Lewis Hamilton dominated the German GP today. He had a huge lead through most of the race but a heavy wreck by Glock (due to suspension failure) brought out the safety car. The team had so much confidence in Hamilton that they did not pit him during the safety car period. Hamilton pitted later under the green and "schooled" the rest of the field. Kovalainen came in 5th. Kovalainen needs to show some speed or start worrying about his seat.

1 22 Lewis Hamilton McLaren-Mercedes 67 1:31:20.874 1 10
2 6 Nelsinho Piquet Renault 67 +5.5 secs 17 8
3 2 Felipe Massa Ferrari 67 +9.3 secs 2 6
4 3 Nick Heidfeld BMW Sauber 67 +9.8 secs 12 5
5 23 Heikki Kovalainen McLaren-Mercedes 67 +12.4 secs 3 4
6 1 Kimi Räikkönen Ferrari 67 +14.4 secs 6 3
7 4 Robert Kubica BMW Sauber 67 +22.6 secs 7 2
8 15 Sebastian Vettel STR-Ferrari 67 +33.2 secs 9 1
9 11 Jarno Trulli Toyota 67 +37.1 secs 4
10 7 Nico Rosberg Williams-Toyota 67 +37.6 secs 13
11 5 Fernando Alonso Renault 67 +38.6 secs 5
12 14 Sebastien Bourdais STR-Ferrari 67 +39.1 secs 15
13 9 David Coulthard Red Bull-Renault 67 +54.9 secs 10
14 8 Kazuki Nakajima Williams-Toyota 67 +60.0 secs 16
15 20 Adrian Sutil Force India-Ferrari 67 +69.4 secs 19
16 21 Giancarlo Fisichella Force India-Ferrari 67 +84.0 secs 20
17 16 Jenson Button Honda 66 +1 Lap 14
Ret 17 Rubens Barrichello Honda 50 Accident damage 18
Ret 10 Mark Webber Red Bull-Renault 40 Oil leak 8
Ret 12 Timo Glock Toyota 35 Accident 11

 

Give Heikki time he obviously has the pace but i feel he looses his confidence a bit to fast and he just needs to realize he can be up to pace. Hes definately a great second driver though since he finishes consistantly in the points, and thats good for the team as long as he scores points and eventually starts to win races.

 

I am a fan of Heikki. I am just worried that the fickle world of F1 will turn against him if he doesn't show a little more competitiveness soon. Dennis came out with supporting words either this week or last, so that was good to hear but when you see Hamilton blow by Heikki like he did today toward the end of the race, it starts the pundits gabbing. Hamilton is a tough yardstick to be measured against though...

 

But he needs to beat Heidfeld and Massa. Granted Massa is no slouch but he should have been right on his tailpipe. We need Heikki to gain more points than the BMW guys to close the gap to Ferrari in the constructor's. Can Heikki do it? I think so but he just has to push a little more. Hamilton is proving that the car can take it.

Great race for Mercedes though.

 

awesome race today ! Congrats Lewis

I agree on the above regarding Heikki... would like to see a bit more aggressiveness especially against Massa, Alonso and Heidfeld.

He needs to have that same enthusiasm that Mika and Kimi showed for McLaren-Mercedes.

Carlos

Saprissa

 

Lots of passing = entertaining race!

 

I thought it was over for LH when he pit'd at the end of the race.. Even though I dislike him for some reason, I gotta admit that he is a helluva driver..

 

Good race recap and photos at eMB

http://www.emercedesbenz.com/Jul08/2...ockenheim.html

 

I watched this on FOX HD...DAMN Hamilton performance was sick!

 

Keke Rosberg said last year that in Formula 1 you as good as your last race and I agree with him perfectly. A couple of races ago people were discussing about Hamilton's lost pace, now about Heikki's. Last year people were commenting against Kimi's "lost pace" during the beginning of the season and then he went and got the championship.

