Pole proved as big an advantage for Raikkonen as all recent Spanish GP winners. (LAT photo)
If ever there was a predictable race winner of an F1 race, it was surely Kimi Raikkonen in Sunday’s Spanish Grand Prix. The Finn’s victory was the 8th consecutive victory for a polesitter on this track, a record better than any other track, including Monaco.
Raikkonen’s 51st podium finish ties him with Mika Hakkinen for the all-time record by a Finnish driver. It was only his second hat-trick of a win from pole with the fastest lap, after Australia 2007 (his Ferrari debut). Felipe Massa’ second-place finish makes this Ferrari’s second 1-2 finish in a row, but the order was reversed from Bahrain.
Surprisingly for such a chassis-dependent track, this was only the second time the Scuderia have taken a 1-2 in Catalunya, after Schumacher and Barrichello did it in 2004, and it was also the closest ever margin of victory in a race here. Raikkonen’s 3.2sec gap over his teammate beat the previous record of 5.716sec by Michael Schumacher over Alonso from 2003.
For Massa, second place was the least he probably expected on a weekend in which he celebrated his 27th birthday, while third-placed Lewis Hamilton scored just his 5th podium finish in the last 12 races – not the record you might expect for somebody who has been the championship leader for most of that time.
Both Hamilton and fourth-placed Robert Kubica leapfrogged Nick Heidfeld in the points table after the German’s failure to score on Sunday. This is the first race this season that BMW have not scored a podium finish, but as they only had 9 podium finishes in 15 years (as Sauber), they probably shouldn’t be too downcast.
In fifth place, Mark Webber quietly got on with things, after a weekend in which he scored his 50th top ten start. To put that in context, Massa, who made his debut in the same race as Webber (Australia 2002) only has 47 top ten starts – despite racing his whole career with Sauber and Ferrari, whereas Webber has driven for teams such as Minardi and Jaguar.
Webber is second only to Heidfeld on the current grid in terms of most starts without a win, and coming into this weekend Webber was equal in appearances (108), points (83) and, unfortunately, wins (0) as the cursed New Zealander Chris Amon, arguably the most talented driver never to win a championship F1 race (although he was a winner more than once in non-points events). Sunday saw Webber score in his third consecutive race.
Another man not picked up by the camera much on Sunday was Jenson Button, who scored Honda’s first points of 2008 with sixth place. Honda are really getting back on their feet this year, although qualifying continues to be a frustrating experience for them. In Australia they missed Q3 by 0.009sec, in Malaysia they missed it by 0.068sec. Button made it to Q3 in Bahrain but in Barcelona they again missed out by 0.065sec – albeit in a Q2 session in which the top ten were separated by just 0.4sec.
Button’s race performance certainly put that disappointment to bed, and in addition to taking a three points Button also set the fifth-fastest lap of the whole race on the final lap, following on from his fourth-fastest lap in Sepang. Such performance would have been unthinkable from last year’s car.
Williams’ Kazuki Nakajima finished seventh for his second point scoring race of 2008, but this was a below-par performance for Williams compared to previous Catalunya races. In 17 previous F1 races on this circuit, a Williams had finished in the top six 16 times.
On the track where he scored his most recent F1 podium finish (and the only track on which he has scored 2 career podiums), Jarno Trulli took the final point, which means he’s now scored more points in four races this season (9) than he did in all of the 2007 season (8).
Trulli scored his worst qualifying position of the year this weekend (8th), as did BMW’s Nick Heidfeld (9th), who missed the points for only the second time in his last 14 races, and BMW gave up their lead in the constructors’ championship, one race after hitting the front for the first time in Sauber’s history.
