British Grand Prix Review

As a track that produces wheel-to-wheel racing, Silverstone can be a bit hit-and-miss. The usual vagaries of British weather can sometimes throw the cat amongst the pigeons, and the long straights and corner combinations can allow for impressive overtaking manoeuvres. On the flip side, somewhat like Barcelona the number of sweeping turns exacerbates dependence on aerodynamic performance, and the not-insubstantial amount of testing done here means that teams have a decent idea of what the optimal set-up is.

This year, lo and behold, the weather stayed unusually fine all week (whereas, conversely, it has been cold, raining and miserable in Sydney!). In addition, the lower horsepower of the V8s but softer tyres had quite dramatically changed the way Silverstone is driven. Daunting corners like Bridge and Copse could now be taken flat, and the amount of time spent on full-throttle per lap had jumped astonishingly from under 60% to over 70%.

The hugely increased cornering velocity, though, while exciting from a 'speed thrills' point of view, simply put more emphasis on the aerodynamics to keep the cars on the road, for example in the sequence from Copse through Maggotts and Becketts, such that by the time they got onto Hangar Straight, a car behind would be nowhere near close enough to get a good slipstream. It all made for a rather dour British GP - about as dour as England's performance against Paraguay in their World Cup opener the day before.

Schumi and Raikkonen had not been that far behind in the first stint, but that telling first round of stops broke the back of the red and silver efforts, and from there it was a matter of basically waltzing to victory, in a perfectly balanced Renault R26 that never looked like getting out of shape. With 74 points out of a possible 80, and a points lead of 23 points over Michael, as long as the reliability keeps up the title is all but over. Fernando can finish second to Michael in every race and still win the crown from here.

Unlike last year, when by this stage in the season the McLaren looked the fastest car, not only does Alonso have a points lead at the moment, the Renault also looks the speediest package in the field. In a display not unlike Schumi and Ferrari's in 2002, Alonso and Renault have the perfect blend of driving prowess, and car speed and reliability. Their rivals, like Ferrari's four years ago, always look like they could pose a challenge, but in the end it's repeatedly the blue and yellows taking home the bacon.

All of this must immensely frustrate the seven-time German champion. Now he knows what it was like to have been, say, one of the Williams drivers four years ago - regularly looking like he's in the hunt for pole and victory on Saturday, only to appear quite hapless in the face of a relentless juggernaut come Sunday. There was not much more Michael could have done this weekend. He successfully put behind him the Monaco debacle, surviving an anti-climactic GPDA meeting with his position intact.

A penny for Michael's thoughts at the moment; the German is undoubtedly a realist, and only the bravest optimist in his position would genuinely think that he still has a clear title chance. Of course Michael will work devilishly hard and pressure Alonso all the way, he knows to do nothing else, but with 18 points over Raikkonen, he's not really under threat from behind. Will enduring ten more long races of having no real championship fights to fight force his hand about his future?

Schumi might not be feeling overly positive right now, but Raikkonen ought to be encouraged. Before the weekend he not only annulled his title expectations this year, he even seemed to give up the prospect of scoring wins. True, he could not sustain his qualifying pace, and not only did he get beaten by Michael in the end he was also almost hunted down by Giancarlo Fisichella in the second Renault, but at least he had the pace to be competitive up front. Perhaps a win in '06 might not be such an impossibility.

Behind the front three came their team-mates in exactly the same team order as the podium finishers. Despite predictions from Flavio Briatore that Fisichella would win at Silverstone, nothing of the sort came to pass. Giancarlo continued his well-beaten form throughout the weekend, and only came to life in the latter stages of the race when Raikkonen's McLaren came into view. If this is the way he stakes his claim to be Renault team leader in 2007, no wonder the talk is of a completely new line-up at the Regie.

Juan-Pablo Montoya, though, was once again disappointing and increasingly listless. Either the McLaren really was a handful or JPM simply never got the set-up right, as on-board shots showed an evil-handling beast that the Colombian could not make go fast. An ordinary qualifying and an even more ordinary start that saw him caught behind Nick Heidfeld was only fortuitously rectified by the BMW's disastrous stop, but the neither-here-nor-there 6th place would have done his job prospects for 2007 not much good.

BMW were the clear fourth-best team, not entirely a surprise since Silverstone is a track where Sauber has traditionally been strong. Both Heidfeld and Jacques Villeneuve had the occasional one-lap pace that was right up amongst the best, even if they were down a few tenths per lap over a longer period. In that midfield battle where, depending on which race it is, some teams are higher and others falter, this was one of the events where the BMWs shone, and points for 7th and 8th were a deserved reward.

Both drivers were closely matched, with Villeneuve continuing to surprise and confound his critics this year by making his partnership with Heidfeld arguably the most even pair of team-mates in the field. From a neutral perspective he's probably done enough to retain his drive for next year, and one can understand his frustration at the fact that the team won't make any commitments about next year's line-up, with Mario Theissen clearly having the hots for Robert Kubica.

