Tuesday, May 13, 2008 McLaren’s gamble pays off in Turkish GP By Steve Slater Special Contributor
A WORD of advice if you are a card player. Never try to play poker against Lewis Hamilton and the McLaren team.
Their performance in the Turkish Grand Prix, when Hamilton finished second to Felipe Massa, came in a race where they knew they had been trumped by Ferrari even before they lined up on the grid. Felipe Massa literally held all the aces, but no-one in McLaren gave a hint of the gamble they were about to take.
The Istanbul Otodrom is fast, surprisingly bumpy and demands continuous monitoring of the state of each cars tires. It is one of the few tracks were tire strategy rather that the risk of running out of gas, governs the timing of the pit stop.
In particular, the infamous turn 8, the long left-hand bend taken at close to 300 kph is torture on the tires. In addition to subjecting the drivers to side-loads of over 4.5g, the same forces place huge loads in particular on the right-front tire.
They almost threaten to tear the tread off the sidewall.
If you remember that is precisely what happened to Hamilton in the 2007 race. On lap 43, some 25 laps after his first pit stop, the tread tore from the tire.
Fortunately, he was able to maintain control and limp into the pits.
Dropping from third to fifth place was a disappointment, but in reality it was a great escape. By rights he should have had as big an accident as Kovalainen in Spain.
Aggresive driving
This weekend, tire makers Bridgestone told Hamilton’s engineers that they again could not guarantee his tires for more than 20 laps. The problem it appears, is specific to Hamilton’s driving style, which aggressively “points” the front of the car into the corner, demanding a high camber setting on the suspension, angling the top of the wheel inwards to give more “bite” to the steering.
Hamilton’s approach clearly works in terms of speed, but it comes at the cost of added load on the tires. Interestingly, Kovalainen has a different driving style and doesn’t suffer the same tire problems even though he’s driving the same car.
Tire life
Whatever, with Bridgestone’s engineers unable to guarantee a longer tire life, Hamilton was forced to gamble on running with three pit stops, 16 laps apart while everyone else, including the Ferraris of Massa and Raikkonen, planned to stop just twice.
In order to make up the time for that extra stop, Hamilton had to effectively drive 58 low-fuel qualifying laps during the course of the race. Not only did he do that, he pulled off a brilliant move to pass Massa for the lead, then having made his extra stop, in the closing stages of the race he held off an equally-determined Kimi Raikkonen to claim second place.
While he ultimately missed out on victory, Hamilton was justifiably proud of a drive which I rate as the best of his career.
“It’s not about winning, it’s about feeling that you extract 100 percent from yourself and the car and I did that today” said Hamilton. “Before the race our prediction was that all being well, I would finish fifth, so second is such a bonus”.
Meanwhile Felipe Massa put his championship challenge back on track with a beautifully measured drive to his third successive victory at the Turkish GP. He and Hamilton are now equal second on 28 points, seven behind the title leader.
On the fast and flowing Istanbul track the Ferrari car was clearly the class of the field. Now we look ahead to the Monaco Grand Prix where on past form, McLaren will have the advantage over Ferrari.
Last year Fernando Alonso headed a McLaren 1-2, chased home by Hamilton who was convinced he could have won. This year, I am expecting that Hamilton will. And if he does, the championship battle will be wide open once again.
(Steve Slater is the expert half of the popular F1 commentary duo on STAR Sports. Slater is a veritable encyclopedia of motor racing and has been involved in the sport at many levels including as journalist, race-organizer, radio broadcaster, and now commentator.)
