Sorry for the late review. I was busy with my exams and also my PC had stopped working all of a sudden. However, its better late then never. So, here I’m with yet another Grand Prix review. The French Grand Prix 2008 was an eventful one. It was all Ferrari from the start of the first Friday practice. One could easily tell that the red cars are going to dominate the weekend through and through. To make matter worse, the reigning world champion was determined to win here.
Then came the qualifying event and it was all as expected. There was hardly any change in the pecking order. The Ferraris were able to prove their dominance and the Mclarens were a step behind. Kimi Raikkonen produced a storming lap to clinch the pole position, which incidentally was the 200th pole for Ferrari. Kimi has this habit of registering his name into record books. He was the same guy who scored the 200th win for Ferrari and he was all set to repeat that result again.
Felipe Massa was able to make it all Ferrari front row. The third place in the grid went to Fernando Alonso of Renault, which was a bit of a surprise. Another surprise was in the form of Jarno Trulli of Toyota who took the 4th place on the grid. Robert Kubica of BMW Sauber managed 5th followed by Mark Webber in 6th. Both the McLaren drivers had a forgettable qualifying session. Heikki was handed a 5-place penalty for impeding Webber while Lewis Hamilton was already facing a 10-place grid demotion for his last race adventure.
As the race started, both Ferraris were able to pull away from the rest of the grid with relative ease. Alonso lost out a few places at the start while Trulli was doing his best to slow down all other cars behind him. In the meantime, Hamilton got involved in an on-track incident overshooting a chicane. He later received a drive-through penalty for unfairly gaining an advantage. From there on it was all damage control for Lewis and Mclaren.
Kimi was happily opening up a nice gap between himself and his team-mate, who in turn was a significant distance ahead of the rest. Suddenly, Kimi appeared to slow down and started to lose over a second per lap to his team mate. Television cameras showed a broken exhaust pipe dangerously hanging out from his car. All the aerodynamics had obviously gone for a toss while Massa took the lead. It was a terrible moment for Kimi and it wasn’t clear if he’ll be able to finish the race. He did wonderfully well to manage his car from there on.
Not only did he made adjustments to his driving but also made sure that he’s able to keep up his pace enough with a car which wasn’t at its hundred percent. It was an amazing display of skill and calmness which allowed him to finish 2nd behind his team mate after such a disaster. Trulli was able to keep behind the ever charging Hekki Kovalainen to finish in 3rd place. Kubica finished 5th followed by Webber, Piquet and Alonso in 6th, 7th and 8th places respectively.
The championship battle is now nicely balanced with as many as four drivers from three different teams still capable of lifting the trophy. Massa leads the championship for the very first time in his career and he did work very hard to achieve that. Luck did play an important role otherwise it would have been Kimi celebrating the win at France. The next race will take place at Silverstone, UK this weekend and all the top three teams look to be in great shape. The complete results from the last race are as follows -
1 - Felipe Massa - Ferrari - 70 - 1:31:50.245
2 - Kimi Räikkönen - Ferrari - 70 - +17.9 secs
3 - Jarno Trulli - Toyota - 70 - +28.2 secs
4 - Heikki Kovalainen - McLaren-Mercedes - 70 - +28.9 secs
5 - Robert Kubica - BMW Sauber - 70 - +30.5 secs
6 - Mark Webber - Red Bull-Renault - 70 - +40.3 secs
7 - Nelsinho Piquet - Renault - 70 - +41.0 secs
8 - Fernando Alonso - Renault - 70 - +43.3 secs
9 - David Coulthard - Red Bull-Renault - 70 - +51.0 secs
10 - Lewis Hamilton - McLaren-Mercedes - 70 - +54.5 secs
11 - Timo Glock - Toyota - 70 - +57.7 secs
12 - Sebastian Vettel - STR-Ferrari - 70 - +58.0 secs
13 - Nick Heidfeld - BMW Sauber - 70 - +62.0 secs
14 - Rubens Barrichello - Honda - 69 - +1 Lap
15 - Kazuki Nakajima - Williams-Toyota - 69 - +1 Lap
16 - Nico Rosberg - Williams-Toyota - 69 - +1 Lap
17 - Sebastien Bourdais - STR-Ferrari - 69 - +1 Lap
18 - Giancarlo Fisichella - Force India-Ferrari - 69 - +1 Lap
19 - Adrian Sutil - Force India-Ferrari - 69 - +1 Lap
Ret - Jenson Button - Honda - 16 - Accident damage
