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Formula 1
COOPER: McLaren Glad To Be As Good As Last Race
McLaren went into the August break with heads held high after Lewis Hamilton's win in Hungary...
Lewis Hamilton's win in Hungary was his second of the season. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)
After a busy schedule that saw three Grands Prix in four weekends in July, Formula One's summer break is now in full swing, and given the lack of hard news at the moment, it seems that everyone really has taken the opportunity to have a holiday. Clearly, I’m doing something wrong!
For the teams, a vacation is actually compulsory, given the agreement that commits them to close their factories for two weeks. To ensure that engineers aren’t sneakily working from home, servers are turned off, so emails can’t flow back and forth. However, you can bet that even when sitting on beaches with their kids, those at the sharp end are still pondering the 2012 Pirelli tire conundrum and trying to figure out other ways of making their cars go faster.
Of course, some folks left the last race in Hungary happier than others, although most of the top guys could find something positive. Ferrari was relieved to come away with a fifth-place for Fernando Alonso at a track that didn’t suit the F2012, Lotus had a healthy haul of points with a second and third for Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean, respectively, and even Red Bull could draw satisfaction from a fourth and an eighth, a handy bit of damage limitation that ensured the team went into the break with a healthy lead in the constructors’ series.
But nobody headed to Budapest Airport with bigger smiles than Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren crew, after they ended a run of frustration with a superb win.
A couple of races earlier at Silverstone, McLaren technical director Paddy Lowe had given me a hint of what the special timing of a success at Hungary might mean.
“That Hungary race is a great one to win, just emotionally,” he said. “We’ve won it two out of the three years we’ve had the summer break. You’re only as good as your last race in F1, aren’t you? So to have your holiday with that under your belt is a great feeling. I’m sure we’ll all be trying to make that statistic better.”
And that’s exactly what happened, Hamilton’s victory ensuring that Paddy, his team boss Martin Whitmarsh and their colleagues could take their break – which uniquely in the case of McLaren involved the two weeks immediately after Hungary – with a huge weight off their shoulders.
One man who was particularly happy was sporting director Sam Michael, who is ultimately in charge of how strategies play out on race weekends. It hasn’t always worked well this year, but in Hungary, it did. Hamilton had either Romain Grosjean or Kimi Raikkonen looming large in his mirrors all afternoon, but he never flinched.
“Lewis’ start was good and really he just led the whole race from the front,” Michael told SPEED.com. “We were under quite a bit of pressure from Lotus for the whole race, but Lewis drove really well to manage that and get himself the win. But it was really close.
“We were basically going as quickly as we could! Lotus had us under pressure all day, and we beat them in the pits and by outqualifying them. The whole last stint we were managing tires. Kimi was faster than us, but we held him off.”
The big question in that last stint was whether Hamilton would ‘fall off the cliff’ and lose performance as his tires let him down, and Michael conceded that it was not a foregone conclusion.
“We weren’t confident at all, but we knew that if we stopped, that was it; Lotus would come first and second. We knew that we couldn’t stop and come back and get them; they were too strong, so our only chance for a win was to stay out, and it paid off.”
The form of Raikkonen and Lotus may have come as a surprise to many, but Michael says McLaren does not underestimate the Finn, especially when he was breathing down Hamilton’s neck in the final stint.
“Kimi’s a World Champion for a reason, but he knew that he couldn’t have a go unless Lewis got into big tire degradation," Michael said. "You could hear him saying that on the radio, so that was sort of comforting! We thought he might save all his KERS to have a go, but he wasn’t quick enough to be able to do that; he had to use it all the time to stay close to us, and he couldn’t use it out of Turn One down to Turn Two.
“We expected them to be very quick with all their practice pace, and every Grand Prix this year they’ve been fast on long runs. The reason why we beat Lotus was we outqualified them and beat them in the pits. It’s as simple as that.”
Still, it was not a perfect afternoon for McLaren. The team experienced a couple of pit stop glitches, and Jenson Button, who at one point looked set for a good helping of points, had a frustrating day.
McLaren seemed to drop the ball with his strategy, leaving him stuck behind Bruno Senna for many laps, and making three stops to Hamilton’s two. Jenson himself was more than a little frustrated afterward.
Michael was a little coy when discussing what had gone wrong: “There’s lots of inputs to a pit stop decision, and most of them are about starting off with a plan, and then making sure that you cover people. In actual fact, the reason why we stopped JB early on that [final] stop was to cover (Bruno) Senna, because Senna stopped behind us and was coming back quickly. Because you can’t overtake, we wanted to make sure we covered him to make sure we didn’t lose position. It was all straightforward stuff.
“His degradation was too high. If you look at his lap times, we realized at an early stage that we couldn’t do a two-stop with him. He couldn’t maintain the pace. It was just the way we had to set up and everything else. A three-stop in paper is fine, but you can’t overtake, and he lost too much time behind Senna, and once he lost that time, it was difficult for him to make it back into the top three or four.”
In other words, while it’s easy for us to criticize from the outside, it’s all rather more complicated that it might appear.
Button is still mathematically in the title hunt, but realistically the champion must surely be one of the top five as they stood after Hungary – and that group includes Raikkonen. It’s going to be fascinating to see how things pan out when the action resumes with Friday practice at Spa on the last day of this month.