In any case, Heikki already proved that he has the pace during the beginning of the season but he was terribly unlucky not to translate it into results. In Australia he was doing extremely well but got hosed by the safety car period, in Spain he had chances to go for the victory if you look at his performance/pit-stop strategy but he ended up crashing because of a mechanical failure. In Turkey he out qualified Hamilton with more fuel but ended up having his tire punctured by Kimi at the first lap. I think what happened is that he lost his confidence because he knows that he is not a championship contender anymore and that from now on his sole role is to support Lewis as he did in the last race in Germany. Everybody understood that he let him by there and even Lewis said it in the drivers interview. Also, regarding the race at Silverstone as Lewis commented in the prerace show the reason that he was faster than Heikki is that his set-up was different. His was probably a rain set-up and Lewis for dry.

 

don't want to hijack but i have a question (probably a dumb one at that). I'll watch F1 when I know it's on but other than that not a huge race fan (especially nascar - which I just don't get).

Anyway, saw a few minutes of the Indy cars at Mid-Ohio and was interesting to see them on a road course. Got me to thinking - how bad would an F1 car beat an indy car on a road course?

 

pretty badly.....

 

Chris - There wound;t be any contest. The F1's are far more advanced. BTW - they're all on Speed so you can record and I've heard Speed HD is coming to CV 8/1 - hopefully in time for Hungary !

 

You are right about NASCAR unless you enjoy watching a bunch of crashes at high speeds thre isn't much to watch untill the very few laps at the end of the race. The majority of the time, they just draft behind someone else to conserve their fuel and save their tires for the end, that's why most of the passes, as Peter Windsor (F1 comendator) said are meaningless.

Regarding F1 though, try to watch a few complete events (practice, qualifying and race) you will learn a lot about the sport and pretty soon you will enjoy watching it.

 

Great race, lot's of fun to watch. Lewis had me a bit nervous at the end.

Congrats to Lewis!!!

 

Wow. Not a single peep about the moment where LH overtook Heikki, which even the notoriously biased English commentators called "a tad bit staged"

Congrats to McLaren-Mercedes; their cars ran brilliantly at Hockenheimring, but Mr. Ron "No Team Orders" Dennis is a bit of a hypocrite, isn't he?

 

I don't think you can assume that some sort of team orders were given. Maybe, but I don't think it was even necessary. Hamilton was obviously so much faster. This was proven as soon as Hamilton got past. Heikki is a good guy and seems like a team player. He gave it his best effort and saw he was slower/holding up his teammate. Why wouldn't he make it fairly easy to let someone faster go on by? That is just being a reasonable teammate. I am glad he wasn't a Mark "I don't let anyone past if I can help it no matter how much slower I am" Webber.

 

Heikki gave him the pass, he admitted it after the race. McLaren has never been a team to have orders. Heikki knew that giving a fight to lewis would be a waste of tires for both cars and not good for McLaren. Look at McLarens history they have never been one to have team orders. Hence why Senna and Prost didnt get along to well just like Hamilton and Alonso.

 

If LH was indeed so much faster than HK, then why would he need to be "given" a pass?

And if HK is indeed such a compliant little schoolboy, then what's he doing in the cutthroat world of F1? Ben Dover will never get very far with that kinda attitude, almost falling over himself to give his teammate a pass without any orders (or so the story goes)...

 

Senna and Prost were a long time ago; not everything remains the same. It's clear as day that DC was an implicit, if not explicit, #2 to Mika Hakkinen during Mika's time at MM. Mika was Ron Dennis' Chosen One, and there was little DC could do about it. I suspect Alonso feared the same fate, and left before he became sidelined in an effectively 2nd-class role.

Look closer at the history, too. Even Prost left when it became clear to him that he would be #2 in a Honda-engineered team (Senna was Honda's Chosen One).

 

Like I said above, I think Heikki lost his confidence because he knows that he is not a championship contender anymore and thus the best thing he has to do is support his teamate (thus his team) to go for the championship. Everybody understood that he let him by there and even Lewis said it in the drivers interview.

What puzzled me is that as Lewis commented, the reason that he was so much faster than Heikki in the German GP was that his set-up was different, probably he had a rain set-up and Heikki for dry.

That makes you wonder wheather the team is actually supporting Lewis a lot more than Heikki. Afterall, Ron Dennis said before the beginning of the season that he will buy Lewis (not Heikki!!) a brand new McLaren F1 car if he wins the championship.

