Dodgy Business

Oh my God, how close did McLaren come to blowing that?! They couldn't have been closer. But look at the last few laps of the Brazilian GP in detail and it's so easy to see why.

There were raised eyebrows when Lewis qualified fourth, on the wrong side of the grid. "I don't understand that." one ex-driver said to me in the press room. "People have been talking about the option tyre being a bit marginal and if I was Lewis I'd have wanted them to fuel me light to get me on pole and out of harm's way.

"I'd do a short first stint on the option, then come in early. Okay, I'd get passed but then I'd have two long stints on the prime tyre. I'd be a bit out of sync but with the pace that McLaren's got, a one-armed blind man couldn't fail to get it home in the first five. But look at what he's got to do now; he's got that tight first corner where there's always aggro and he's got his old buddy Alonso right up his chuff. Couldn't really be worse."

There was no shortage of people suggesting that Fernando's first lap intentions might be less than honourable. The Spanish had already been busy with a YouTube clip showing their interpretation of how he would punt Lewis off at Turn 4.

Fernando Alonso © XPB

Quite a lot of work had gone into it - they had in-car Lewis, in-car-Fernando and in-car Mark Webber, who they'd given a birds-eye view of the action. It finished with a smiling Fernando resplendent in a set of Ferrari overalls as the Italian national anthem played on. Ferrari's press officer Luca Colajanni was among those we showed it to. "Send me the link," he smiled.

It did make you think. Lewis would have been five when, in 1990, Ayrton Senna bull-dozed Alain Prost into the boonies at Suzuka's first corner - all the more frightening because it seems like yesterday - to avenge the previous year. I wondered if Lewis had seen the footage. If I was him I'd rather have been starting anywhere - including the pit lane! - than eight metres in front of Fernando.

It was all rendered immaterial by the rain that arrived just as the grid formed. Alonso did not make the best getaway, the Renault slithering off the line and Fernando needing to be brave to demote Kovalainen in the other McLaren, which had started behind him. To be entirely fair to Alonso, he drove another excellent race and then, to the astonishment of many, appeared in the McLaren garage straight afterwards to shake Lewis's hand and congratulate him.

They talk about fact being stranger than fiction and, true enough, you could not have made up the 11th hour scenario that developed at Interlagos.

The first spots of rain started to fall with eight laps remaining. Kazuki Nakajima, delayed by his first lap incident with poor David Coulthard, was the first to pit and bolt on a set of wets. The sky was black. Less than ten seconds later, Giancarlo Fisichella's Force India was in the pits. Not for wets though. Fisi left with a set of Bridgestone's extreme wets. Then came Nick Heidfeld, who took wets. Fifteen seconds later Rubens Barrichello arrived and also went for the extremes, as did Sebastien Bourdais and Adrian Sutil.

Extremes were a big gamble and they were taken by those who were not in contention and had nothing to lose. But, anyone who witnessed Brazilian storms of the kind that hit Interlagos in 1993 and again in 2003, knew that the track can be awash in seconds. Believe me, if rain of that type had come down last Sunday, the guys on extremes would have been vastly quicker. In fact, they would arguably have been the only ones with a realistic chance of keeping their car on the circuit.

Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen were the first of the front runners to pit for ordinary wets, with five laps to go. They were followed in by Hamilton and Vettel. Massa went round once more, befitting the copybook race that Felipe and Rob Smedley orchestrated. When everyone else in the top five had stopped, it was logical to cover them.

But the decision to bring Lewis in so nearly cost him the world championship. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy. They weren't racing Massa, or Alonso, or Raikkonen, or even Vettel. They needed to be fifth. The car they were racing was Timo Glock's sixth placed Toyota, which had crossed the line 20s behind Lewis at the end of lap 65, with six to go. Trulli, in the other Toyota, was 11s behind his teammate.

You don't need computer simulation or any complex gizometry to work out that if you stop for wets and Glock doesn't, and it doesn't rain any heavier, you aren't going to catch him. Just as Massa covered the guys behind him, you can argue that what McLaren should have been doing was covering Glock. The fact that Toyota made the right call and McLaren didn't, is evidenced by the fact that Timo was 20s behind the McLaren when Lewis stopped and 5s behind him at the flag.

Sebastian Vettel passes Lewis Hamilton © XPB

But what a truly Godawful position for McLaren to be in. The world and his wife is streaming into the pits, some of them for extremes, the car you are trying to beat is blasting round on drys, less than a pit stop's time behind you, and the skies are threatening the biggest soaking since Noah was a lad. Somebody up there certainly had a sense of humour!

The right thing was to leave Lewis out, but how could you possibly know? If McLaren had done and it had rained even moderately, chances are Lewis would have skated off and the team would have been crucified for the China crisis of '07 all over again. Once they'd brought him in, all they could do was look at the skies and pray.

