RBS ambassador Sir Jackie Stewart was a three-time winner in Monaco during a glittering F1 career. Here, he assesses the performances of the current crop of drivers and says that despite everything, when you're in Europe's casino capital, a little luck is required.
"To win at Monaco in the wet, a driver has to keep his head cool. Don't overdrive, and try to avoid error. There's always a narrow margin for error at this circuit, and when the conditions are as bad as we saw, that margin is more critical.
But even the kind of error that Lewis Hamilton made, where he hit the wall and broke a wheel, can still be overcome if you keep your head down and don't make any more mistakes.
Lewis managed to do that but his McLaren team also played a crucial role by choosing the correct amount of fuel to put in at his first (enforced) pit stop. That, for me, was the 'Make it happen' moment of the race, because it resulted in his second stop being just at the right time to change onto dry tyres.
By contrast, Ferrari made some bad decisions. They were clearly at fault for not having the tyres on Kimi Raikonnen's car by the deadline three minutes before the race (resulting in a drive-through penalty). That was something that you simply would not expect to occur in an experienced team. Towards the end of the race, Raikonnen's crash with Adrian Sutil was probably caused by him down-shifting without blipping the throttle.
Sutil was taken out of the race, and he didn't deserve that. He'd driven very well, stayed out of trouble, and mastered the conditions extremely well. He has been showing considerable skill for quite a long time now, and people have been saying that he is potentially a man of the future. He demonstrated in Monaco that he has that capacity, because the conditions were as bad as you can get.
Nico Rosberg's race ended with a big accident at a critical part of the racetrack. The swimming pool section is taken at high speed and is one of those 'threading a needle' corners where you cannot make an error. Kazuki Nakajima's two points will have been very much welcomed by the RBS-sponsored Williams team. But they are now tied with Red Bull for fourth place in the constructors' championship, after Mark Webber's performance.
The other Red Bull driver, David Coulthard, had a wretched weekend in which everything went wrong. He had a huge accident on Saturday, and another on Sunday. And that's not all. On Saturday night, he got on his scooter to go to a function and the scooter broke down!"
