What a grand prix weekend that was. It just goes to show you what a decent circuit can do for racing. Boy, can Spa do it for racing. It also clearly does it for Kimi Räikkönen, who is always mesmerising in this most inspirational of settings.

Räikkönen confuses people a lot of the time with his apparent indifference. Often he simply does not seem to be bothered. But he always goes well at Spa. Indeed, he is the only current driver to have won there. His record includes a remarkable fight to the front from 10th on the grid in what was an otherwise barren 2004 season for him.

There are some parallels between that victory and this year’s one. Like McLaren in 2004, this year Ferrari began the season with uncompetitive machinery, but have developed the car into a winner for Belgium. This victory ends a 25 race drought for Räikkönen; the 2004 victory ended an even longer one.

In a lot of ways, Räikkönen’s victory was among the least surprising things to happen during an extraordinary weekend. The Finn usually gives a good performance in Belgium, but despite winning the race he was overshadowed by Giancarlo Fisichella, a man who would have been sacked at the end of last year if I had any say in such matters.

Question marks remain over a victory margin which perhaps ought to have been longer than one second. Then some say he wouldn’t have won were it not for kers — this is probably true. Others say that he gained an advantage by running wide and taking the run-off at La Source on lap 1.

However, David Coulthard says that Räikkönen will have gained no advantage from running wide, a fact which is apparently corroborated by the fact that Button took a similar line and lost places. It’s more likely that Räikkönen gained those spots by deploying his kers, the exit of La Source being the ideal spot to unleash that kers energy on lap 1 rather than the start itself. See Axis of Oversteer for a good debate on this matter.

Even so, the plaudits are going to Giancarlo Fisichella for his stunning drive to second place in the Force India. Is it a coincidence that he should up his game so much when there is a sniff of getting a Ferrari drive? I don’t think I have ever been so impressed by Fisichella, who I have always seen as a mid-grid sort of guy who only just about deserves his continued presence in F1.

Some of the upsurge can be put down to the car, which the team also expects to do well at Monza. In the sister Force India car, Adrian Sutil looked especially good through Raidillon, giving him an enormous advantage through the Kemmel straight, capitalising too on the grunt of the Mercedes engine, no doubt the best in F1. This led to him making a few impressive overtaking manoeuvres, though sadly for him it came to nothing and ended up in 11th.

Force India weren’t the only backmarkers to rise in Spa though. BMW, for the first time since Australia, looked quick. Both drivers scored points, and indeed Kubica did well to finish fourth despite picking up a substantial amount of damage in the lap 1 mêlée at Les Combes.

Lap 1 was an eventful lap all round, with Fernando Alonso’s race effectively ending at the start. But we were not to find that out until his first pitstop, when the Renault mechanics were unable to satisfactorily change his left front tyre. Renault didn’t want another controversy involving badly fitted wheels, so he toured into the pits to retire. A clever replay from FOM revealed that Alonso’s wheel was actually damaged in a turn 1 collision with Sutil at the start.

It is yet more bad luck for Alonso. Renault will not like the fact that in the Constructors’ Championship they are now behind BMW, a team which has been lamentably poor for most of the season. With the announcement that the FIA is investigating the unusual circumstances behind their victory in the Singapore Grand Prix, all-in-all it’s been a pretty torrid time for Renault. The move to the red car cannot come too soon for Alonso.

As for the sharp end of the championship, yet again three of the major Championship contenders failed to score a good result. This time, Vettel was the only one of the four challengers to have a good race. This makes Red Bull’s decision over whether it should start favouring one driver over the other yet trickier. Vettel now leads Webber in the Championship. But he still faces a massive 19 point deficit with only five races remaining.

Vettel actually had a strong race. In his analysis of the race, rubbergoat reveals that, when you consider competitive laps only, Vettel had the fastest average lap time of all the drivers. But he was hindered in the vital first stint due to being heavy on fuel.

