Autosport on Kimi and Massa

The Theory of Relativity

Prior to the season, many had predicted that Kimi Raikkonen would win the 2007 Formula One championship. After seven races, some are already speculating that Ferrari are looking to replace the Finn. What had gone wrong since he won the opening round at Melbourne? And are things really as bad as perceived? Adam Cooper keeps a cool head and analyses the situation

By Adam Cooper
autosport.com contributing writer

Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari career could hardly have got off to a better start in Australia in March. Pole position and victory - it was the sort of debut performance that almost made you think, Michael who?

Since then, however, not a lot has gone right for the Finn. He followed up with a couple of solid third places, but the last four starts have brought him just 10 points, the same number he earned in Melbourne. He is already 26 points off world championship leader Lewis Hamilton, but surprisingly perhaps, still only seven behind his teammate Felipe Massa.

If Fernando Alonso is a little confused as to how his move to McLaren has worked out, then Kimi is surely equally perplexed. Not only has the team lost their early winning form of late, but he has frequently struggled to match the pace of Massa, the man he perhaps viewed as his support act when he originally signed up.

Australia: a great start

Ferrari hit the ground running in Australia. The team made the most of limited pre-season testing, and made a big step forward just before the first race. Their ongoing knowledge of Bridgestone certainly gave the team an advantage, and in Melbourne, everything clicked.

At least it did for Kimi - he was helped by the fact that Massa had a problem in qualifying, and started from the back. With BMW's Nick Heidfeld holding up the McLarens, that first race was a cruise for Raikkonen.

Things got a little harder in Malaysia, where he made the first of what has turned into a series of bad starts. The McLarens got away, but third was better than nothing. And Massa's fumbled attempts to pass Hamilton seemed to confirm that Kimi was the main man.


Raikkonen repeated that result in Bahrain, but this time Massa salvaged his reputation with a great win. Then things started to go astray.

In Barcelona Kimi was an early retirement with a mechanical problem - still the only such failure experienced by any of the top four runners all season. But Felipe was already out in front, leaving Kimi trailing.

Monaco should have been a chance to put Massa in the shade, notwithstanding the performance advantage of the McLarens, but the Finn blew it at the exit of the Swimming Pool in qualifying - the back stepped out as he turned in, and the front right just clipped the barrier.

It was an odd mistake, but at least he was able to demonstrate his bravery to the team. A track-rod was broken but a cracked wishbone was the biggest problem. There was no time to fix it, but Kimi said forget it, he would take the responsibility. Not surprisingly, the engineers thought better of that suggestion...

It was a race of low attrition, but nevertheless his progress up to eighth appeared a bit laboured, and one couldn't help thinking what his predecessor might have done in similar circumstances.

Many saw Monaco as a one-off, but Ferrari were again shy of McLaren's pace in Canada, a very different kind of track. Raikkonen edged out Massa in qualifying, although the safety car meant that we never saw the true fuel loads.

In a race where anything could happen, Kimi could not better fifth. He made another poor start, and made life difficult for himself by damaging his front wing on Massa's rear tyre. Picking up some of Robert Kubica's debris didn't help, either. He was also delayed by having to wait behind his teammate at the first stops. But overall, it was another unconvincing performance.

Monaco and Montreal are very different in terms of aero set-up, but the common link was the supersoft tyres and the type of asphalt. And while the emphasis on top speeds may be worlds apart, both put a premium on traction out of the slow stuff. And as Massa also pointed out, they were both very strong tracks for McLaren in 2006.

Like his teammate, Raikkonen was convinced that Indianapolis would be more of a fair fight: "The last two races are special places, Monaco and Montreal," he said on Thursday. "So this is more like a traditional race. We will see here really where we are, but I think the teams are very close to each other."

Indianapolis: Getting closer?


Ferrari were indeed closer to McLaren in America, but close is not good enough. Once again, Raikkonen had a frustrating weekend. He was beaten by Massa in qualifying, although unlike in Canada Ferrari did not have to worry about BMW, as Heidfeld threw away a certain third with a mistake in the penultimate corner.

However, Kimi's biggest problem was that in the second session he had to take an unplanned extra run on new soft tyres, as he had slipped down the order and faced the very real risk that he would be bumped - in Montreal he very nearly lost out, having not done an extra run.