Ironically, Glock had been leaving it one more lap, then one more lap. When it started to get a bit heavier he radioed that he wanted to come in for wets. Forget it, Toyota told him, the pit lane is full of people and you'll not get in. Stay out.

Hamilton's position was perilous. Vettel had relegated him to sixth and as they crossed the line at the end of lap 69, with just two to go, Lewis was still 15s behind the Toyota. Worse than that, Glock on his dry tyres was still going faster than anyone on wets. Of those point-scoring cars on wets, the quickest lap 69 was Massa's 1:19.848 and Glock had done 1:18.688! At this stage, unless Lewis could re-pass Vettel, it looked hopeless. It was stomach churning time in the McLaren pit.

Then, finally, crucially, on the penultimate lap the rain started to come down properly. Even those on wets slowed up by around 5s, Massa lapping in 1:24.871. Glock, now in trouble, took 1:28.041. Trulli in the second Toyota, the only other driver still on drys and further back, hence having more of his lap afflicted by the heavier rain, slowed to 1:33.539.

But still Glock was more than 13s in front of Lewis starting the last lap. It was in the lap of the gods.

There are conflicting versions about what was going on at McLaren. Martin Whitmarsh said that their GPS equipment had been showing them the rain and that all they could do was hope it was correct. They told Lewis that Glock was still on drys and that he should catch him on the last lap, so not to take any risks with Vettel.

Which seems at odds with what Lewis himself said: "Sebastian got in front of me and I was told that I had to get back in front of him. I couldn't believe it." He made it, as we know, but if that rain had come 30 seconds later, he wouldn't have.

The sickening thing was all the Glock conspiracy nonsense afterwards. Yes, Timo was going awfully slowly, and yes, he'd pulled off the racing line. There are very good reasons for both. If you try to drive a racing car on dry tyres on a wet track, you can't go very fast. Even Massa, on wets, took 1:27.721 for his last lap. Glock dropped away to 1:44.731 but if you have any suspicions that he wasn't going as fast as he could, look at Trulli's last lap time - an almost identical 1:44.800.

Anybody who has done any kart racing, let alone F1, will know that when it rains and there is tyre rubber down, you can't drive on the line with dry tyres because it's too slippery. Of course Timo pulled off the racing line. But this being the internet age, you only need a couple of comments from goons in possession of no facts and even less brain, to spark a full-on conspiracy theory.

Timo Glock at speed © Toyota

"If Lewis hadn't overtaken me in that corner he would have overtaken me on the following straight because there was no way I could go flat out on the dry tyres," Glock patiently explained afterwards. "I had the car in fourth gear to minimise the wheelspin and I was just concentrating on bringing it home. That's all I could do. In that situation you cannot think about the championship. I was driving my own race and I wasn't looking out for Lewis or anybody else. I was too busy trying to keep my car on the track!"

On the flight back, I caught sight of someone reading the Daily Star. I think the first five pages were about Interlagos and the headline was all about the slur on Lewis's championship and the Glock conspiracy. Utter crap.

A newspaper I work for, quite naturally, wanted a reaction from the FIA. So I phoned up. Look, I said, I know this is nonsense, but can you please say that it is. The governing body's man pointed out what I already knew, that Trulli and Glock's last lap times were identical, that nothing untoward had happened and that they were entirely happy. He was reluctant to give a quote, though, because to do so would almost be legitimising the claptrap. It's the world in which we live, I'm afraid.

But let's sign off with a couple of positives. Remember the days when local host broadcasters used to be responsible for the F1 coverage? Had that still been the case, we would probably have been watching Felipe Massa's final lap in its entirety, or else Rubens Barrichello, instead of the drama that unfolded.

These days, thanks to Bernie Ecclestone, a huge TV production operation is shipped to every race bar Monaco and Japan. It is directed by a chap called Dean Locke and I have to confess that I occasionally do some data screen watching for them in case something not immediately obvious is going on while people are shouting in their ears.

Let me say here and now that not one iota of what you saw on screen last weekend was down to me. Bernie's lads were on top of that from start to finish and I thought their coverage was quite superb. It doesn't matter how good the show is if you're not seeing it. They couldn't have captured the story, the drama and the emotion any better.

One of Bernie's boys was jubilant afterwards. "Bloody hell," he laughed, "we should get a BAFTA for that!" And he wasn't wrong. And ditto the ITV crew. James and Martin were absolutely spot-on for what was the most dramatic piece of sporting theatre I can ever recall. In any sport.

And that's the point. If anything can encourage the powers-that-be to protect Formula One, to understand it's potential and to act responsibly to protect and nurture it, it should be last Sunday.