Turkey 2008

Felipe Massa certainly seems to have made this track his own with a third consecutive win from the four races that have been held here. He took pole position in Saturday's qualifying and never really looked as if he would be headed. Lewis Hamilton managed to split the two Ferrari's at the end, holding off the only other Turkish Grand Prix winner, Kimi Raikkonen, although when he won the opening race he was driving for McLaren.

Heikki Kovalainen passed the FIA medical on Thursday (required because of his very heavy crash in Spain) and, according to McLaren's medical staff, he was actually now in better condition than before the crash because of the intense physical training he has carried out to make sure he was 100% fit. He showed that he had no after effects by qualifying on the front row ahead of his team-mate in 3rd and Kimi in 4th.

Heikki and Kimi made brief contact in Turn 1 at the start; Heikki's left rear tyre touched Kimi's right front wing endplate. The net result was that Heikki suffered a puncture and had to pit. This effectively placed him at the back of the field and although he recovered as the race wore on he could only finish 12th. During the race, Lewis made a typical Hamilton move on Felipe to take the lead but it proved to be short-lived because he had opted for a 3-stop strategy as opposed to the usual optimum 2-stops. This was partly because he preferred the hard tyre and wanted the shortest time possible on the obligatory soft tyre but principally it was because McLaren were concerned about tyre safety after problems at this race last year.

He drove extremely well and was only 4 seconds behind the winner despite an extra pit-stop that would have cost him 25+ seconds extra time than the 2 Ferrari's. Felipe said afterwards that he was relieved to find that Lewis was three-stopping! The two BMW's seemed to keep a low-profile during the race but, nevertheless, took 4th and 5th places and not only stayed ahead of McLaren in the Constructor's Championship but actually increased their advantage from one point to two.

Unfortunately, this race saw the demise of the Super Aguri F1 team through financial problems after a brave attempt to break into F1. On occasions last year they had outpaced their Honda backer's cars and both their drivers, Anthony Davidson and Takuma Sato deserve to still be in F1. A great shame that the modern-day costs of F1 effectively bar entry to any other than a global manufacturer.

Part of our UK television coverage is currently being devoted to celebrating 60 years of Formula One races at Silverstone with Martin Brundle driving an historic car from each of the last 6 decades. At Spain we saw the legendary Maserati 250F and this week it was the turn of Colin Chapman's Lotus 49, which won on its debut at Zandvoort in 1967 with Jim Clark at the wheel and a 1-2 finish was on the cards until Graham Hill retired with engine trouble.

It wasn't only Chapman - Tyrell, Brabham, McLaren, Williams, Wolf, Hesketh et al have all proved that you don't need huge budgets to produce great cars and exciting races. Once the global car manufacturers started to take an interest in F1, the only conclusion to be drawn is that as the budgets have gone up, the excitement and thrills have gone down!

Race Results posted by
David Little
12th May 2008

  The HTML code for this page has been validated by the World Wide Web Consortium.