Adam Cooper notched up his 27th season as a racing journalist in 2011. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
For the teams, a vacation is actually compulsory, given the agreement that commits them to close their factories for two weeks. To ensure that engineers aren’t sneakily working from home, servers are turned off, so emails can’t flow back and forth. However, you can bet that even when sitting on beaches with their kids, those at the sharp end are still pondering the 2012 Pirelli tire conundrum and trying to figure out other ways of making their cars go faster.
Of course, some folks left the last race in Hungary happier than others, although most of the top guys could find something positive. Ferrari was relieved to come away with a fifth-place for Fernando Alonso at a track that didn’t suit the F2012, Lotus had a healthy haul of points with a second and third for Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean, respectively, and even Red Bull could draw satisfaction from a fourth and an eighth, a handy bit of damage limitation that ensured the team went into the break with a healthy lead in the constructors’ series.
But nobody headed to Budapest Airport with bigger smiles than Lewis Hamilton and his McLaren crew, after they ended a run of frustration with a superb win.
A couple of races earlier at Silverstone, McLaren technical director Paddy Lowe had given me a hint of what the special timing of a success at Hungary might mean.
“That Hungary race is a great one to win, just emotionally,” he said. “We’ve won it two out of the three years we’ve had the summer break. You’re only as good as your last race in F1, aren’t you? So to have your holiday with that under your belt is a great feeling. I’m sure we’ll all be trying to make that statistic better.”
And that’s exactly what happened, Hamilton’s victory ensuring that Paddy, his team boss Martin Whitmarsh and their colleagues could take their break – which uniquely in the case of McLaren involved the two weeks immediately after Hungary – with a huge weight off their shoulders.
One man who was particularly happy was sporting director Sam Michael, who is ultimately in charge of how strategies play out on race weekends. It hasn’t always worked well this year, but in Hungary, it did. Hamilton had either Romain Grosjean or Kimi Raikkonen looming large in his mirrors all afternoon, but he never flinched.
“Lewis’ start was good and really he just led the whole race from the front,” Michael told SPEED.com. “We were under quite a bit of pressure from Lotus for the whole race, but Lewis drove really well to manage that and get himself the win. But it was really close.
“We were basically going as quickly as we could! Lotus had us under pressure all day, and we beat them in the pits and by outqualifying them. The whole last stint we were managing tires. Kimi was faster than us, but we held him off.”
The big question in that last stint was whether Hamilton would ‘fall off the cliff’ and lose performance as his tires let him down, and Michael conceded that it was not a foregone conclusion.
“We weren’t confident at all, but we knew that if we stopped, that was it; Lotus would come first and second. We knew that we couldn’t stop and come back and get them; they were too strong, so our only chance for a win was to stay out, and it paid off.”
The form of Raikkonen and Lotus may have come as a surprise to many, but Michael says McLaren does not underestimate the Finn, especially when he was breathing down Hamilton’s neck in the final stint.
“Kimi’s a World Champion for a reason, but he knew that he couldn’t have a go unless Lewis got into big tire degradation," Michael said. "You could hear him saying that on the radio, so that was sort of comforting! We thought he might save all his KERS to have a go, but he wasn’t quick enough to be able to do that; he had to use it all the time to stay close to us, and he couldn’t use it out of Turn One down to Turn Two.
“We expected them to be very quick with all their practice pace, and every Grand Prix this year they’ve been fast on long runs. The reason why we beat Lotus was we outqualified them and beat them in the pits. It’s as simple as that.”
Still, it was not a perfect afternoon for McLaren. The team experienced a couple of pit stop glitches, and Jenson Button, who at one point looked set for a good helping of points, had a frustrating day.
McLaren seemed to drop the ball with his strategy, leaving him stuck behind Bruno Senna for many laps, and making three stops to Hamilton’s two. Jenson himself was more than a little frustrated afterward.
Michael was a little coy when discussing what had gone wrong: “There’s lots of inputs to a pit stop decision, and most of them are about starting off with a plan, and then making sure that you cover people. In actual fact, the reason why we stopped JB early on that [final] stop was to cover (Bruno) Senna, because Senna stopped behind us and was coming back quickly. Because you can’t overtake, we wanted to make sure we covered him to make sure we didn’t lose position. It was all straightforward stuff.
“His degradation was too high. If you look at his lap times, we realized at an early stage that we couldn’t do a two-stop with him. He couldn’t maintain the pace. It was just the way we had to set up and everything else. A three-stop in paper is fine, but you can’t overtake, and he lost too much time behind Senna, and once he lost that time, it was difficult for him to make it back into the top three or four.”
In other words, while it’s easy for us to criticize from the outside, it’s all rather more complicated that it might appear.
Button is still mathematically in the title hunt, but realistically the champion must surely be one of the top five as they stood after Hungary – and that group includes Raikkonen. It’s going to be fascinating to see how things pan out when the action resumes with Friday practice at Spa on the last day of this month.
Adam Cooper notched up his 27th season as a racing journalist in 2011. He has written about F1 for SPEED.com since 2005. Follow him on Twitter.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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