrari isn't about to tell us how much power Raikkonen lost, but his times dropped by a second, so it was a not insignificant amount. But don't forget the guy is a world champion, and true greats can adapt to difficult circumstances, as we saw so often with Michael Schumacher in the past.

"It wasn't particularly easy for Kimi, and he had to get into a rhythm where he could drive the car as fast as it would go again, with the handicap that he had. And while he was doing that Felipe caught him, and eventually passed him. It was inevitable. He had a car that was a second a lap faster."

Although obviously concerned that he too might suffer a breakage, Massa must have had a smile on his face when he inherited the lead, and he didn't exactly hide his pleasure afterwards.

The same race last year was a crucial tipping point in the balance of power between the two Ferrari drivers. Massa took pole, as his custom, but Raikkonen sat behind him and used his later pit stop to ease into the lead. It was one of the rare occasions in 2007 when the two Ferraris were in a real competition on the track, and Massa was not exactly delighted with the outcome.

Felipe Massa bounces over the chicane in qualifying © LAT

Massa has been superb in qualifying this year, but in France he admitted that made a bit of a mess of things, and pushed a little too hard.

He wasn't too upset about lining up second, however, because he knew he had a couple of laps of fuel in hand. He probably went into the race thinking that he might be able to do to turn the tables on Kimi, but Raikkonen made sure there was no chance by pulling away in that first stint.

"In the end I think we made the right decision," says Smedley. "You hedge your bets by going a bit longer, and that's what we did in the end.

"I have to say we wouldn't have had the pace to beat Kimi. I have to be fair to the guy, because he was absolutely fantastic all weekend. So we wouldn't have had the pace to beat Kimi, but we would have had eight points in the bag, because the car as you saw was just incredible. It was just unbelievable. Felipe didn't have a great qualifying, but sometimes it goes like that."

Massa was at least happier in the middle of the race, although Kimi was always going to be out of reach.

"He was a lot more comfortable with the car in the second stint, after we made a few adjustments in the pit stop. The gap increased to 6.5s or something, then he just held it and then he brought him in a bit. It was a little bit up and down between the two of them, but it would have been very difficult to beat Kimi."

Smedley insists that we were witnessing a real race between the pair:

"Oh yeah. They were both flat out. I've read a couple of times in the past few years when other teams have won races and then say they weren't pushing from the middle of the race. That wasn't the case. You've got two drivers racing each other, and you certainly don't stop racing each other in the middle of the race ..."

It might have looked easy for Massa in the latter stages, but there were still concerns about his exhausts, and then the weather also became an issue in the closing laps as spots of rain fell.

"I was giving him the lap times of Kimi, I was giving him where we were, I was giving him what the risks were of the rain. The team was trying to give him all the information just not to push the car, because we knew there were potential problems."

So Massa took the ten points, while Kimi seemed more than relieved to get eight on a day when he suffered a mechanical failure. After failing to score in the past two races, it was a welcome relief.

The win moved Massa into the lead of the world championship for the first time in his career - indeed no Brazilian has led since Ayrton Senna was on top after Monaco 1993, an intriguing statistic.

Significantly, Massa has been quietly stacking up the points even when things have gone wrong. Sunday in Monaco wasn't great for him, but he still came home in third, and he fought back from that rig problem in Canada to claim fifth, and bagged four more priceless points.

That sort of damage limitation is how you win titles. But things are so tight now that the only way to really make sure is to deny the opposition the points by finishing in front of them as often as possible.

Felipe Massa battles for position with the Toyotas in Montreal © LAT

"We still got the points," says Smedley of that difficult Monaco/Montreal run. "That's really our approach to the championship. We don't have to win every race - we can't win every race - and just have to accept on the days that you can't that you have to pick up as many points as you can.

"We've had a great car, we had a great car in Monaco, but we weren't able to show it. Monaco was an Achilles Heel of ours in 2007, but we came back strong with a lot of work from the guys back in the factory, and had a great car.

"In Canada, in qualifying at least we were well and truly beaten by Lewis, you have to say. But then in the race we came back strong again. So we're always there, we're always strong, and if we're not right at the front, we're not far behind."

It remains to be seen how things pan out this weekend at Silverstone. Ferrari was utterly dominant on race day last year, but McLaren has addressed two key issues - fast corner performance and tyre management - so the battle could be a little closer this time. Certainly Hamilton looked good in the recent test.

"We're confident," Smedley insists. "We were confident last year coming from a track with long sweeping corners, and a slow speed section at the end. We've got to make sure we prepare as well as we can and go there and do the best job."

In 2007 the two Ferraris were rarely fighting for the same bit of track, and eventually retirements saw Massa drop out of realistic title contention. This year things could get a little more exciting, and that's without even considering the potential involvement of McLaren and Robert Kubica.

If it does develop into a fight between Massa and Raikkonen, it could be a difficult one for the team to manage to everyone's satisfaction.

"It's going to go all the way to the wire, isn't it?" said Smedley. "There's nothing else to say about it! They're two great drivers. Felipe is doing a great job at the minute, as is Kimi, so it's going to go right down to the wire. As you say, it's going to be hard to manage, but that's the job that we do ..."