British Grand Prix Review

Yes, Red Bull arrived at Silverstone with a range of aerodynamic upgrades, the most noticeable being its chiselled nose being replaced by a platypus bill, and they certainly seem to have made the RB5 even more of a rocketship. But enough to spreadeagle the field in such a fashion? Was this a sign of a change at the top of the pecking order that would make the championship fight a lot tighter than everyone imagined? Or was it simply that Silverstone suited the revised RB5 and did not particularly suit the Brawn?

As always the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, and it will take a few more consecutive rounds of such comprehensive supremacy by Red Bull before anyone can conclusively say that they have jumped to the top of the grid. But their ascendancy in Britain has been unmatched even by any performance by the Brawns so far this season. Vettel and Mark Webber were peerless in every session, except for Saturday morning when Nico Rosberg couldn't bear having his free practice-topping streak broken.

Vettel's final lap in Q3 was superb, and when it emerged that his was also the heaviest car in the top ten, everyone else may as well have packed up their transporters and gone home. Sebastian then just kept doing what he had to do in the race. He made a clean start and whilst Rubens Barrichello held Webber up, he skipped away to the tune of a second a lap. Of course, teams and drivers are aghast if anyone dares to suggest that an F1 win was a cakewalk, but this was as easy and imperious as they come.

He had been distracted and it had cost him a few tenths. He claims he had to take a shallower line into Stowe and that's probably true. But in hindsight, did Mark cause himself more damage than Raikkonen did? There is something in the laidback Australian sporting psyche which means that, when they're expected to get the job done, half the time they do and the other half something small puts them right off. There's a certain mental fragility which some might label as not having a killer instinct.

Sure Raikkonen was on the racing line but he was a long way up the road when Mark started getting agitated and gesticulating. As already stated, Kimi went wide enough at Stowe in hindsight for Webber's lap to be uninterrupted. Might a Senna or a Schumacher have been distracted if they were in Mark's shoes? Or even a Vettel, for that matter? This is the kind of question that people still ask about Webber. To what extent is his bad luck always bad luck - and when is it actually bad management?

What is probably genuine ill fortune for Webber is that, when he finally gets his hands on a race-winning car, he has Vettel as a team-mate. If it were most of his former team-mates, he would have racked up several of those elusive victories by now. Having said that, current form suggests the win is not impossible in the remaining nine races. Here though, by starting 3rd and being trapped behind Barrichello in the first stint, the best he could hope for was leapfrogging Rubens during the stops into 2nd, which he did.

Actually leapfrogging was arguably the real sport on show in Silverstone, more so than Formula One racing. Could there ever have been a better example of the principle that he who pits later has an advantage, because he gets to run extra laps on low fuel whilst his rivals are slowed down by a heavier load? Amongst the top runners, it was a rarity for anyone to hold their position whilst pitting earlier than someone else; invariably the driver stopping later managed to get in front.

Raikkonen in the end finished quite a powerless 8th, having started 9th but run 5th in the first stint after an awesome getaway off the line, but at both rounds of stops, apart from Kazuki Nakajima he was the first frontrunner to pit. The opposite was true of Felipe Massa, who by missing the Q2 cut was able to choose a long-fuel strategy at both stops, which coupled with a very solid drive meant that he jumped from 9th early on to an eventual 4th, and at one stage looked like threatening Barrichello for 3rd.

If it was a case of 11th to 4th for Massa, it was a case of 4th to 11th for Nakajima. In terms of one-lap pace this was Kazuki's most competitive outing of the year, if not in his entire F1 career, and it was just reward to see him qualify a career-best 5th even if it was fuel-assisted. But his out-laps on a full tank were atrocious, and having moved to 4th off the start, by the end of the first stops he was already out of the points, and only fell further to 11th by the end of the race.

His team-mate Rosberg was one of those who got past him at the first stops, and Nico also dealt with Raikkonen at the same time, but at the second stops he was one of those who lost out to Massa, which resulted in his eventual 5th. But Turkey and Britain have been promising indicators that, whereas the previous free practice showboating had no substance come Sunday afternoon, the Williams race package is now a seriously competitive proposition and Rosberg should score regularly in the foreseeable future.

Trulli's impressive 4th on the grid came to naught when he dropped to 7th on the first lap, and in the rest of his race passing Nakajima at the first stops was offset by being overtaken by Button at the second stops. Timo Glock also lost places at the start, and then spent the afternoon battling Giancarlo Fisichella's Force India. He was passed by the Italian at the first stops but got his revenge second time around. Still, in finishing 9th he has only scored one point since Bahrain and he seems to have lost his mojo.

