European Grand Prix Review

The Prancing Horse were clearly the pacesetters over the weekend, showing the most consistent speed throughout practice and qualifying even if they didn't top all the sessions, and evidenced by the fact that it wasn't Schumi playing a lone hand, but Felipe Massa was right up there as well. And although Alonso took pole with a scorching lap time, that time, which was faster than the quickest recorded in the first two segments of qualifying, gave the game away about his strategy.

In short, it was too good a time, and it gave a big hint that the Renault was lighter. That duly came true, and from here it was advantage Michael. He did not pass the Renault at the first stops, but he didn't have to. Ferrari simply knew how much they had to fuel the German's car so that he could run longer in the second stint, and then it was just a matter of getting the job done. And if there's one man on whom you'd stake your house that he will put the laps in as required to make use of pit strategy, Michael is he.

Now some may be critical that this race, like Imola, turned out to be a strategy-fest, and that may be so. At times Schumi did close right up on Alonso but did not, or could not pass. But given the over-emphasis on aerodynamics, the variable performance of the Bridgestones and the Michelins, and the effect of the wind all weekend, all made passing difficult, putting pressure on Michael and Ferrari to execute their plan perfectly, which they did, underlining once again their professionalism and Schumacher's sheer magic.

Credit must also go to Massa for a very solid drive en route to his first F1 podium. He held off Kimi Raikkonen all race by consistent, mistake-free driving, and it showed that it's not just Michael's genius hauling Ferrari higher than where they ought to be. Alonso's ashen-faced expression on the podium said it all; for the first time since Brazil last year the Renault was outclassed as the fastest car in the field, and perhaps even longer than that if Fernando had spent most of the midseason last year in cruise-and-collect mode.

The boys at Renault did seem rather too easily outfoxed, and one wonders if they had ever so slightly lost their composure this weekend. It will be interesting to see how they respond at Alonso's home track next weekend, where Fernando will have a sell-out crowd urging him on, but where his team will also know that they have only had a one-week turnaround since being genuinely beaten. Are Renault and Michelin finally staring at a rival that can match them in 2006 for speed, reliability and consistency?

Renault's cause, particularly on the constructors' championship front, wasn't helped by a third consecutive lacklustre performance from Giancarlo Fisichella. Yet again he couldn't match his team-mate for speed, and like at Imola he was caught out in segment 2 of qualifying and didn't make the cut. He was particularly incensed at Jacques Villeneuve, claiming that the BMW driver had held him up, with the stewards agreeing and disallowing he Canadian's three best times from the third segment.

Keep in mind that each of Ayrton Senna's 65 pole positions was set in free-for-all sessions in which the great Brazilian had to find the necessary space for himself. How precious are today's lot, that with each passing race more and more drivers are blaming traffic for their failure to progress to the next phase of qualifying! With traditional skills like tyre and fuel conservation, throttle control and backmarker lapping no longer tested, it is good that some old challenges remain.

Predictably, Fisichella only made his first stop around half distance, at which point Renault short-filled him so that he was back in for a second stop around a dozen laps later - a tactic that Williams also employed for Nico Rosberg. A bizarre strategy, that. If you can turn your race into a one-stopper, you'd think that the track position advantage of making one stop fewer than others, and the difficulty of anyone passing you out on the circuit, outweighs the tyre and weight advantage of running a skewed two-stop plan.

The Nurburgring, Raikkonen's voodoo track, actually turned out to be arguably the most promising race for McLaren so far this year, at least as far as the Kimi side of the garage goes. The Mercedes engine upgrade boosted the Finn's performance, and, unusually for Mercedes-Ilmor engines of recent years, stayed reliable. A slightly more traditional two-stop strategy, still running longer than their rivals but not so heavy as to suffer too great a weight penalty, inched Kimi back towards some kind of competitiveness.

Honda will be cheered by Rubens Barrichello's decent effort to finish 5th - his most solid weekend as a whole for his new team to date, having outqualified Jenson Button to boot. Having said that, they will also be galled by the fact that Rubens was more than a whole minute behind Raikkonen at the end. There were no misleading qualifying heroics from either RA106 this time, but still no particular race speed of note either, and, in Button's case, another Honda engine failure.

Honda can talk the talk all they like, but they can look to Ferrari as a salient example of a team that just walks the walk and puts the results on the board. That 'first win' for BAR/Honda still seems so far away. It was interesting hearing Jenson's rather defeatist comments pre-race about his average record at the Nurburgring. That's the kind of navel-gazing, chips-on-shoulders statement you don't hear from the Schumachers and Alonsos of this world. They just get out onto the track and get on with the job.

Williams are starting to rival Honda in the tough-talking-bluster stakes, Sam Michael claiming that the FW28s could have started on the front row when in fact they started 19th and 22nd after engine changes thanks to more niggling problems with the Cosworths. Mark Webber, after an awesome start that had him 12th after one lap, then suffered his third mechanical retirement of the year when on strategy he could well have finished around 5th.