Rosberg was unlucky not to salvage a point for Williams after what had been an excellent drive in an otherwise deflating weekend for the Grove team, straight after they had been competing at the pointy end at Monaco. Mark Webber had predicted that Silverstone would not suit the FW28, which still struggles when it comes to aero efficiency, and now that the Cosworth has been caught by its rivals in terms of horsepower output.

So it came to be, with Webber embarrassingly missing out on the first cut in qualifying after he and Williams screwed up their strategy and didn't get out for a second run. From 17th on the grid, his lowest qualifying position since Austria in 2003, his race misfortune continued by being an innocent victim of Scott Speed's tangle with Ralf Schumacher. Rosberg himself was fortunate to make Q2, having outpaced Webber by a matter of hundredths, but once he made it through, 12th on the grid was a fair effort.

A superb start and well-maintained pace had the German in the points in the second stint after Heidfeld's poor first stop, but the Williams got jumped by both BMWs at the final stops. Rumours abound that Williams have inked a deal with Toyota for next year, and that would be no surprise. Williams and Cosworth seem to have operated all season on a knife-edge between success and failure. A link-up with a manufacturer would simply give them much-needed margin resource-wise and development-wise.

Even if Jenson had raced on, it is unlikely that he would have got into the top 10, let alone the points, as Honda continues to labour for race pace. Rubens Barrichello has now had the upper-hand over his team-mate for two races, although it's unlikely that Monaco and Britain have been representative of their true form. What's more telling is that Rubens started 6th, but dropped out of the points at the first stops and never came close to clawing his way back in, eventually finishing a lapped 10th.

Barrichello is the only driver apart from Alonso to have finished in all eight races so far, but in five of those events he has come home lower than his original starting position. Likewise, out of Button's six classified finishes (including Australia where he stopped just short of the finish line), four of those have also been below his grid spot. It just shows that Honda still have not worked out how to maintain a solid pace and actually make up ground during the race, rather than sliding down the field.

Yet again it was hard to evaluate the Toyota TF106B's potential. Jarno Trulli never got the chance to demonstrate his qualifying prowess after an engine failure put an early end to his Saturday afternoon's work, and a bright early segment on race day came to little when it turned out that he was on a two-stop strategy just like everyone else when perhaps it would have been more advisable to run a longer one-stop plan. Still, there have been positive signs of revival in Jarno's driving of late, and that's welcome.

REJECT OF THE RACE
Scott Speed
Overly optimistic move knocked out Ralf, Webber

Speed is just not making the right impressions. Finally getting past Q1 thanks to Trulli, Webber and Button all failing, he was still off the pace of team-mate Vitantonio Liuzzi. Although generally he's able to keep the car on the road, he's not that quick, and he occasionally does rash things like pass David Coulthard under yellows in Melbourne and colliding with Ralf here at Silverstone. In a weekend devoid of too much foolishness, 'Reject of the Race' to Scott Speed for causing an entirely avoidable incident.

It was all a case of middling performances for middling results in the rest of the Red Bull camps, Christian Klien and Liuzzi finishing exactly where they started, the Austrian recording only his third finish for the year. DC started 11th and finished 12th, in a weekend where he hit out at Montoya for dirty tactics before spectacularly recanting and apologising, seemingly smoothed things out between Schumi and the rest of the GPDA, and announced his engagement to his girlfriend of not-that-long, Karen Minier.

It's a bit on the pathetic side when Coulthard the diplomat and Coulthard the romantic made exponentially more news than Coulthard the racing driver, straight after his podium finish at Monaco. Well, except for those preposterous rumours that DC would go to Ferrari started by himself, the link coming because Red Bull is currently powered by the Maranello motors. In so many ways it just simply doesn't make sense, but then again stranger things have been known to happen.

Despite his protestations not that long ago that Midland was not for sale and that he was in it for the passion of racing rather than just as a passing business fad, the Russian-Canadian has never really been able to convince anyone, and no-one will be really devastated if the team changes hands again. MF1 have not managed to endear themselves to too many people in the same way that, say, Super Aguri have. In F1, whether someone has a genuine passion for racing isn't that difficult to discern.

Down Aguri way, they finally ran a third car for the first time this year, with Sakon Yamamoto returning to the paddock for the first time since Japan last year where he drove on Friday for Jordan. Without time to acclimatise, he was quite some way off the pace of Takuma Sato and Franck Montagny, although there is enough evidence to suggest that he is significantly better than poor Yuji Ide, and he could well be a worthy candidate to replace Montagny and re-complete the all-Japanese driving line-up.

The SA05s were more off the pace than they have been for a while, with attention presumably now focussed almost entirely on the new car. Both Taku and Franck also had troubled weekends in which both had off-track moments, Taku crashing for the first time in a while in what has been a most commendable season to date in his new role as a team leader. However, both cars made it to the chequered flag, yet another fillip for the hard-trying team that can't be faulted for effort week in, week out.