Winning the Hard Way: How McLaren Won and Lost

The Italian Grand Prix might not have featured a great deal of wheel to wheel action amongst the frontrunners, but it was nevertheless a fascinating contest. This latest battle in the McLaren/Renault war saw honours evenly distributed in terms of constructors' points at least, with McLaren gaining just one on their rivals.

Apart from a stunning level of reliability throughout the field, the race featured several intriguing aspects that are worthy of further examination, and as so often is the case this season, the real interest revolves around things going awry at McLaren.

Kimi Raikkonen's third pre-qualifying engine change in six races contributed to the fun, of course. That 10-place penalty gave both McLaren and their main opposition plenty to think about on Saturday lunchtime as they each worked through the likely scenarios. McLaren's eventual choice of a one-stopper was a bold one that very nearly paid off.

The One-Stop Strategy

Nobody knows the exact size of the opposition's fuel tanks, but teams can make educated guesses based on certain scenarios that crop up during the year. The one-tyre rule has made for some interesting strategies this season, and Monaco apart - where it was almost standard - we've seen the odd attempt at a one-stopper elsewhere, a trend started by Felipe Massa in Australia. He was able to manage it by skipping the second qualifying session.

Of course, to do a one-stop race you don't actually have to get to half distance before pitting, because the laps prior to the race have to be taken into account as well. Teams usually count qualifying as two laps (the actual hot lap and the ins and outs combined), while the preamble to the start adds up to another complete lap. So that's three laps of fuel used up before the lights go out.

Now if you add those three laps to the race distance - 53 laps in the case of Monza - you come up with a total of 56. Half of that is 28. Subtract the aforementioned three laps again, and you get 25.

So lap 25 is how far Kimi needed to get. To manage it, he had to set off on his qualifying lap with the tank full to the brim, so his pole lap was an extraordinary feat.

"He drove a spectacular qualifying," said McLaren's Martin Whitmarsh after the race. "As people can now see, with a very heavily laden car. I guess people knew we weren't strikingly light, but part of the frustration of qualifying at the moment is that you've got to try and keep it a little bit to yourself. But we knew, and only we knew with certainty, what a mighty, mighty lap it was."

The interesting thing is that, as far as I understand it, the Renault tank is significantly bigger than McLaren's. Remember, in Monaco Fernando Alonso had to run 53 laps to the end of the race. Juan Pablo Montoya, who skipped second qualifying, had a total of 47 laps - including the formation lap.

Of course, teams have ways and means of improving fuel economy. The driver can play a role to some degree with how he drives the car, but mostly saving fuel involves 'turning down' the engine and using a little less performance. For example, for Raikkonen to stretch what would be a 24-lap load at maximum attack into 25 laps would require a fuel saving of just 4%, a very realistic figure.

In fact, circumstances played into his hands. Having done his best to avoid any grief on the first lap, the Finn found himself behind Jacques Villeneuve, who obviously had a much nimbler car off the startline. Rather than get frustrated at being stuck behind a Sauber, Raikkonen used those laps to his advantage, saving fuel because he was running at Villeneuve's pace.

"He had a very measured start of the race in terms of caution," Whitmarsh explained. "He didn't do anything silly, because we believed he was on a strategy that would enable him to come through, so he didn't take unnecessary risks."

Whitmarsh was a bit coy about how hard it was for Raikkonen to make it to lap 25, or whether Monza is the only track - bar Monaco - where a McLaren could try such a trick.

"We've got four races to go, we're going to use the car and the advantages we have in the car, which hopefully are the performance and maybe the flexibility of the [fuel] tank. Quite a few people didn't have the option of one stop, and I don't think many people came here with a view to doing one stop. Nor did we actually! But it was the right thing to do...

"To be honest, we didn't bang in to fuel economy mode, and we had enough fuel to get back after the race and take a sample. We were OK... It would have been a lot easier if we'd filled it up!"

I think he was joking. Of course the opposition had done their sums based on previous races and knew that stopping once was an option for Raikkonen.

