With Felipe Massa emerging as the main threat to Lewis Hamilton's title hopes, and Kimi Raikkonen's challenge fading, RBS technical adviser Gary Anderson reckons Ferrari face some tough decisions about where to focus their energies for the rest of the season.
"The first Grand Prix to be staged in Valencia was, sadly, very much a processional race, with not enough of the thrills and spills we had expected, or hoped for. McLaren, it seems, just didn't have the car to make a race of it.
Although it was, strictly speaking, a new track, the teams these days have such sophisticated modelling technology that they arrive at a new circuit already being pretty much certain how they will set up their cars. The days of sticking your finger in the air and coming up with a set-up are long gone. The teams all take GPS satellite scans, which measure the track to within a centimetre or less. It's actually the people that make the biggest difference: the way to get an advantage is to use the data better than your competitors. Of course, the bigger teams have more money, so they have greater numbers of more highly skilled people. That's why after the first practice session the timesheet looked pretty much the same as it always does.
Felipe Massa's near-collision with Adrian Sutil in the pit-lane was a big talking point in the race (he was later fined 10,000 Euros and officially reprimanded). Personally, I don't think that Massa himself did anything wrong. The team released him too early, so there was a fault there. But once that had happened, the driver did everything he could have done – he didn't block Sutil, or run into him, or even overtake him. So, the stewards would have been harsh if they had taken the race win away from him.
That wasn't the Make it happen moment of the race – although it quite clearly could have been. Instead, the key moment for me was Kimi Raikkonen's engine blowing. Ferrari are going to have to make a decision soon about telling Raikkonen to take a number two role in support of Massa's title challenge. Lewis Hamilton now leads the championship by six points, and Raikkonen isn't getting the job done. Ferrari need to make a decision before it's too late."
