A.Wayne

Well , things are not as strange as it used to be with MS around , so maybe we could use him a little , NOT!

but i do love this launch control system Ferrari gave to ruben ...


Rubens get new launch control system.. 02 , he actually pull the front wheels of the ground when launching .. LOL...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zCjpUIzoeY

A.Wayne

By Alan Baldwin Sunday, July 1st 2007, 16:50 GMT

Kimi Raikkonen on the podium in FranceKimi Raikkonen answered his critics and breathed some life back into his flagging title campaign by leading Ferrari to a one-two French Grand Prix win on Sunday.

It was the Finn's second win of the Formula One season, but his first podium finish since Bahrain in April five races ago.

Raikkonen arrived in France seven points behind Brazilian teammate Felipe Massa and with the media highlighting his struggle as replacement to Ferrari's retired seven times world champion Michael Schumacher.

With Massa on pole position for the fourth time in eight races, while Raikkonen started third, it looked as if the Finn might have to play a supporting role again on Sunday.

Instead, he swept past McLaren's rookie championship leader Lewis Hamilton to take second place at the start and then made the most of the pitstop strategy to get past Massa and stay ahead to the chequered flag.

"I think we needed that," he told a post-race news conference.

"The work starts paying off now. It took maybe longer than we expected, but in the end it is good that we got the win and are back in the right place now.

"I think we are back where we expected to be," added the Finn, still 22 points off Hamilton's tally of 64 but just five adrift of Massa and eight behind McLaren's double world champion Spaniard Fernando Alonso.

"We had a bit of a hard time but I kind of expected to have difficult times.

"People always think that you've lost it when you don't have good results, but we just work hard and try to get it right and I think we can still improve."

McLaren had won the last three races, after Massa's victories in Bahrain and Spain, but Ferrari showed their improved form in testing at Silverstone last week had translated into race pace.

"Both drivers got great starts, then they drove exceptionally well and fought it out between themselves for the win," said team boss Jean Todt, celebrating the 14th anniversary of his joining Ferrari.

"Only traffic and strategy finally decided which one got the upper hand.

"This one-two is crucial for the rest of both championships," added the Frenchman. "There are still nine races to go and everything is still possible."

A.Wayne

Kimi Raikkonen warned his rivals that there is more to come from him and Ferrari after winning the French Grand Prix – his first victory since the season-opener at Melbourne in March.

The Finn beat his team-mate Felipe Massa to the flag at Magny-Cours after passing the Brazilian during their final pit stops.

And after admitting relief at finally breaking his run of poor results, Kimi promised to deliver more of the same in the coming races.

"It's nice," he said.

"I think we have had a bit of a hard time, but I kind of expected to have a bit difficult times.

"Okay people always think that you've lost it when you don't have a good result.

"But we have just worked hard and tried to get it right and I think that we can still improve. We are still not where we want to be but we are definitely happier with the car since the last test, and the last races even but we just couldn't get it together so.

"I think we have the basis to have a good speed in the car now so I hope we can keep this up in the next races.

Raikkonen said that making a good getaway, a weak point for him this season, was a vital factor in his win on Sunday.

"Finally the start worked for me and it helped a lot," he said.

"I think the car was good all the time but not exactly perfect, but I was very happy with the car.

"I just tried to push and keep up with Felipe because I knew I was going to stop a bit later. Just before the first stop I had a quite a bit of traffic, but in the second stop we managed to get ahead of him.

"It was a good day for me and for the team."

Raikkonen added that while had pushed hard in the laps between Massa's stop and his own he had struggled to pace the Brazilian in the middle stint of the race.

"We needed to have a good run in to the second stop," he said.

"I was a bit further away than I really wanted to be from him, but that's racing. I couldn't really stay close enough. But it worked out perfectly in the end so I couldn't ask for more.

"Of course you would rather start from the front, it makes your life easier, but we knew we should be okay in the race.

"It all depended on what happened at the start and we had a very good start this time."

A.Wayne

The man regarded as the world's fastest racing driver has struggled to adapt to Ferrari following his move from McLaren as replacement for Michael Schumacher.

The 27-year-old has looked anything but the favourite for the world title, a status he enjoyed at the start of the season.