"We knew how big their fuel tank was, so that wasn't a surprise," said Williams' Sam Michael. "It's only really Monza or Monaco where you'd consider a one-stopper these days. You would never do it on strategy, the only reason he did it was because he took that 10-place penalty. That's the only reason he filled it up. Otherwise he would have been on a more traditional long first stop."

"I really wasn't sure whether Kimi would one-stop it," admitted Renault's Pat Symonds. "I knew he was going a fair way into the race. And it wasn't a given that having gone to 25 that he would necessarily one-stop. Of course, as soon as we saw the fuel time, we knew he was. I think it actually would have worked quite well for them, too..."

The Tyre Problem

Mark Webber said on Saturday that there were some concerns over the Michelin left rear tyre. After all the problems his Williams team experienced in Turkey, he had every right to be more worried than most about potential problems, but this time it was not about deflection or rubbing bodywork, but the normal loadings put on that corner of the car at Monza, particularly at Parabolica and the Lesmos.

The interesting thing was that Michelin also had an issue with the Porsche Supercup, after two failures in practice. That was subsequently addressed by restricting the cambers the teams had been running in an attempt to find speed. While Porsches do not have very much in common with F1 cars, the episode was a reminder of how critical that left rear is at Monza.

Seemingly, there were no obvious signs of any problems when Raikkonen came in for his pitstop. The tyre began to come apart immediately after the stop, and of course with half the race still to run, there was no option but to bring him back in. The brilliant ploy of stopping only once had been completely blown.

When the same thing happened much later to Montoya, getting to the end was a realistic target. Interestingly, the team had a fair idea of what the Colombian was going through, having taken a close look at Raikkonen's damaged tyre.

"The first thing we did," said Whitmarsh, "was check that the construction of the tyre was intact, and [examine] the delamination of the tread from, if you like, the fabric of the tyre. We had that information. We didn't expect another one, to be honest! We knew from the evidence, or we believed we knew from the evidence of Kimi's problem that the fundamental structure of the tyre was still intact. If it was the same problem."

In other words, Montoya's situation was made slightly more comfortable by the fact that his teammate's tyre was available for inspection.

"It was, in a perverse sort of a way!" Whitmarsh confirmed. "It didn't feel like it at the time, but I know what you mean. We had that information so we knew that the fundamental structural integrity of the tyre may still be OK."

So what caused the problems? As Ron Dennis was happy to admit, two problems with the same team points to a set-up issue, and he was quick to defend Michelin. The interesting thing is that the two failures happened so far apart. Raikkonen had of course carried a lot of weight in the first half of the race, and that inevitably plays a part in the equation.

Although it had obviously been developing, the problem did not emerge until just after his pitstop, and it could be that the inevitable dip in temperature and pressure that occurs at a stop, followed by the sudden increase in weight, somehow tipped it over the edge. In contrast, Montoya's happened just a few laps from the end, when he wasn't pushing to the limit, and when the fuel load was running down. Nevertheless, that tyre had certainly taken a pounding.

Whitmarsh's answer is not as silly as it may first sound: "It was going quicker round the corners! Had the problem not happened with Juan Pablo, then other people, and maybe even we, would be tempted to say it was weight. We'd run heavy fuel loads over 20 laps with those tyres, and the same set-ups. We'll have to see what happens when we analyse it further.

"But frankly we were going quicker through the high-speed corners, and we would have generated more loads in those tyres to have done so. Maybe we just pushed it over the edge that we hadn't quite found before."

It's interesting to hear the views of the other teams. While Sam Michael was surprised to hear that Webber had intimated pre-race that there might be problems, he admitted it was something that Williams kept an eye on.

"Obviously we put a lot of effort into tyres after what happened in Turkey," Michael noted. "But most of that was to make sure we weren't damaging the sidewall with the tyre touching anything on the bodywork, which we have obviously solved. But in terms of the left rear - the problem that McLaren had - we had signs of that as well, but it obviously wasn't as bad as what they had. We saw it at the pit stop."

"We weren't close to having a problem," Symonds said of Renault. "But if there was going to be a problem, that's where it would have been. We were confident that it wasn't going to cause us any worries, but we were on the same compound and same rear construction."