He made it through, but the bottom line was that he went into the race with no fresh soft tyres available for the first stint, unlike his main rivals. The team gambled on putting him on new medium tyres for the opening stint, hoping that would be a better compromise.

But once again, Kimi had a bad start, losing out to both Heidfeld and Renault's Heikki Kovalainen. They were on the preferable soft tyre, and as we'd seen elsewhere this year, the Ferrari appeared to be unable to do much when stuck behind another car.

Eventually things fell in his favour. He caught Massa - setting fastest lap along the way. In the final stint Raikkonen was on the quicker tyre while those ahead were on the medium, but it was too little too late, and he was consigned to fourth place.

"To finish fourth is never good," he reflected afterwards. "I think we paid a big penalty to have a not so good start. The car was pretty OK, once we got racing, but if you get stuck behind some people it's very difficult to get past.

"We took on hard tyres from the beginning, we didn't have any new softs, and we didn't want to risk that on the start, and anyhow we lost some places some on the start. Once we put the soft tyres, they were good, but like I said it didn't help, it was a bit late. Like I said, if you are behind that's the penalty that you pay."

He was at least able to keep the pressure on Massa, although as at McLaren, the team tried to keep things fair - both drivers turned down their engines at the same time, in order to preserve them for Magny-Cours.

"We did the same on both cars, so it was an even affair," the Finn added. "It was just too difficult to overtake. When you get close enough even when you are faster and you lose downforce, you cannot get close enough to overtake - that's the biggest problem.

"We were racing for the third place, so it's normal that you try to get close and try to get by. [Felipe] made a mistake in one place and I got close to him, unfortunately it was in the wrong place, you cannot really get past there.

"I think we had a pretty good race car once we got clean air and the soft tyre, but it was too just late already at that point. We need to look at the situation and improve qualifying, but I think it looks more worse than it is."


Better than it looks?

That was probably a pretty accurate comment from Raikkonen. As noted, he set fastest lap last Sunday, and at the point he did it - just before the second stops - his main rivals were on similar fuel loads and were also on the soft tyre. When he was potentially quicker in the last stint, he had little choice but to sit behind his teammate.

Had he not lost so much ground behind Kovalainen in the early running - he was around 11 seconds behind Massa when the Brazilian made his first stop - he might have been able to jump to third.

It should also be noted that the gap to his teammate in qualifying was 0.136 seconds. In the race he pitted a full three laps later, which pretty much explains that deficit, although he probably extended that margin from two laps by saving fuel when running behind the Renault.

In other words, this was probably his best race relative to his teammate for a while, an indication perhaps that the inevitable hurdles involved in settling into the team and adapting his style to car and tyres are being overcome.

But the fact is Massa is consistently putting on a stronger showing than most folk expected, and Kimi has not been able to establish himself in the pacesetting role that he had anticipated.

Qualifying remains a problem for both drivers, and much seems to revolve around getting temperature into the tyres over that crucial flying lap.

After Indy, race engineering head Luca Baldisserri explained it thus: "It would seem that when McLaren put on new tyres and they are able to do a lap, they are much more consistently quick than us. Our point is that sometimes when we put on a new set we can be very, very quick but a lot of times we do mistakes, and this means that we are on the limit.

"Everybody has the same tyres, so the grip is there, because other cars are able to use the grip, that's the problem. The grip is there and you have to use the grip in the best way as possible, so that's the key point, and the whole factory at home is concentrated on trying to understand this."

The first lap tyre performance issue also makes life difficult at the start, while Raikkonen has also had the bad luck to be on the dirty side of the track in the last couple of races, which didn't help. Nevertheless, it seems odd that a guy thought of as an instinctive, aggressive racer has fared so poorly in the opening seconds of so many races this year.

No one believes that Raikkonen has lost any of the pure blinding pace that we know he is capable of, but these days there is much more to being an F1 driver than just driving fast. Even compared to the high standards established by Michael Schumacher, Hamilton is doing an extraordinary job of making the full use of all the facilities at his disposal, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

In contrast, Kimi has never been the proactive type and is certainly not the sort of driver who puts very much effort into motivating the troops in the way that his predecessor did. He's experienced difficult times with difficult cars at McLaren, and been part of a revival on more than one occasion. But it's probably fair to say that test drivers Alex Wurz and Pedro de la Rosa did more to get things pointed in the right technical direction than Kimi did.


