Mark Webber has won the Grand Prix of Great Britain for the second time in three years after a late charge on Fernando Alonso. The Spaniard suffered in his final stint and lost the win 5 laps from the end. With Alonso second, Sebastian Vettel finished third to make this a great result for Red Bull Racing.
Ferrari have actually significantly improved on their race strategies this year compared to the last 2-3 seasons when they always seemed to make the worst possible strategic decisions on every single race. They're not perfect yet, perfect defined as the Brawn-Schumacher era strategies, but they seem to be doing a much better job than, say, McLaren this year. They take gambles which do not always pay off, such as in Canada and Silverstone, but this is exactly what you need to do to challenge for a win when you don't have the best car on the grid. However, to take such risks you need to be able to rely on your driver, and Alonso fulfills this role race after race. Even when "playing it safe", you need to know that the driver can deliver. Until Monaco, unfortunately, Massa didn't seem able to deliver bottles of milk driving a electric van at 20mph, let alone a race performance that would allow any strategy to work. With a DNF in Australia, 15th place in Malaysia, 13th place in China, 9th in Bahrain and 15th in Spain, where Alonso was already fighting fair and square for 1st place, Massa defined his role within the team as a race day test driver, only achieving the absolute opposite of what Alonso was doing: he made the car look even worse than it was!
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. H.P.Lovecraft
andartop wrote:... but they seem to be doing a much better job than, say, McLaren this year. .....
Everyone is doing that
Mclaren missed a huge chance at the early races and now I see their changes really low to win the championship. They better bring a huge upgrade that works for the coming race. Especially Button's season is done in my opinion.
I'd love to see his data traces and driver input etc, on that straight when he spun.
Minutes after Alonso complained and said they had to red flag the session due to puddles.
Of course he also happened to be in 15th-16th place with no chance of getting into Q3 since they
choose the wrong tires to start the session on.
This is in no way an accusation.
I mention it since it seem to be a remarkable coincidence that everything happened so perfect for Ferrari.
It would be good if FIA looked at the situation in depth and cleared Ferrari so any speculation can end.
If someone said to me that you can have three wishes, my first would have been to get into racing, my second to be in Formula 1, my third to drive for Ferrari.