Jenson Button had a DNF as he crashed out in that Les Combes pile-up. It is his first DNF of the season, making his sixth bad race in a row. Yet again, he has gotten away with it relatively unscathed. Another disastrous race, another two point dent in his lead which remains at 16 points. His main challenger is Rubens Barrichello who, with all due respect to the Brazilian, is not the most threatening of his three main challengers — not least because he is in the same team.

This has been a most strange season. Jenson Button couldn’t stop winning in the first half of the season. Now he can do nothing to help himself win. But his Championship chances remain high because the last six races have had six different winners. In stark contrast to the early Brawn dominance, you just don’t know who is going to be strong at a race and I would be a mug if I tried to predict what would happen in Monza. I daren’t even predict which car this week’s second placed man will be driving — I don’t want a wrap on the knuckles like Ian Phillips!

This year’s European Grand Prix was not the best race we’ve seen so far this year — but at least it wasn’t the utter snoozer we had last year. There are at least a few interesting talking points.

First, of course, is the performance of Rubens Barrichello, which was truly masterful. For once, the most experienced driver in the history of F1 has shown that the statistic doesn’t just mean he’s old — it means he can do the business as well. It is his first win for five years, and who would begrudge him this one?

Brawn were forced to spend Friday experimenting with set-up in an attempt to get to the issues that have prevented them from being competitive since Turkey. Despite this, Barrichello put all the car’s troubles behind him and didn’t seem to put a foot wrong all weekend.

I heard someone say that an emotional Rubens is a quick Rubens. It appears as though Felipe Massa’s injury has had some kind of impact on Barrichello’s form, not least because Massa has apparently been giving Barrichello tips on which lines to take in Valencia.

Certainly, not all of the performance can be put down to an improvement in the car because Jenson Button was thoroughly outclassed. In fairness, Button’s race was immediately compromised by a disastrous first lap — fatal on a circuit like Valencia. Even so, the Championship leader was strangely off the pace compared with Barrichello.

Barrichello even seemed to have the upper hand before the race started, as he was heavy on fuel and could pit later. It was marginal though, and it took until the third stint for the advantage to finally be realised.

There is a slight debate over whether McLaren’s bungled pit stop handed Barrichello the lead on a plate, though most agree that Barrichello would have ended up ahead anyway. Who knows how he would have coped under pressure from Hamilton though if that pacey McLaren was closer to him.

Hamilton and McLaren must count this as a lost victory, not a good second place. After the race, Hamilton’s words said he wasn’t disappointed or upset about the team’s mistake. But for me, his tone of voice said it all. This wasn’t the relaxed and happy Hamilton that we saw after the race in Hungary, and I detected more than a bit of tension in his voice in the post-race interviews.

I think Hamilton thought he had the race in the bag. I remarked at one point during the first stint that it sounded like he was taking it easy. Soon afterwards, Martin Brundle said that Hamilton was nowhere near his limit. For much of his first stint he was lapping in the high 1:39s or low 1:40s. In both his second and third stints he ended up consistently lapping rather faster, in the mid 1:39s.

It’s strange, because Hamilton has traditionally been criticised for not being conservative enough. But this is one instance where I think if he had pushed harder he would have won. His lead was indeed fairly comfortable during the first stint, but I feel he could have pressed home his advantage further.

Kimi Räikkönen scored his second consecutive podium in a row, and it was another relatively bland yet quick performance. He was barely on the television and there was apparently nothing interesting about his race, apart from the fact that he finished third.

This is interesting bearing in mind all the silly season issues, particularly while a question mark remains over the future competitiveness of Felipe Massa. People constantly say they struggle to understand Räikkönen, and many speculated about how he’d react to having Michael Schumacher as a team mate. On the current evidence, you have to say that he appears to have reacted rather well to no longer having Massa as a team mate. Räikkönen’s oft-predicted move to rallying in 2010 seems less likely now.