Frustrated by his early retirement in Barcelona in May, Kimi skipped out of the track with some 27 laps to go, in large part because he wanted to get home to Switzerland to watch Finland play in the ice hockey World Cup. He was given permission to go, and you could argue that he had little to offer in a debrief after running just a few laps, but it didn't look good. That evening the visiting Schumacher finally left after 7:00 pm, having sat through the full post-race briefing.

After a difficult qualifying for Ferrari in Canada, Kimi left the paddock for downtown Montreal at 4:20 pm. Again, perhaps he had said all he had to say to his engineers. But when he was racing, Michael would have been there for many more hours, especially after a bad day when there was work to be done.

You could argue that all that matters is what a driver does with the steering wheel, but in modern F1, that is really no longer the case. There's no doubt that Kimi is bringing less to the table than Schumacher did, and in the overall scheme of things, that has perhaps made the team a little weaker.

After Spain Schumacher also appeared at Monaco and Montreal, but he gave Indy a miss. Exactly what his role is remains something of a mystery. We do know he contributes in meetings, and after all he knows an enormous amount about how to make a car go faster, and how to formulate strategy.

However, his on-off presence must be strange for Kimi in particular, although less so for Massa, who has worked with Schumacher since his Maranello testing season, and obviously learned a lot and enjoyed working alongside him last year.

The Brazilian has made full use of that knowledge this season, too, and his instant recovery from his Sepang disappointment is a sure sign of how confident he is right now. If Fernando Alonso believes that McLaren favours their British protege, Kimi must surely harbour similar thoughts about how Ferrari's boss dotes upon his Latin teammate.

The bigger picture

Perhaps the strangest thing about Ferrari's recent dip in fortunes is that it seems to be so deeply related to tyres and tyre use.


At the start of the season it seemed that Ferrari's Bridgestone knowledge was going to make all the difference. Sure, the tyres were not the same as those used by the red cars and others at the end of 2006, but they were based on earlier technology that the team knew well, and there seemed to be no substitute for those years of experience gained with the Japanese supplier.

The fact that there would be no tyre development this year seemed likely to work to the favour of Ferrari. Bridgestone had mapped out the whole season with its range of hards, mediums, softs and supersofts, and thus Ferrari could make full use of their extensive experience, knowing exactly what was coming for each circuit and how things were likely to play out.

But rivals have learned more about the 2007 tyres, and learned quicker, than perhaps anyone expected. Oddly enough, these last three races were all at tracks that nobody had tested at, so McLaren (and BMW) had not had a chance to dial into tracks with the Bridgestones. It seems already to be a genuine level playing field.

Like everyone else, Ferrari have had to adjust to the fact that their in-season progress has to come from the chassis side. That process must be hard to manage after so many years of working so closely with their tyre partner and constantly developing the tyres to suit the car as much as vice versa.

There's also the matter of the missing Ross Brawn. In Australia, it seemed that a seamless transition had been achieved. Ferrari have long been a team of great depth rather than just a few marquee names, and some talented people matured in Brawn's slipstream.

But there is no substitute for strong leadership and a firm hand on the tiller. After Kimi's Melbourne blitz, my feeling was that all would be fine as long as the team were on top, but as time went by, Brawn's absence would be felt more keenly. As soon as the team slipped up or the pressure was really on, the team might struggle to get back on track as easily as they might have done in the past. Is that what we've seen happen in recent weeks?

We're now heading back to 'normal' circuits, places with more emphasis on high-speed changes of direction than straight-line performance or traction out of slow stuff.

Magny-Cours has been kind to Ferrari over the years, and Michael won there last year. It's also five years since Kimi Raikkonen so nearly scored his maiden Grand Prix win there, only to fall foul of some stray Toyota oil. A return to his Melbourne form would be an appropriate way to mark that unfortunate anniversary.

"Sometimes you have difficult times in racing, in championships," he said before the Indy race. "It is not the first time for me, so we just need to be patient, work hard and get everything right. So it is not too late and we will try and get back from there."

 

Hi Carol -

Thanks for the report, very interesting that Felipe was center stage. Nobody would have guessed a few months ago. Wonder what the rest of the season holds.

Gary