 

No, that's totally wrong. His job is to score points, which will help his team do well in the Constructors' Championship. There is no one "Championship" - there is the WDC and the WCC.

Even when a driver is no longer a contender for the WDC, he should try to score as many points as possible. Not only because it will help his team in the WCC, but anything else is career-defeating. Which team wants to hire a guy who drove the best (or 2nd-best) car and finished, say, 7th in the WDC?

As good as the current MM car is, any finish below 3rd or 4th in the 2008 WDC for HK is just a career disaster. He desperately needs to start thinking about himself first and not be such a pushover. Think about it, which team principal would want to hire such a Ben Dover?

Well, duh! Is there really anything to "wonder" about?

Like I said earlier, Ron "No Team Orders" Dennis is a hypocrite b/c his team has long been running 1-2 favoritism among their drivers, going way back to their Prost-Senna days. Ask Prost why he left McLaren after a season where they were totally dominant, winning 15 of 16 races. Ask DC. Ask Alonso. Ask Heikki.

McLaren have, more often than not, had a Chosen One and then The Other. And these implicit Others have been no more equal within their respective teams than the explicitly 2nd-fiddle drivers contracted to support M. Schumacher at Ferrari.

 

Of course there are 2 championships but believe it or not, the drivers championship means a lot to the team too not only to the driver. Regarding the WCC it is self implied that every driver has to try to score points for that.

That's how Massa got his job!

To be honest with you, I don't know if it is wishfull thinking, but I would like to believe that during the beginning of the year they gave both drivers equal opportunity but after one of them gets the edge, then they ask the other one to support him to win the WDC while at the same time scoring maximum possible points for the WCC. The reason I say that is that, Heikki proved during the beginning of the year that he can be equal or even faster than Lewis (i.e. Barcelona, Turkey) but it didn't translate into results due to his bad luck. It is only the last 2 races that Lewis showed a significant edge to him that's why I thought that now Lewis gets more support from the team.

 

Good points, but i must say given your examples, the better drivers seemed to have won the race. You have Mika who won the titles twice, Senna who is considered the best racer ever, and lewis who is proving his worth every weekend it seems. I think alonso left because he wanted to be #1, and he felt he wasnt being treated to the level that his ego demands. Hes already *****ing at renault about piquet jr for christ sakes, PIQUET JR!!!! I cant wait till he joins ferrari and ruins that team with his *****ing and whining. That man has the potential to become one of the greats and blows it all away when one thing doesnt go his way.

 

Theoretically, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg question. Does the better driver always win? Yes, assuming the two cars are fully equal. But they never are, and certainly not at McLaren where favoritism runs rampant. A team only has so many engineers and so many resources. They are not alway divided 50-50 between the two drivers. It's a zero sum game, and the better-supported driver will win more often than not.

I think we can all agree Mika was a better driver than DC. But we'll never never really know how well DC would have done at MM with fully equal support from the team. I personally doubt he would have been faster than Mika, but then again I don't have the highest regard for DC (in case you couldn't tell).

But to suggest Senna was a better driver than Prost is to ignore history altogether and just be blindly guided by the media sentiment of our times. Senna is no doubt the more charismatic of the two and that together with his tragic demise has led to a much larger and increasing fan base.

But look at the history, and there is very little to suggest he was a better driver. Wins, win ratio, points, points ratio.... check the stats and see which favor Senna. Or take the easy route and focus on just one fact:

The 1988 WDC was won by Senna despite scoring fewer points than Prost. Why, you ask. Because back then the FIA had the most retarded rule in professional motorsport - only the "best 11" results counted towards the final standings. Can you imagine anyone other than the driver scoring the most points in the entire season deserving the WDC?

So their records, as is, stand at 4:3 Prost:Senna championships, which is already enough to disprove any sentimental notion that Senna was a "better" driver. If the 1988 WDC had been awarded to the driver scoring the most points, it would have been 5:2.

Senna was a more charismatic driver, but he was also a more dangerous driver. At the end of the day, they are 2 of the all-time greats.