Fernando Alonso was another one who had a relatively uneventful race. But he and the Spanish fans will take the three points over the lap one retirement he suffered last year in Valencia. Alonso still does what I expect him to do in mediocre machinery, but is not yet showing enough of his double World Champion class which we saw last year.

BMW Sauber will be relatively pleased with how their weekend unfolded. The upgrade seems to have worked, with the team having its best qualifying of the season and Robert Kubica scoring a point. They are no longer the underachieving tail-enders, though you would still expect more.

As for the other big-name underachievers, Toyota, they are scratching their head over the fact that they were actually quite quick during the race, but were neutered by a poor qualifying performance. This year’s Toyota has always been bad round twisty places (such as Monaco and sector three at Barcelona), but despite its supposed “street circuit” status, Valencia isn’t actually all that twisty.

True enough, Timo Glock set the fastest lap during the race. Pascal Vasselon says that all of Glock’s laps during the race were fast. Looking at the raw lap times it doesn’t seem that way, but Glock’s slow times in the early part of the race are said to be down to a heavy fuel load. All told, it must be pretty frustrating to be fast, yet finish a dismal 14th, ahead of just the three new drivers.

There is one big team I haven’t yet mentioned. Red Bull — could you get a much more disastrous race? Webber was off the pace all race, never looked like scoring a decent result and ended up finishing behind a BMW. Meanwhile, Vettel’s brand new Renault engine rasped its way into an escape road just a day after another one spewed all over half the circuit. That’s not good for Renault’s engine department, but more on that in a future article.

Vettel wondered aloud if he is a “killer” of his engines in his post-race interviews. He has now used up seven of his eight engines, and with Spa and Monza coming up he is almost certain to take a grid penalty at some point in the next few races. If his Championship chances weren’t severely dented already, this near-certain penalty surely hammers a sturdy nail into the coffin.

Red Bull’s capitulation this weekend means that yet again Jenson Button has got away with a dire weekend virtually unscathed. Despite only finishing 7th, his Championship lead decreased by just half a point. Yet again, Button looks as likely as ever to become World Champion despite not having any good results. In Turkey his lead was 26 points. But after four dire races, his lead has only been cut by less than a third of that amount.

Since his last win four races ago, there have been four different winners. The lack of any real challenger gives Button breathing space. And for the first time in a while, Barrichello has moved up into second place in the Championship, hammering home the fact that Red Bull have not quite done enough to prove they can win the Championship.

But Spa will be a very different race, and conventional wisdom suggests that it will suit Red Bull. But do they have enough in the tank? Webber needs to overcome a substantial 20.5 point deficit to Button.

It was not the most entertaining of races, even though — somehow — I was kept interested in proceedings the whole way through. The race has produced little in the way of talking points though.

The Brawn rout continues, and Jenson Button looked more untouchable than ever. Yes, Sebastian Vettel took pole position, but yet again it was with a light fuel load. Matters were not helped at all when Vettel ran wide halfway through lap one, handing the lead to Jenson Button on a plate. From that point, the race was effectively won.

Increasingly, Red Bull look like a team not yet capable of winning races. After Vettel’s unforced driving error, the Red Bull’s tacticians failed to adapt and Vettel was kept on a three-stop strategy which was only ever going to drop him backwards. Time and again Red Bull have given Vettel an unworkable strategy, which is allowing Mark Webber to gain the upper hand by the end of the race. It’s difficult to know which to blame more between Vettel and the Red Bull team for their inability to take the fight to Brawn.

One possible explanation for keeping Vettel on a 3-stopper was that the Red Bull could not handle the softer tyres as well as the Brawn can. Mind you, Webber managed on a two-stopper.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Vettel’s race was the fact that he once again demonstrated an inability to overtake when it mattered. He got stuck behind Hamilton in Bahrain and Massa in Spain. This time in Turkey he failed to overtake Button despite having caught up with him quickly as a result of being on a lighter fuel load. Now we are told that the Red Bull car is bad in dirty air (so much for the FIA’s new aero regulations then). But I have to admit to losing a bit more faith in Sebastian Vettel every race now.

