Planet-F1

European GP: Winners and Losers

Sunday 24th August 2008

Felipe Massa was a cut above everyone in the inaugural Dockside Derby. If Valencia is "the new Monaco", then that must make Swindon the new Florence...

Star of the Race
Felipe Massa, Ferrari, 1st
An immaculate race from Felipe Massa and a perfect response to his disappointment at the Hungaroring. He and Lewis Hamilton were a class apart at Valencia, but it was the Ferrari driver who set the majority of Fastest Laps in a race where only the two of them got a look in. If Ferrari are to favour one driver now, then he's making it a very easy choice, he was faultless.

What a pity he should ruin all that good work with the tossiest of comments in the press conference afterwards. To brand Adrian Sutil's failure to slow down in the pitlane and let him out as "not very clever" takes the kind of arrogant stupidity only an F1 driver could conjure up. Massa was toe-curlingly embarrassing. Did he really expect the Force-India to cruise down the pitlane on the rev limiter waiting to stand on the anchors should the Ferrari emerge?

Compare and contrast Massa's comments to some of the post-race comments from Fernando Alonso, who had every right to be blindingly angry, but who was restraint itself when talking to ITV's Louise Goodman.

WINNERS
Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, 2nd
Lewis looked distinctly under the weather this weekend and was the only guy to keep Massa honest. It's doubtful whether he could have matched Massa even on his best form, but he was never more than 10.2 seconds behind over the race distance.

Robert Kubica, BMW, 3rd
Kubica almost sneaked past Hamilton at the start but from then on it was damage limitation and one eye in the mirror for Heikki Kovalainen. If the Ferraris are going to blow engines at alternate races he could still be in there with a shout at the end.

Heikki Kovalainen, McLaren, 4th
Kovalainen wasn't held up by anyone in the race, so you'd expect him to be a bit closer to Lewis Hamilton than thirty-four seconds - that's a consistent lap time of over half a second slower.

Jarno Trulli Toyota, 5th and 7th
Jarno will be glad to be outscoring Timo Glock again and the Toyota team look like making fourth place in the Constructors' Championship their own now that both he and Timo are getting into the points. Even qualifying outside of Q3 is no barrier to Glock who is proving very adept at handling a heavily-fueled car. Maybe it's a good job overtaking is so difficult.

Sebastian Vettel, Toro Rosso, 6th
Given the increased pace of the Ferrari-powered Toro Rosso compared to the Renault-powered Red Bull, Sebastian Vettel may be having second thoughts about moving over. Vettel produced another solid performance, though he escaped unscathed from his familiar first lap moment-of-madness, coming from too far back and banging Raikkonen's wheels square on. Coulthard did the same to Sutil and wasn't so lucky.

Nico Rosberg, Williams, 8th
Despite starting the race on the supersoft tyres, Rosberg survived to score a point.

LOSERS
Valencia Organisers
Now repeat the mantra - "Valencia is a distinctive racing circuit and a valuable new addition to the F1 calendar. It's a modern Monaco". Or that's what Bernie would like you to think anyway. How about the Winners and Losers alternative: "Valencia is a very dull race in a faceless, dusty dockside car park."

The great redeeming feature about F1 street circuits is that they're nadgy tracks, likely to bite the driver for the tiniest of mistakes. That makes up for the intrinsic lack of overtaking. Take that danger away - as they have done at Valencia - and you have a track that can only rely on its scenery. When that scenery is a dockside dominated by ferries, the glamour evaporates.

It's hard to imagine the Automobile Club de Monaco getting worried about Valencia as an alternative for the beautiful people to hang out after the 2008 race. In fact you get the feeling that the Spanish have invested £70m in a white elephant. We have seen from the demise of the two German GPs after Schumacher's retirement, that simply having German drivers in the race cannot sustain the level of interest for a double dose of F1,

For a country that has no tradition of following F1 (they didn't even have TV coverage until Alonso's emergence into the spotlight, despite Marc Gene and Pedro de la Rosa) the organisers are absolutely dependent on Fernando's involvement.

It's been a great achievement to get the facility up and running so quickly, but most people don't watch sport for the swiftness and execution of the capital infrastructure projects.

Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari, DNF
Zero points is not what Raikkonen would have wanted - even if it evened up the Scuderia score after Massa blew an engine unit last time out. He's had a sorry time of late, qualifying behind Massa, starting poorly and getting stuck behind slower cars, and now he's caused uproar by exiting too early after his second pit-stop. Yet with six races to go, if two of them are wet (and Mount Fuji and Spa often are) then Raikkonen is a far bigger threat to Hamilton than Massa would be. Ferrari have a difficult path to tread.

Fernando Alonso, Renault, DNF
In the stop-start action of the opening corners it looked like Nakajima had half an eye on a car cutting the apex of the corner and didn't expect Alonso to brake so hard in front of him as they jostled with Timo Glock. Fernando was the innocent victim of what looked like a GP2 accident. Hard to know why it wasn't investigated further as it left 100,000 spectators distinctly unchuffed.

FIA Stewards
Where do you want to start, then...?

The shambolic performance of the stewards exceeded all W+L's expectations in Valencia, reaching new lows of inconsistency and demonstrating yet again that the multi-billion dollar sport of F1 is refereed by three blokes tossing a coin.

It started on Saturday with Timo Glock making Nick Heidfeld so angry about being blocked in qualifying that he drove his BMW off track. The stewards reviewed the tapes and came to the opinion that Glock hadn't got in the way. Compare this to Alonso's supposed impeding of Massa at Monza a few years back, or Heikki Kovalainen getting in the way of Mark Webber (who like Heidfeld, still qualified) before the French GP.

Kazuki Nakajima drove straight into the back of Fernando Alonso on the opening lap. You'd think that they might have considered that an avoidable accident and at least replayed the tape. Nope.

And finally, they set the most dangerous precedent of delaying Felipe Massa's "unsafe pit-stop release " decision for no real reason and set the tariff for dangerous driving in the pitlane at a mere 10,000 euros.

Effectively what they have said to the teams is that they can let their driver out into a narrow pitlane near another car and the most they can expect to get is a 10,000 euro fine. In the