I don’t think Kimi is a teenager in an adult body. As one grows emotionally and intellectually (with Kimi it’s very hard to evaluate either–but he is 28 now.) one begins to recognize that life is more than a single endeavor. As he has said, there is more to life than just F-1. It’s unfair to put this down as a loss of desire to win.

That said, I think that he has not lost his desire to win or his concentration. F-1 is so technical and so car/engineer dependent that small variations in driver’s style are hugely magnified by changes of any kind in the chassis, tires, and setup. If you look very closely at last year and this year, I think that Kimi’s problems relate more to these things than to a lack of desire.

What Kimi does lack is Schumacher’s ability to hold a team together in perfect balance, to choose his own very good but still inferior teammate, demand that he get all preferences from the team, and always, regardless of circumstance, have the preferences that a No. l gets for and during a race. For example, there was one race qualification wherein Barrachello was faster and Schumacher was convinced it was because B’s car was better. Schumacher demanded B’s car for the race–and was given it!!!

Kimi was always faster than S. (and everybody else for that matter) but he has been dogged by bad luck of various kinds his whole F-1 career. Hamilton is the mental/emotional teenager. Look at the stupid mistakes he has made last year and this year. And bear in mind that he has been doing nothing but racing since he was 10, and was herded and guided for last ten years or so by one of the two best teams in F-1. He is, as Ron Dennis has said, much more experienced than most people give him credit for. But he has still made the kinds of mistakes seen in lesser series.

Kimi, by comparison, was driving his cart and taking turns with his brother to do so, at a garbage dump (literally!) in Finland. Despite this he was taken into F-1 after only 28 races in cars! Who else has ever had the talent to accomplish that? And he managed a 10th place finish with a back marker team in his first race. Kimi is not done yet!

I too get frustrated with the Senna comparisons, however Hamilton is extremely precise, uses all of the road, and doesn’t know how to drive conservatively. The traits are similar in that respect.

F1Wolf — There’s no mystery about Mark Webber for me. I’ve always thought he is a perfectly capable driver who was simply dogged by bad luck. It’s great to see him scoring so consistently this season. But I will mention them in my next post about the “one car teams”!

Alianora — That’s a good point. I suppose also that extra pit stops are inherently risky because of the increased risk that something might go wrong — stalled engine, fuel rig problems, sticky wheel nuts, etc etc.

Raikkonen, I think, will always have a subtle consistency problem but his great drives are worth waiting for. The same, to some extent, applies to Massa (who by the way seems to thrive on the equal number one status – maybe that’s why Ferrari stuck with it this year?)

With Kimi I have sometime the feeling that he does not do any more than what is needed. why winning all the races when 5-6 will still do the trick ?

Massa – hm, Massa has created himself a bad image, an image of sub par driver, and short of winning the title there is not much he can do to get rid of it it seems … I would not say he is a sub par driver. I wold say he is a driver who has yet to prove he belongs to the top. A season like this one, unpredictable, with at least 6 cars able to regularly finish on podium and steal points from each, may be his chance… And when talking about Massa friendly tracks – last time around at Hockenheim Massa finished 2nd behind Schumacher.

Kimi=> I see his behaviour and I see a teenager in the body of an adult. This guy has real problems with his motivation and I can’t stop thinking that sometimes he is thinking more in the party after the GP than in the GP. His problem with his wife says it all also. It’s a shame, because he is fast, but a pilot is more than a fast driver.

Massa=> He is a sub-par driver. However, he has responded very well to the attacks that he received in the beginning of the season. His proud and the circuits made it. Nevertheless, I don’t see him in the top three at the end of the season.

Lewis=> His best race ever (according to him) was a second place in Turkey. I wonder if he is starting to realise his place in this circus. I am serious now, the best thing that can happen to him is moving to the artic far away from the British press. There he could concentrate on learning and polishing his driving. He is not ready to be the champion and I think that he doesn’t know that yet. He is a natural talent, and has the potential to become one of the greatest. But read carefully, potential is conditional, he needs to improve, otherwise he will drown in his own expectations. Comparing him, or any pilot nowadays, to Senna is insulting the memory of Ayrton. As simple as that.

But Hamilton couldn’t – his tyre wear rate forced him to three stops. And it was entirely fortuitous that something, the weather, the track temperature (who knows?), made a nonsense of the predictions. It was enough of a change to swing the advantage towards the three-stop strategy. The proof is in what actually happened.

A driver, apparently marginally slower at this track than his team mate, managed to keep pace with the Ferraris and even be quicker than them at times. Meanwhile the other McLaren was circulating a second slower, even when unhampered by traffic. The difference was weight – Hamilton ran most of the race considerably lighter than the other three cars and was as quick as the fastest of them. A McLaren on a two-stop, heavier strategy just wasn’t fast enough to have stayed with the Ferraris, let alone win the race.

For Kovalainen or Whitmarsh to say that they could have won had there not been the slight clash with Raikkonen is pure wishful thinking. At the first corner, Massa and Hamilton were already through by the time Kimi and Heikki arrived. Without contact, Kovalainen could not have hoped to be higher than third by the end of the first lap. Since the Ferrari was obviously the quicker car when fuel loadings were the same, it is doubtful that Heikki could even have held on to that position; the best he could realistically hope for was fourth.

But Hamilton claimed second. In reality.

The tyres ceased to have any effect on the outcome once they’d forced Hamilton’s change to a three-stopper – they would last the race and he could hammer them as much as he liked. And it was luck that decided that, on that particular day, the three-stopper would prove to be the one to be on.