Sir Frank Williams is due to make a decision about his 2007 engine plans soon, and at this rate he will almost certainly plump for a link-up with Toyota, if for no other reason than it means that he can have the resources to fix things like his cars' reliability. Meanwhile, it was a solid race by Rosberg, equalling his 7th place in Bahrain, but had he also not been put on a skewed two-stop strategy but rather stay on a one-stop plan instead, then 5th was certainly there for the taking.

BMW and Villeneuve in particular will feel as though they should have got more out of this weekend. Jacques will feel hard done by in relation to the stewards' decision over his incident with Fisichella, not that it changed much in terms of his grid position, and then mediocre work by his crew at his second stop dropped him behind Fisichella and Montoya whom he had worked so hard on the track to hold back. Still, a point for 8th is a reward nonetheless for a pleasingly revitalised, content-not-angry Jacques.

Like at Imola, the ex-champion put Nick Heidfeld into the shade, which was a surprise. On home soil, Heidfeld traditionally goes well at the Nurburgring. Just in the last two years, he ran strongly in the hopeless Jordan in 2004, and last year snared pole and 2nd in the race for Williams. This year he was nowhere in qualifying and race trim, and apparently completely baffled by his own lack of speed. All of which amounts to the 'Reject of the Race' award this time around.

REJECT OF THE RACE
Nick Heidfeld
Last year's Nurburgring hero, this year's zero

The Italian qualified fairly well here and ran in the points in the first stint, making out as if he had turned the corner, but inexorably he fell out of the points at the first stop and never looked like getting back in. His future in the team must surely be questioned now. Meanwhile, Ralf in his 150th GP tapped Vitantonio Liuzzi at the first corner, vaulted up into the points from midfield at his first stop, and would have scored again but for an engine failure. It's not particularly spectacular, but it is definitely creditable.

Scott Speed posted a top ten finish for Toro Rosso, and is proving that he has no trouble hustling a car to the finish, even if his pace still catches nobody's attention. For the fourth time out of five he missed the first cut in qualifying, whereas Liuzzi has made it through four out of five. Yet again he joined the ranks of excuse-makers. His brash personality is something F1 can afford more of, but the outspokenness can rankle when he has very little on-track cred to back it up.

Liuzzi not only found himself tagged by Ralf and then David Coulthard at the first corner, but then amateurishly spun and stalled trying to get back on three-and-a-half wheels. Toro Rosso co-owner Gerhard Berger recently identified Tonio as one of the five drivers of the future (along with Rosberg, Speed, Heikki Kovalainen and Robert Kubica), but whilst the Italian's dominance over Speed catches the eye, at this stage there's not quite enough evidence to get too many others swooning over his abilities.

Christian Klien's attitude seems to epitomise that of his employers. After impressing all and sundry last year, this season he seems too carefree to genuinely make a success of what he's doing. Despite showing flashes of pace in Saturday practice and in the early stages of the race, yet again he failed to make the first cut in qualifying, and once more he blamed the traffic. Don't forget, Dietrich Mateschitz has already publicly put him on notice that his place in the team is up in the air for 2007.

Couple that to Berger's comments about the drivers of the future (which included both Toro Rosso men but not Klien), and Liuzzi getting tests for the Red Bull main team, and Christian ought to be knuckling down and putting in some stellar showings. Instead, he comes out with rather unkind, throwaway, cultural-cringing comments about Yuji Ide's departure from the Super Aguri race seat (hear us talking about it on our podcast). You just get the impression that the Austrian needs to take things a little more seriously.

At Midland, Christijan Albers showed impressively improved pace in the lead-up to the race, and was unlucky not to make the first qualifying cut after the incredible false red-flag bungle. A poor start however left him trailing Takuma Sato's Super Aguri and trapped him behind team-mate Tiago Monteiro all race. That was somewhat undeserved, given that Albers is really showing Monteiro the way this year, as Tiago disappointingly struggles yet again, being over 0.6s slower than Christijan in qualifying.

Sakon Yamamoto springs to mind, after his quite decent effort in a Jordan on Friday at Suzuka last year. If Aguri Suzuki insists on a Japanese driver as a long-term solution for the second car, then he might also care to look at Hiro Yoshimoto, BCN driver in the GP2 series and a capable points-scorer. Alternatively, a number of up-and-coming Japanese talent (including the son of ex-F1 driver Satoru Nakajima) are at the pointy end of the F3 Euroseries field.

Aguri could do a lot worse than stick with Montagny though. Having not sat in the SA05 before the weekend, the former Renault test driver was soon on or about Sato's pace, and put in a very commendable Grand Prix debut. Sato is a good yardstick right now; in all honesty, with some of his opportunistic first lap moves and his ability to punch above his senile car's weight, making very few mistakes in the process, his star ought to be rising back from last year's depths. He'd be in our top ten drivers of 2006 so far.