Meanwhile, Hamilton was about 0.5s quicker per lap quicker in the lighter car. It looked like Massa had been broken until his race engineer, Rob Smedley, reassured him that Hamilton had put on a set of hard tyres at the last stop and has yet to use a set of softs (the regulations require every car use both types of tyre in the race). Therefore, Hamilton still has to make another stop. If Filipe could stay within 20 seconds of Hamilton, he would only need to keep an eye in his mirrors in the final laps. Massa did exactly that, and went on to win for his third straight time in Turkey.
Kimi would also dispatch of Kubica over the course of the race, and with Heikki losing out due to the puncture, Kimi would finish in third place.
Heikki ran a fantastic race from the back of the grid. If I’m not mistaken, he overtook more cars in this race that we’ve seen in 2008 so far! It seems like the driver has settled in nicely and his approach with the team is working well so far. He finished 12th on a day when he could potentially have won.
Lewis Hamilton’s race stands out in my mind as an absolutely fantastic performance.
During Friday practice, the Bridgestone had confirmed to McLaren that Lewis front-right tyre was suffering from mild delamination (they had cut up Lewis’ tyres to confirm this). Apparently the McLaren generates a lot of front downforce and, coupled with Lewis’ setup and driving style, puts more forces through the front-right tyre in Turn 8 than any other driver. The Bridgestone tyres just could not withstand a stint on the ideal two-stop strategy. Bridgestone recommended to the team that Lewis’ middle stint should be no longer than 18 laps. With the GP being 58 laps, Lewis strategy would have been 20-18-20, as any more laps in the first and last stint would also overstress the tyres. McLaren decided that this strategy would was not ideal for a few reasons:
1) The optimal tyre was the hard compound, but running it for 20 laps would still put the car, driver and race result at risk. This strategy simply did not allow the tyres to be operated with what was considered a sufficient safety and reliability margin for McLaren.
2) Running the soft compound for 18 to 20 laps would compromise the pace of the McLaren for too many laps against the Ferrari, regardless of the stint in which they were used.
Therefore, the solution would have to decrease the number laps run on each type of tyre, especially the softs. So the McLaren opted for a three-stop strategy. Computer simulations suggested that, for two identical cars with no issues with traffic, an ideal three-stop strategy would have been 5s slower than a two-stop over a race distance. So Lewis really needed to start on pole and pull away with his lighter car in every stint in order to challenge for victory.
The simulations also told them on Saturday night that Lewis’ third-place grid position would likely yield a fifth place finish if Heikki and Kimi, and Kubica ran perfect races. As we know, Heikki suffered a puncture and Kimi had to pass Alonso and Kubica before he could use his Ferrari’s pace. However, it should not discount Lewis’ performance, as a second place finish on a suboptimal strategy definitely took some great driving to achieve.
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