But from 16th on the grid he was up to 14th on the first lap, before taking Robert Kubica on lap two as well as both Nick Heidfeld and Fernando Alonso in one opportunistic swoop at Stowe. That put him within touching distance of the points - literally, as he finished only 1.9s behind Raikkonen. There were no such heroics for Sutil after his brake failure-induced crash in Q1, a fuel pressure problem with the spare during the formation laps which meant he started from the pits, and a spin at copse on lap 2.

Behind the top eleven finishers there was a gap to the rest who were all lapped, and that was directly due to Heidfeld backing all of these drivers up behind him in the first stint when his front wing was damaged but he refused to pit, contrary to team instructions. No one behind could get past, particularly since the first man held up was Alonso whose Renault was unable to put its power down effectively. And that meant that whoever was two-stopping out of these drivers was always going to lose out to the one-stoppers.

That is how Nelson Piquet Jr managed to finish 12th, two spots ahead of Alonso having started 14th, but how frustrated must Fernando be having started 10th, but got himself trapped behind Heidfeld after a poor first few laps. The Renault R29 is an absolute dog of a car to drive. For the third season in a row Enstone's product has not been intrinsically competitive, but unlike the last two years there does not appear to be any improvement in the pipeline. And for the first time ever, Fernando's career is starting to go nowhere.

Heidfeld got his just desserts for spoiling so many people's afternoons by falling to an eventual 15th, which is where he started in the first place, whilst Kubica, like Alonso, would be cursing a poor opening set of laps that put him behind his team-mate. He finished as the best of those remaining two-stoppers in 13th, but after breaking his points drought in Istanbul, it looks like it will continue to be slim pickings for the rest of the year. Also like Alonso, for the first time his career too is also losing momentum.

REJECT OF THE RACE
Formula Elaborate Bluff
Six day pipe dream overshadowed the race

Toro Rosso won't even be getting their first iteration of a double-decker diffuser until Hungary! Sebastien Buemi's bright start to the season has faded somewhat, and he was most subdued in Britain, starting 19th but eventually falling behind even Sutil after a two-stop strategy. Sebastien Bourdais, fresh from his second-place finish at Le Mans where he showed his best form since his Champ Car days, may have made some headway on his one-stop strategy had it not been for his tangle with Kovalainen.

This was a racing incident in which both were partly to blame. A befuddled Heikki Kovalainen, having moved aside to let Lewis Hamilton past for strategy reasons and been caught off-guard by Bourdais steaming up behind him, did move tentatively several times, enough for the Frenchman to hit him. Nevertheless, had he not hit the McLaren, Bourdais looked like he would have had trouble making it into Vale, such was the speed of impact with Heikki's left-rear and the amount of lawn-mowing he subsequently did.

Kovalainen's DNF finished off another meaningless weekend in which the Finn's effort to get into Q2 was undone on the first lap when he plummeted to 19th, but his one-stop strategy may have got him back up to 13th behind Piquet in the end. As for Hamilton, it was an embarrassment for the reigning World Champion. Caught out by the red flag in Q1 which left him only 19th quickest, Lewis admitted that he may not have managed to improve, such was the McLaren's inability to handle Silverstone's sweeps.

McLaren were obviously a candidate for the 'Reject of the Race' award, but they do not take it this time around. Yes, there were a number of positional changes throughout the British GP due to the pit stops, but on the whole it was a mind-numbingly dull affair. The new technical rules have done a little bit to improve the racing, but while Silverstone is a great driver's circuit, there are too few combinations of tight corners, long straights and heavy braking zones which is what today's cars need to facilitate passing moves.

Worse still, not only was it a dreadful race but it happened over a near-suicidal weekend for F1, during which the off-track bitching - there is no other word for it - once again hijacked the headlines thanks to the FOTA breakaway series, which was announced on the eve of the British GP weekend. We shall not discuss it in any detail here, one because all and sundry have debated the pros and cons of it to death, and two because a few days later the breakaway was off anyway.

It had been, as many had thought, no more than an elaborate bluff in a game played by narcissistic, self-important, megalomaniacal egos in which frankly no-one could claim any moral high ground in the end. The proposed FOTA breakaway series was the final tactic that forced Max Mosley into the concessions that ensured peace on FOTA's terms, but such high-stakes gamesmanship and peace on such bullying won FOTA no friends. 'Reject of the Race', then, to the FOTA breakaway series for shooting F1 in the foot.