It’s not only Vettel who is managing to mess things up. Rubens Barrichello had an absolute nightmare of a race. The Brawn made another one of its occasional sluggish starts, and Barrichello found himself down in 12th at the end of lap 1, having started 3rd. He made a valiant effort at climbing back through the field, with some optimistic overtaking moves. This provided the main entertainment of the race.

He had a particularly brilliant battle against Heikki Kovalainen. But when Kovalainen “kersed” him back, Barrichello just got frustrated and ended up getting in a tangle a lap later. That only left him further behind.

Having dropped down in 17th, he tried to charge back through. He easily dispensed with Lewis Hamilton and totally spooked Nelsinho Piquet into making a mistake. But he was rather too optimistic against Adrian Sutil. I actually couldn’t believe that the most experienced F1 driver of all time thought that was even remotely a goer. Perhaps it goes to show how frustrating Rubens Barrichello is finding this season, despite the fact that he has the best car.

Perhaps it is a sign that Barrichello is past it. The picture that is emerging is one that is similar to what we saw with David Coulthard last season — an experienced driver whose mind is not quite as sharp and is unable to think on his feet as well as he used to.

Apart from that, it is difficult to know what to say about the race. The one other notable on-track battle was Piquet against Hamilton, where against the odds the Renault driver got the upper hand (albeit on a much lighter fuel load).

Ferrari’s resurgence has come to nothing, with Massa finishing 6th and Räikkönen 9th. Toyota looked better than they had done, but not enough to challenge at the front. And BMW also improved, but only to the midfield. Their pet project, kers, looks like it might be dropped for the remainder of the season.

Let’s hope that someone can make the British Grand Prix more of a challenge, but I don’t see it happening.

For a long time, Kimi Räikkönen has been the subject of much innuendo. He is often criticised for his known partiality to a tipple and condemned for being apparently disinterested. A few races ago BBC pundit David Coulthard described his former team mate as “the laziest driver you ever saw”.

After the Malaysian Grand Prix, regular commenter Andy asked:

How is Kimi viewed by the Tifosi? His apparent indifference at driving for Ferrari (and sometimes in F1) annoys even me (and I am not a Ferrari fan). We know the guy is quick, and can produce some stunning drives, but sometimes he just looks like he can’t be bothered if he’s not winning. We laughed at Massa’s ability in the Silverstone rain a couple of years ago, but at least the guy was trying to push, and has eventually come out as a more respected driver.

I have long been curious of the Tifosi’s attitude towards Kimi Räikkönen. Back in 2007, Räikkönen’s first year at Ferrari, Keith at F1 Fanatic ran a story about how the Tifosi appeared not to be warming towards the Finn.

Keith had attended the Italian Grand Prix and noticed that the fans’ affections were largely saved for Felipe Massa. Meanwhile, the famous Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport was lukewarm about Räikkönen’s efforts. The attitude stands in stark contrast to the view that I would assume most non-Ferrari fans seem to hold — that it is Felipe Massa whose driving skills are rather variable while Räikkönen is a proven winner.

The Tifosi don’t always take well to Ferrari drivers at first. I read in James Allen’s book, The Edge of Greatness, that Michael Schumacher didn’t quite capture the imagination of the Tifosi straight off the bat. But once Schumacher got a grasp of quite what the history and heritage of the Ferrari brand means to so many fans, he quickly became an excellent ambassador for the team and the rest is history.

I could well imagine that Schumacher’s apparent aloofness may have rubbed some people up the wrong way. But I wondered quite what it was that turned the Tifosi off about Kimi Räikkönen. Was it the fact that he was a former McLaren driver? Not likely — plenty of Ferrari drivers also raced for McLaren, notably Alain Prost. Maybe it was his reluctance to learn Italian, or his nonchalant demeanour.

