Felipe Massa, Ferrari’s red star by Martin Brundle

Felipe Massa has taken a step forward and is showing signs he could be the next champion

We are approaching the halfway point of a Formula One season that has already seen four different championship leaders in Felipe Massa, Kimi Raikkonen, Lewis Hamilton and Robert Kubica. It’s shaping up to be a classic contest as the stability of the technical regulations has led to teams becoming more closely matched.

The Ferrari has addressed its weak points of last year over the kerbs and in slow corners, while the McLaren has overcome its deficit in the fast corners. BMW has taken a big step forward and is ready to pick up any gifts from the favourites.

Both of the top teams can look back and see wasted opportunities. Championship leader Massa made major errors in his pointless first two races, his Ferrari teammate Raikkonen did likewise in Australia and Monaco. Hamilton has messed up on three occasions and his McLaren teammate Heikki Kovalainen lost the chance of winning at Turkey by being too cautious in the first corner. Any one of Massa, Raikkonen or Hamilton could have been well clear by now, but they are not - leaving BMW’s so far error-free Kubica in the thick of the championship fight.

On his day Massa is immense. We saw him deliver his almost customary victories at Bahrain and Turkey, but it was generally accepted that over the course of the season Raikkonen would be the one to put in the critical fast laps around the pit-stop window, get to the front and control the race. Yet Massa has apparently upped his game yet further this year. It’s clear that Felipe’s race engineer Rob Smedley is having a big influence on his approach, giving him a more steely edge. Massa is impressing me in the level way in which he is handling success and failure, taking both in his stride. It is not at all inconceivable that he could be this year’s world champion.

Raikkonen is difficult to read because he is so inert, and then there was his extraordinary refusal to deny he was considering retirement after 2009. He’s coming to Silverstone on the back of a second place in France that would have been a victory but for his exhaust problem. In a way that was unlucky but in another sense it was fortunate – ordinarily the engine bay would have melted and he should have been black flagged for having a dangerous car.

There’s inevitably an element of defensive design from Ferrari that enabled the car to keep going. We often see the Ferraris bounce off other cars without damage. This team know how to design and build championship-winning cars. They’ve been champions in six of the past eight years and are a formidable force in every department, not by accident, and not just because of Michael Schumacher.

Although Raikkonen will feel he was robbed in France, he won convincingly in Malaysia and Spain and he was set to be in the fight for the chequered flag in Canada until Hamilton took him out in the pit lane. Although we’ve also seen the occasional fairly quiet performance from him, there remains a calm confidence and it’s difficult to envisage him not being involved in the title battle all the way to the end.

Hamilton has had an up and down season - absolutely mighty in Australia, Monaco and, until his pit-lane faux pas, Canada, but peppered with a few critical errors. His penalty for his first-lap pass in France was possibly harsh, but apparently there was another camera angle demonstrating that he was only able to make the pass stick by braking unusually late and inevitably missing the corner.

As a teenage fan concisely said to me at the Silverstone F1 test this week: “I think they are being hard on him, but if he didn’t make mistakes they wouldn’t have the chance.” I can’t argue with that.

However, it is hard to be too critical when we applaud some of the outrageous things he can do in a racing car, the raw speed, the way he can finely balance and exquisitely slide a car, that first-corner judgment that sees him making up places. It is that enormous confidence, bordering on arrogance, behind the wheel that allows him to achieve those things. So to criticise him when the same qualities lead to errors is unfair to an extent, although he has to find a more consistent balance and control of determination, aggression and frustration.

Where I think he is misguided is in waging a war with the media. That’s a battle he will lose horribly, the media answer to their editors and are totally driven by the story, not the relationship. The more senior media members have had the pleasure of talking to the likes of Clark, Stewart, Andretti, Fittipaldi, Villeneuve and Peterson, and so take more than 18 months to be fully impressed. They will work with you, but it’s reciprocal, and they are better friends than enemies. An angry driver will always drive like Lewis did in Magny-Cours, overaggressively bouncing off the kerbs and sliding around grabbing half-chances to overtake.

There was a three-race period from Turkey onwards where McLaren looked like it had the high ground on pure performance, but in France, even without his penalties, Lewis would have been third, with the possibility of nicking second from the limping Raikkonen.

That doesn’t initially bode well for Silverstone, as the high speed demands of the two tracks are quite similar. Lewis was on pole last year, but it was nothing more than a glory run aided by an unrealistically low fuel level and the race saw him a fading third. The good news is that he looked terrific in Silverstone testing earlier this week and his fighting spirit might just be enough to get him in the mix.

He described his fan support at the test as “insane”, in the nicest possible way, and that is an energy that he can use to help rise above the confident scarlet prancing horse jockeys. The crowd will be willing him on, and that will bring extra inspiration without doubt. Mega-stardom needs to be put on hold for now though, with total focus on this critical and busy mid-season phase.

By Martin Brundle