Limping from one disappointment to another, Raikkonen - signed on a reputed stratospheric salary of £25.3m - has been a tiger without teeth.

Yet Raikkonen's convincing victory in last Sunday's French Grand Prix suggested Lewis Hamilton's hopes of making history as the first rookie to win the world title may yet be facing a serious threat.



As far as Hamilton is concerned, Raikkonen - and team-mate Felipe Massa - are the rivals he cannot control.

Hamilton's team-mate Fernando Alonso is the rival closest to him in the championship.

But formidable as he is, the Spaniard is in the same car as Hamilton, so unless the Englishman runs into problems, Alonso is unlikely to be able to make big inroads into his 14-point lead.


Raikkonen's errors have let Massa become the leading Ferrari driver
Although Massa is a further three points adrift, and Raikkonen another five, Ferrari were in a different league from McLaren on their way to a one-two at Magny-Cours.

If that continues, Hamilton could be looking at third as a best-case scenario at each race - and will lose chunks of points at a time.

It is every man for himself at Ferrari, and Massa remains marginally the best-placed of their drivers in the championship.

But it is clear who is potentially the most dangerous Ferrari driver as long as the man Di Montezemolo calls "the real Raikkonen" has indeed finally emerged - there have already been murmurings from within the team that Raikkonen has forced them to re-evaluate their understanding of what is possible, even with Schumacher as their reference point.

Raikkonen's inconsistent form this year has gone a long way to underlining why, while he is regarded as the fastest driver in F1, it was Alonso who started this year regarded as the best (a position which will be under threat from Hamilton if things carry on as they are).


People always think that you've lost it when you don't have a good result

Kimi Raikkonen
While there is no doubt about Raikkonen's pace, his application out of the car is another matter - both at the circuit and away from it, where his fondness for what might euphemistically be called liquid refreshment is well known.

Raikkonen's dominant victory at the first race in Australia hid the problems he was having adapting to Ferrari - and particularli to Bridgestone's tyres.

Alonso had similar problems at McLaren, as the Japanese rubber is designed with a different philosophy from the Michelin tyres they had grown used to over the previous years and requires a fundamental change in driving style.

Those difficulties affected Raikkonen's performance in Malaysia and Bahrain, where he was off the pace.

Since the following race, Spain, he has been Ferrari's faster driver, but a broken suspension forced an early retirement in Barcelona.


Could Hamilton soon be fending off a Raikkonen title assault?
Then Raikkonen compromised his own performances to varying degrees with errors and lapses of concentration in the Monaco, Canada and US races, where Ferrari were anyway off McLaren's pace because of problems getting their tyres up to optimum temperature.

Nevertheless, a close examination of Raikkonen's pace before France had suggested that he was now on top of his new car and that another win was not far away, as long as Ferrari could erase McLaren's advantage.

And in France, where Ferrari's pace was improved dramatically by some significant developments that improved the way it worked its tyres, he proved it.

Raikkonen's race engineer, Chris Dyer, diplomatically describes his problems as part of the "natural process" of a driver fitting into a new team.

"It's just a constant process of trying to understand him better, trying to understand the car better and get the most out of both of them," Dyer says.

Raikkonen himself says: "We had a bit of a hard time but I kind of expected to have a bit of a difficult time.


It maybe took longer than we expected but we're kind of back in the right place now

Kimi Raikkonen
"So, OK, people always think that you've lost it when you don't have a good result but we just worked hard and try to get it right and I think we can still improve.

"In the last races [before France] we just couldn't get it together. I think it seems to have good speed now so we must keep it up in the next races."

That seems an eminently achievable aim. Hamilton says he expects McLaren to be more competitive at Silverstone than they were in France, but it is difficult to predict whether they will be a match for Ferrari.

On the one hand, the long, fast corners in the first half of the lap will favour the red car, but the slower, shorter ones later on will suit the dynamic direction change of the McLaren.

After Silverstone, there are a number of races that can be expected to favour Ferrari - Germany, Turkey, Italy, Belgium - but others that could suit McLaren.


Raikkonen's is seen as arguably the fastest driver in the world
Certainly Raikkonen sees France as a watershed.

