The 2008 season promised to be a re-run of the previous season, but with some subtle changes. Firstly, though Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton remained to head the challenge of Ferrari and McLaren respectively, the third fork of the trident from 2007's championship fight came into the new year on the back foot. Fernando Alonso was back at Renault, having completely burned his McLaren bridges over the latter half of last year, and looked to be facing an uphill struggle to get in the mix in 2008. Meanwhile, Alonso was replaced by promising Finn Heikki Kovalainen, as Ron Dennis sought to foster a slightly more constructive driver relationship than during the Alonso/Hamilton year, while Felipe Massa faced a make or break year alongside Raikkonen.
Plenty of other teams were talking the talk pre-season. Red Bull were predicting a step forward with their Adrian Newey-designed RB4, Toyota repeated their promise of every year that they would become a true challenger for race wins, Honda had high hopes for an impact from new technical boss Ross Brawn, and Toro Rosso's new driver pairing were full of promise, the "two Sebs" of Vettel and Bourdais both highly rated. Elsewhere, Williams were hoping for further progress after their relative improvement in 2007 and Force India joined the field after Vijay Mallya became the latest owner of That Team That Used To Be Jordan. Just about the only teams looking like taking a step back in 2008 were BMW Sauber, who had struggled throughout pre-season testing with a car that was tricky to optimise to individual tracks, and Super Aguri, who after a stunning 2007 were back to budget issues and penniless grovelling to Honda. For one of those teams, the year would turn out to be a glowing success, for the other, a devastating failure.
AUSTRALIA
And so, the 22 cars rolled out of the garages at Albert Park in Melbourne to start the season, and plenty of pre-season assumptions were ripped up from the word go. BMW belied their dismal testing performances to stick one of their drivers on the front row of the opening grid of the year, in the form of Robert Kubica. The Pole was just beaten to the, erm, pole by Hamilton, who kicked off his season with a double helping of positives, after Raikkonen suffered a mechanical drama in qualifying which left him mired in 15th place on the grid. Also having their pre-season bubble of hope popped with the pin of reality were Mark Webber's faithful fans (i.e. the population of Australia). A spectacular brake failure saw the Aussie crash out of qualifying and line up just one place ahead of the Finn in the Ferrari.
If the grid in Melbourne was slightly crazy though, the race itself was positively bonkers. Hamilton may have controlled the race from the front, and took the win with ease, but behind him, it all kicked off. The first lap was a mass of collisions, three safety car periods were required for further crashes which eliminated David Coulthard and Felipe Massa in a collision a turn one, and then Timo Glock's Toyota in a spectacular solo accident towards the end. The new safety car rules were exposed for the sham there were, as Kovalainen's race was ruined by having to wait for the pits to open after Glock's shunt to make his final stop. The rate of attrition meant he still came home 5th, as just seven cars took the flag. Raikkonen's recovery drive was ruined by two needless spins at the same corner, and he retired late on with engine failure, picking up a single point after getting classified in 8th. All in all, a near-perfect outcome for Lewis Hamilton.
Championship contenders - Hamilton 10pts, Raikkonen 1pt, Massa 0pts, Kubica 0pts.
MALAYSIA
Ferrari hit back at Sepang, as they began an early season run of dominance for the Italian squad. Massa raised a few eyebrows by outpacing Raikkonen in qualifying, although at this point in the season that phenomenon could still be explained away with fuel load alone. Elsewhere in qualifying, the big talking point was safety. In the final stages of the session, Nick Heidfeld was forced to veer around the two McLarens dawdling around on fuel-saving inlaps while on his final flying run. The powers that be acted swiftly, penalising both Kovalainen and Hamilton five grid places, and bringing in a rule requiring inlaps in Q3 to be completed within a certain percentage of a cars qualifying time.
In the race itself, with the McLarens on the back foot, Ferrari made hay, Raikkonen overcoming Massa at the first stops and the pair of them lapping in glorious unison. Until lap 31 that was, when under precisely no pressure, Massa spun into retirement, leaving him pointless after two events and with the Italian media calling for his head on a platter of some description. Kubica was the grateful recipient of the runners-up spot, while Hamilton's recovery drive yielded a mere fifth place, from ninth on the grid. Alonso's pre-season grumbles, meanwhile, were being brought into context. He struggled to a measly eighth place without the attrition of Melbourne to help him out, and he was already written out of the championship hunt. As, by some, was Massa. Perhaps too quickly. Well, obviously too quickly.
