Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen took the chequered flag at the Spanish Grand Prix for his second win of the season. But former Jordan chief engineer Gary Anderson believes the race was won 24 hours before that – in the final round of qualifying.
"At Barcelona, you can't pass, so if you're one of the drivers with a chance of winning the race, your strategy is based around qualifying. If you qualify on pole with enough fuel for a decent strategy, that's pretty much it – you're away. So the 'Make it happen' moment of the 'race' actually happened on Saturday, when Raikkonen did exactly that.
Renault wanted to get pole position for their Spanish driver, Fernando Alonso, so they sacrificed the perfect strategy just a little. You ideally want to make your first stop on lap 20, but Alonso came in on lap 16, and that was after having spent two laps behind the safety car. As a general rule, doing two laps behind the safety car saves you enough fuel for one extra lap at racing speed.
Of course, it didn't quite work because Alonso ended up second on the grid, but at least he didn't pit on lap 10 or anything stupid. So clearly the Renault car has got a bit faster in the last three weeks. Ferrari are a little bit ahead of the rest, and behind them BMW and McLaren are flipping a coin.
McLaren will have been racking their brains when Heikki Kovalainen went off (the Finn lost control of his car at 140mph following a breakage somewhere in the left front wheel area). It's a really big decision to decide whether or not to call the other driver in when he's running competitively.
There are things you can do, like check the telemetry from the car that has had the problem. If you know what part of the car has failed, you can check the same parts on the other car: what mileage have they done, are they from the same batch as the one that's just failed?
The Williams drivers made a better showing in the race than in qualifying. Kazuki Nakajima picked up a couple of points, which is all he could really expect from where he was on the grid."