Juan Rides it Out

It goes without saying that from where Montoya was sitting, the scenario was similar to that faced by Raikkonen at the Nurburgring. But this was a very different type of problem and, encouraged (if that's the right word) by what they'd gathered from Raikkonen's earlier failure, the team felt a little more in control of the situation. But that didn't make things any less tense, not least because the speeds involved at Monza mean that there is very little margin.

"We had tyre pressure which we were monitoring," said Whitmarsh. "And we had acceleration loads - we were looking at the critical loads being set-up in the structure of the car. But nonetheless, you're in the realms of the unknown, you're still watching the tyres.

"Because of the buffer he had, we told Juan Pablo to go slower through Parabolica and the big right-hand corners that were loading the rear left. But he didn't have that much of a buffer, and at a place like Monza you've still got to drive pretty quickly. You've still got to go down the straights at 350km/h.

"For a driver to see that in his rear view mirror, to feel it and hear it, I think any of us would have a lot of difficulty with that! I'm sure he knew that the team had been monitoring things, but at those sorts of speeds if the tyre had decided to fail, then it happens much more quickly than we can see it or communicate to him, or he can react.

"I don't want to overstress it, but I think it was a very brave thing that Juan had to do, and for us on the pitwall it was very, very tense. You've got the desire to win, but if you stop you certainly won't win. And of course you've got the responsibility for the safety of your driver. You want to believe that you're being entirely objective and cautious and responsible, and a bit of you says, 'We can make it, we can win,' and a bit of you says, 'We shouldn't be taking any risks here.' Fortunately it panned out...

"It was a fantastic race for Juan. All weekend he did a great job. We're also very disappointed that we were strong enough here to have a very comfortable, walk in the park one-two.

"Kimi went quick when he had to, got into a position which would have been a very comfortable third place, then we had the tyre problem which set him back. Without the spin he would have been there on the podium again. It was a great drive."

What we'll never know for sure is what would have happened had Raikkonen not hit the tyre problem - although had he been able to pass Alonso, he would have been helped into the lead by Montoya. He did, of course, pass Alonso on the road at one point during the race, as he did at Silverstone...

Fernando's Wake-Up Call

This was at least the third time this year that Alonso has received a late 'wake-up' call from the team. At the Nurburgring he was informed of Raikkonen's tyre dramas, and in Istanbul he learned that Montoya had collided with Monteiro. Once again in Monza he was told to go for it in the closing laps after an unexpected problem hit a McLaren.

"That's exactly it," said Symonds. "Having said that, we hadn't actually turned down quite as much as we do on many occasions, but we did have a little bit left to give him, and he used it!"

On this occasion, the Spaniard didn't quite make it, but nevertheless the team was more than happy to take second and third, with Raikkonen behind. It was not an easy race to manage, because Renault knew as soon as his engine change was announced that Raikkonen would run an ultra long first stint, and the team somehow had to adjust their plans to suit.

"We're well pleased with it," Symonds admitted. "It's hard racing people who are fundamentally quicker than you, and it becomes particularly hard when they spread the grid like that. Racing people around you is less challenging than when you've got a guy in first and a guy in 11th. You really have to watch what you do. If you try and move out of the norm to try and challenge one of them, someone like [Jarno] Trulli can leap you just because you tried to do something out of the ordinary. You really have to think a lot. It's hard. And that makes it really enjoyable!"

Nevertheless, Symonds said things went pretty much to plan: "Yes, it did. I'd always answer yes to that because we normally have so many bloody plans, it's only a question of choosing the right one. In fact, we stayed on what we said in our pre-brief was our most likely plan."

Alonso could become World Champion in Spa, but Symonds admitted that the constructors' title is going to be very hard to hang on to.

"It is getting harder, it's as simple as that," he said. "I don't think Spa will be particularly different to everywhere else. McLaren are going to be a bit quicker than us, and we're going to race them. It won't be a bad circuit for us. Like Monza, we were much closer to them than we were in Turkey, for example."

One way or another it should be a fun weekend.

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