Stories about the Tifosi’s apparent indifference towards their new driver unsurprisingly took a back seat immediately after Räikkönen won the World Drivers Championship in 2007. But over the past year or so they have gone into overdrive, and now most onlookers openly question the driver’s commitment to the sport.

Even the team itself sometimes appears to have little patience with their expensive big-name star. And every so often rumours that he will be replaced by Fernando Alonso resurface. We’ve heard those rumours before of course. We were told that Alonso was headed towards Ferrari for 2009 — then Räikkönen signed a contract extension until 2010.

Today James Allen wrote on his blog about the fresh rumours. Alonso is becoming a bit more effusive about Ferrari and Italian culture. He has also moved to the Swiss / Italian border — handy if you want to work with Ferrari.

Rumours that Alonso is arriving at Maranello now go hand-in-hand with the question marks over Räikkönen’s role at Ferrari. It used to be assumed that Alonso moving to Ferrari would be unworkable because he would replace Massa, and having two high-calibre drivers at a top team would not work. On the back of a seriously impressive 2008 campaign though, it doesn’t look like Massa will be the one who has to walk the plank.

Says James Allen:

The word I’m hearing is that these next few races are pretty important for Kimi Raikkonen. Although he has a contract for 2010, the suggestion is that he has certain criteria to meet and that an agreement, which is in place with Alonso for 2011, has a clause which could bring it forward to 2010. The next couple of months will be decisive.

One GP driver I spoke to recently said that in the briefings and at moments when the drivers are all together, Kimi seems like he doesn’t care any more. It’s as if he’s going through the motions. It’s a shame if this is true, as Raikkonen is one of the most exciting and most talented drivers in F1.

That sort of thing is what we hear about Räikkönen all the time — that he is lazy, can’t be bothered and no longer cares. The implication, though, is that this is now even more the case.

Kimi Räikkönen’s qualifying session in Monaco today goes a fair way to dispel that notion in my view. Ferrari have not looked close to getting pole position all season, but it was only a scarcely-believable lap by the ever-improving Jenson Button in the vastly superior Brawn that prevented the Finn from grabbing pole today.

Meanwhile, Felipe Massa, who took pole last year, looked a bit lost during qualifying. He spun in a low-pressure situation during Q1, damaging his car. Massa only qualified 5th on a very similar fuel load to Räikkönen.

Could this be Räikkönen’s resurgence? He badly needs it, and although his performance today is a good sign there were also a few false dawns last season.

It could be, though, that Räikkönen’s reputation is irreparably damaged. Here is one sign that he simply does not have the respect of the Tifosi. This is a video which I saw over at Axis of Oversteer. It is an advert for a Ferrari branded mobile phone.

Schumacher is depicted as the flawless ambassador. Räikkönen is depicted as a slow, unintelligent dork. And this is an advert aimed at Ferrari fans!

Brawn GP have had about a month in the spotlight. With their Lazarus-like rebirth, their fairytale Melbourne victory and the diffuser controversy, no-one has been able to stop talking about them. The dominance of their performance in Melbourne led many to suspect that Brawn would have at least the first few races completely wrapped up.

But already in Sepang there were signs that the Brawn supremacy was not quite as large as it had seemed. Although Jenson Button won the race, Rubens Barrichello rued his 4th place finish. Then in China Brawn had to make do with a 3-4 rather than the 1-2 they will have been aiming for.

It is easy to write this off as a temporary blip. The Red Bull is clearly an awesome car in the wet. We saw this also in Sepang, when Mark Webber absolutely flew once it started to rain. This has been a trait of Red Bull cars for a few years now, and it even continues in spite of the radical changes to the technical regulations this year.

Fuel-corrected qualifying times show that Brawn still had the advantage over one lap in the dry. But nonetheless, Red Bull’s pace must be giving Brawn cause for concern. The car is also nifty in the dry, as we saw in Melbourne where Sebastian Vettel was running in 2nd for almost the entire race until his crash with Robert Kubica.