"We knew what our problems were," he said. "We try to improve all the time and I think the work is starting to pay off now. It maybe took longer than we expected but we're kind of back in the right place now.

"We just need to keep it up and improve."

Whether that will be enough to peg back Hamilton's lead is another matter, but at the very least an on-form Raikkonen would guarantee some drama trying.

A.Wayne

Hey Chaps,
I found an article written by Petu , you might find the analysis interesting




The battle for supremacy within Ferrari's driver line-up has been much closer than many anticipated in 2007.

Felipe Massa's stock has risen thanks to two accomplished victories and a consistent points-scoring run, but is he really faster than Kimi Raikkonen? Expert analyst Mark Hughes looks at the facts.

Kimi Raikkonen’s return to winning form for Ferrari in France saw him produce the sort of error-free, consistently-on-it sort of drive he’s been failing to deliver since Bahrain, the third race of the season.

Ever since that event – where he left an open door on the first lap that Fernando Alonso walked through, then was later half-asleep on the restart behind the Safety Car – his races have been compromised by little lapses.

At Barcelona he lost a crucial place off the grid, at Monaco he made an inexplicable error in Q2 on Saturday that restricted him to mid-grid, in Canada he damaged his wing at the first corner against the back of team-mate Felipe Massa, at Indianapolis he again lost crucial places off the grid.

In two of those races – Bahrain and Spain - Massa took consecutive beautifully accomplished victories.

So the perception built that Massa was ‘blowing away’ the man who prior to this year had the unofficial tag of ‘world’s fastest driver’.

But actually it hasn’t been like that.

Raikkonen’s shortfall this year has not been one of raw performance, but of sharpness, of making the right instinctive moves in the competitive heat of the moment.

The underlying speed behind the little errors that have proved so costly has been very much there.

In fact, the last time that Massa was genuinely faster through a weekend was in Malaysia, the second race of the year.

In fact, that was th
e only time Massa had been faster all year until, ironically, France – where Kimi won, aided by a better strategy.

The idea that actually Raikkonen has been overall the faster Ferrari driver is very much against the perception and so will take some explaining.

The picture has been skewed by differing fuel weights in the top-10 run-off sessions, but let’s look at it race by race…

Australia. No comparison possible, because of Massa’s gearbox problem in Q2 that kept him out of the run-off. Raikkonen took a dominant pole and win but his team mate was out of the picture. Speed score: Raikkonen 0, Massa 0.

Malaysia. Massa was quicker all weekend, by a couple of tenths. Felipe made a Horlicks of trying to pass Hamilton and so Kimi got the result. But in terms of speed Maasa was the man. Speed score: Massa 1, Raikkonen 0.

Bahrain. Both of Raikkonen’s new tyre qualifying runs were baulked by traffic. So no comparison possible. Speed score remained therefore at Massa 1, Raikkonen 0.

Spain. Massa was on pole, Raikkonen only third but there was absolutely nothing between them once fuel weights were taken into account. We didn’t get to see this play out because Raikkonen retired before his first stop. But team members confirmed that he’d been fuelled three laps heavier than Massa. Score remained Massa 1, Raikkonen 0.

Monaco. Raikkonen made that bizarre error in Q2 that damaged his suspension and kept him out of the run-off. However, throughout the weekend up to that point he had been consistently 0.2-3s faster than Massa.

he team confirmed that he had achieved a much better handling balance than Massa, and wasn’t being compromised by understeer. They were deeply disappointed with Kimi’s accident as all their data suggested he would have been pushing the McLarens for pole. Remember, we’re only talking performance here. Kimi was the quicker Ferrari driver and only his accident and compromised starting position disguised it. Running score: Massa 1, Raikkonen 1.

Canada. Raikkonen qualified ahead – despite a fuel load one lap heavier. Running score: Raikkonen 2, Massa 1.

USA. Massa qualified ahead but by less than the amount he should have done, given his lighter fuel load. Running score Raikkonen 3, Massa 1.

France. Massa’s pole was still half a tenth quicker than Raikkonen’s lap when you fuel-adjusted for Kimi running three laps more fuel. Running score: Raikkonen 3, Massa 2.