Championship contenders - Hamilton 14pts, Raikkonen 11pts, Kubica 8pts, Massa 0pts.
BAHRAIN
The teams headed for the desert bowl of Sakhir next, and delivered a complete mirage of a sporting spectacle. Hamilton never seemed to recover from a hefty practice crash on the Friday, and could only manage third position on the grid, behind Massa and the charmingly surprising pole man Robert Kubica, whose maiden top qualifying slot allowed the world's media to implode under the weight of "pole on pole" gags to be made.
The hope for an exciting race lasted as long as the draft to the first turn, as Massa and Raikkonen powered through from second and fourth on the grid to take a 1-2 that was never realistically threatened by the chasing pack. Eschewing his early-season tendencies, Massa managed to go the whole race without crashing, and became the third different winner in the first three events. Hamilton's start was dreadful, and his recovery drive after he was swamped by the pack was even worse, lasting all of a lap and a half before he drove into the back of old nemesis Fernando Alonso. Despite ITV's efforts to claim that the Spaniard must have brake-tested the Brit, Renault released telemetry to prove Alonso's throttle input had been consistent, and the incident simply became the first signs of the anti-Hamilton conspiracy moans that would come to pepper the season like peppercorns ruining a delicious bowl of ice cream.
Championship contenders - Raikkonen 19pts, Hamilton 14pts, Kubica 14pts, Massa 10pts.
SPAIN
After a fairly tedious race in Bahrain, the only possible worse next destination would have been Barcelona. Thankfully then, the teams headed to Barcelona. The home crowd had made some less than pleasant headlines during the pre-season by staging anti-Hamilton meets during test sessions with apparant racist undertones, after the bitter Alonso/Hamilton clashes in 2007, but thankfully the mood in the crowd was more subdued given Alonso's measly start to the season. He gave them something to cheer about in qualifying, managing a front row start behind polesitter Kimi Raikkonen thanks to extracting most of the fuel out of his car. The battle for grid slots was tight around the oft-tested track. Hamilton only managed fifth place, but was less than four hundredths of a second slower than third place man Massa.
The race was the crushing bore that Barcelona almost always delivers. Massa jumped Alonso at the start, and although both Hamilton and Kubica were able to keep the flying Ferraris in sight this time out, they never challenged the hegemony of the red machines on track. The only talking point of the race was a horrific crash for Kovalainen, whose luckless start to the year continued as he speared off the track at high speed following a wheel failure. Despite ending buried in the tyre barrier, Heikki was thankfully perfectly alright. This race also marked the final "competitive" outing for the penniless Super Aguri outfit. Having spent the first four races on life support from Honda, a buyer for the stricken team could not be found, and they offically withdrew from the championship before the next race. From the promise of 24 cars when the 2008 entry list was announced, F1 found itself back at 20 competitors.
Championship contenders - Raikkonen 29pts, Hamilton 20pts, Kubica 19pts, Massa 18pts.
TURKEY
Those 20 competitors next travelled to Istanbul, where the slow but sure renaissance of McLaren continued, as Kovalainen and Hamilton qualified right behind pole man Massa, and ahead of the championship leader Raikkonen. The question was whether the silver cars could stay on the pace come the race itself. And the answer was "not really".
Although a canny three stop strategy for Hamilton saw him finish second, passing race leader Massa as he did so prior to making his final stop, and just coming home ahead of the second Ferrari of Raikkonen, the race pace was again not quite there for the McLarens, and Hamilton wasn't helped by his own tyre management issues, which led McLaren to make the tactical switch to the extra stop. Meanwhile, Kovalainen's afternoon was over almost before it began, as he (ironically) cut a tyre while scrapping with Raikkonen, and was forced to make a costly early pit stop. Further back, Mark Webber continued to impress for Red Bull with seventh. Any early hopes of a significant shift forwards on the grid for the team in 2008 had been snuffed out early on, but Webber was single-handedly keeping them in the scrap for "best of the rest" in the constructors championship with Williams, Toyota and Renault.
Championship contenders - Raikkonen 35pts, Massa 28pts, Hamilton 28pts, Kubica 24pts.
With five races in the bag, and with four of them dominated by one or both of the Ferrari men, any fleeting hopes of a close title scrap seemed consigned to the idea that Massa could take the fight to Raikkonen, and although Hamilton was still in touch with the red pair, that was more down to consistancy and his early success in Australia than anything else. But as the season entered the middle stages, the balance of power shifted dramatically, as Hamilton brought himself into contention, albeit via some truly monumental cock-ups. But more of that in part two of this season review.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