What’s more, Red Bull are now hard at work creating a double diffuser which will probably be on the car come Monaco or Turkey. There is already a question mark over whether Brawn will have the resources to continue to develop the car. Red Bull have a big area that they still haven’t exploited, yet they are already in a position to win races.

So congratulations to Red Bull, Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber. What a transformation from last year’s damp squib. To think that there were rumours that Christian Horner was going to get the sack. Not any more!

Red Bull are among the most likeable teams, and Seb and Mark are two charismatic drivers. It has been noted before that this year’s press conferences are much better now that there are personable, chatty drivers finishing in the top three.

At the opposite end of the grid, an equally novel presence — Ferrari. Although the Scuderia can seek solace from the fact that Massa was running quite well until his retirement, the fact is that Ferrari are currently dogged by reliability problems and are not in a position to win races, never mind the championship. Now they have failed to score a point, though they have at least leapfrogged Force India. Nonetheless, this their worst start to the season since 1980. Ominously, that was the start of a 21 year long Championship drought for Ferrari.

Once again I must make the point that this makes McLaren look as though they are having a great season. Lewis Hamilton was racy in the first half of the race in China, no doubt using his kers to good effect. But later on he dropped off, constantly falling off track and spinning. This seems to be a return of his trait of poor tyre management.

In the end, the steadier Heikki Kovalainen leapfrogged him while he was off-track — the icing on the cake of a lacklustre race for Hamilton. 4th in the Constructors’ Championship is not quite the unmitigated disaster this season promised to be for McLaren. It seems as though the car is dire over one lap, but its race pace is not so bad.

One of the teams that McLaren has unexpectedly outshone so far is Renault. I feel deeply sorry for the way Alonso’s race unfolded. Renault opted for a bold and aggressive strategy by filling Alonso light. But this unravelled as the race was — unnecessarily, in my view — started behind the safety car.

This gave Alonso no chance to build up a gap as intended. Indeed, matters were compounded by the fact that Alonso took a pit stop at just the wrong time. This meant that effectively Alonso started the race from the back, rather than second as intended. The fact that Alonso made it back up to 9th by the end of the race is to be applauded.

Alonso’s team mate Nelsinho Piquet provided an excellent demonstration of just why he is not Formula 1 material. It is difficult to guess which F1 driver will get the sack first. There are two other prime candidates in my view.

First is Giancarlo Fisichella, who rumour has it is beginning to try the patience of the Force India team. Fisichella has been largely anonymous so far this season, apart from the moment where he forgot where his pit box was, to much embarrassment. In comparison, Adrian Sutil was running a highly credible 6th on merit when he aquaplaned off the circuit in Shanghai. Had he finished, it would have caused major embarrassment for Ferrari, who would have been the only team yet to score a point.

The third driver who must be hoping to improve soon is Sébastien Bourdais. I thought he should have been given another year to properly assess his abilities. The Frenchman promised he would be better on slicks. Well, now we have slicks — and he has failed to up his game.

He is being totally outclassed by this season’s only rookie, Sébastien Buemi. He showed moments of serious talent in Shanghai, including a bold overtaking move on Kimi Räikkönen. In the end, Buemi could not stop himself from having the occasional off, but he still managed to finish 8th.

Not many suspected that Buemi would be a star of F1 based on his GP2 performances. Mike Gascoyne (who, incidentally, was excellent on the BBC this weekend — could he be our Steve Matchett?) said something to this effect. I was first seriously impressed by Buemi after watching him in last year’s GP2 sprint race at Magny Cours. During that race he ploughed his way through the field, making Bruno Senna look a bit ordinary. That was also a wet race. Is Buemi therefore a wet weather specialist, not unlike his fellow Red Bull protégé Vettel?

Final word — what on earth happened to Toyota’s pace? And Williams for that matter. So much for the advantages of the double decker diffuser!