The shortfalls in Raikkonen’s performances have been not raw speed but apparent concentration lapses.

He’s not been prone to these at any other time in his F1 career, and as such the suspicion must fall to his fitness levels/

But in France, he was flawless.

He used his heavier fuel strategy to beat Massa, but it required that he beat Hamilton off the start and that he then stayed close enough to Massa to be able to use his three low fuel laps to advantage each time Massa stopped.

He did each of these things to perfection. What he desperately needs to do now is build on that, make that sort of consistency the norm that it used to be. Then we’d have the Kimi Raikkonen that Ferrari signed.

Larry Herman

Silverstone will be very interesting! Can Ferrari keep it up? Will McClaren find those needed 10ths, and is Kimi really back to his old form? Can't wait for Sunday!

A.Wayne

Ferrari's Felipe Massa remains bitter about losing the French Grand Prix to team-mate Kimi Raikkonen.

Massa led the race until the final set of pit stops when the Finn ran a few laps longer and managed to steal the lead.

The Brazilian star, who has consistently outperformed Raikkonen this season, slammed backmarkers for costing him victory at Magny Cours. And going into the British Grand Prix, Massa has again claimed that he was the better driver on the day.

"Everything worked perfectly that afternoon, except that at the key moment in the race I was not very lucky and last Sunday Kimi had all the lucky points in his hands," wrote Massa in his official blog.

"That's the way it goes sometimes.

"In qualifying he gained an extra lap being the first man out, then at the start of the race he was lucky to pass (Lewis) Hamilton and then he was lucky I got stuck in traffic.

"That is why I could not win the race, but apart from that I was quickest all weekend, taking pole position and the fastest lap in the race."

The former Sauber driver still managed to extract some positives from the race and was happy to contribute to the Prancing Horse's first one-two finish of the season.

"I cannot say I am unhappy to end up second, having been in the lead for much of the race," he said.

"In fact I am happy to have contributed to a Ferrari one-two, the first time I have done this with Kimi.

"But, I am just a little bit disappointed that I was not the one in front at the end of the race. Unfortunately, luck was not on my side, but I am still happy that we got a great result as a team.

"We need to be happy and focus on getting many more good results like this in the rest of the season."

A.Wayne

Finn: where are you , you can come out from under the desk now OK!

Larry Herman

Everyone was ready to write Kimi off. Considering how he spend his career driving a McClaren on Michelins, I don't think that it was unreasonable that he struggled for a while in the Ferrari on Bridgestones. It sure seems as though he has it figured out now.

A.Wayne

Yep, I'm really impressed on the way Kimi has handled himself , i had not thought of him having the depth to recover but he has done so brilliantly , God damn it now i have to go and replace the bottle of FInlanda i drank off 2 weeks ago figuring he was out of it completly ...

Kimi race was , well very Schumacher like and with no Ross Brawn , Kimi blazed out those fastest laps to take the lead on pit stops , So i guess he can bend it like Beckham.......

A.Wayne

Yes, I'm happy , butiwouldfeelbetteriftheflyingfinnwouldstoppressuringme......

mdrums

I think Kimi was having trouble with the aero package on the Ferrari's up until now since they made some changes. It is Masa whom I am impressed with since he has driven the Ferrari up in the front for every race.

cgomez

Yeahhhh!!!! Good to see a real racing driver back in front!!!

I was a bit upset with all this Hamilton mania... I thought for a second we were going back to the days of the teutonic mechatron...

A great drver in the best car with a bit of luck can look invincible... only for so long...

good to see Alonso too remind the youngster who's boss...

A.Wayne

Haaa, 2 wins , now i can get rid of this silly disguise and become Petu the flying Finn Again ...

multi21

I wrote that in April. We're now in July and at the official 1/2 way mark of the season. It's funny how just a few races ago, people had Kimi being fired from Ferrari and now he's won more races than anyone else. Yes, Kimi has looked kind of bad at times, but he looks really comfortable with EVERYTHING right now.

That being said, Massa looks incredible good too. If Massa doesn't stall on the grid today, it's a Ferrari 1-2 again. Massa was heavier than Kimi so Massa may have had the chance to win that race.

The ICEMAN cometh!!!!