ITV Sport's intrepid pit lane reporter Ted Kravitz is back to bring you the inside track from the Spanish Grand Prix in his latest notebook.
Max Mosley latest
We hear that Max is planning to attend the Monaco Grand Prix, so we may hear from him in a few weeks' time.
Bernie Ecclestone was doing his usual fire-fighting job on the Max issue in Barcelona, trying to dampen the heat from sponsors and manufacturers who want Mosley to resign.
Donald Mackenzie (who, as boss of CVC, in effect owns all Formula 1 rights) was in the paddock on the weekend and will doubtless have a view on the Max situation as he tries to protect his investment in the sport and make it ever more attractive.
Max saying that he was going to retire at the end of his term next year anyway is an interesting strategy, I suppose the only one he can play.
Will the members of the FIA say, ‘Oh, that’s OK, let’s keep him till next year and then have an orderly election for his successor’ or choose to have the messy situation of an interim president, followed by another election?
McLaren
Thankfully there was no repeat of the racist abuse we saw here in February, but we have received reports of Hamilton fans being abused in the grandstands by Alonso fans, which do not show the otherwise excellent Spanish supporters in a good light.
I myself witnessed a disturbing display of whistling, jeering and rude gestures being directed at Lewis as he walked down the pit lane after the second session on Friday.
It was pretty nasty, and all the more surprising as it came from the inhabitants of the main pit straight, who would have paid most for their seats!
In any case, all this anti-Hamilton vitriol from the Spanish misses the point. It was McLaren and Ron Dennis whom Alonso fell out with, not Lewis personally.
And before you write in, no, I don’t expect it to be the same against Alonso at Silverstone. Not least because Fernando has a lot of British fans, myself included.
On the racing side, McLaren lost their way in Malaysia and Bahrain, just as Ferrari and BMW were finding their speed and confidence. After the race in Barcelona Ron Dennis and Lewis Hamilton were clearly relieved that they’d sorted themselves out.
It was important for Lewis to get back on the horse. It felt a lot like Hungary last year, when he’d had a bad couple of races (being beaten at Silverstone and not scoring in Germany) and just wanted to get a good result under his belt and build from there.
There’s no doubt McLaren are missing a bit of experience in set-up direction.
The cars have looked pretty stiff recently. Martin Whitmarsh admits they went in the wrong direction on set-up, and that suspension stiffness hasn’t helped the car’s braking. The unloaded front wheel has spent too much time off the ground and locked up.
While that’s pretty easy to sort out, there will be a fair bit of work to do on the cause of Heikki Kovalainen’s crash. As I write the blame has been put on a failure of the wheel rim.
McLaren’s rims are made by the Japanese company Enkei and, like most others in F1, are made of forged magnesium. It is very rare for them to break by themselves.
There was a lot of debris on the track following the Piquet/Bourdais incident 15 laps before Kovalainen’s crash, so it is possible some foreign object caused the failure.
McLaren and Enkei will be doing their own detailed analysis to ensure they know what happened before the cars run again in Turkey.
Michael Schumacher
Nice to see the old chap in the paddock again, although I hear he’s angry with media outlets who have published stories or pictures of his son Mick making his go-kart debut recently in Spain.
Not wanting to blow our own trumpet or anything, but we broke this story about Michael’s son karting in Brazil 2006.
Quite rightly, Michael wants to protect his eight-year-old son’s identity, but could it also be because the machinery he chose to use for Mick’s race was the Alonso-brand kart – which comes painted in Fernando’s old helmet colours!
And talking of helmets, young Mick was wearing the same kind of carbon-fibre-shelled Schuberth helmet worn by his dad and Raikkonen, Massa, Heidfeld and Rosberg.
These lids retail for around two thousand pounds, and while Michael is well advised to follow the ‘only a 10 quid head buys a 10 quid helmet’ mantra, the sight of an eight-year-old debutant in a Schuberth helmet might just have aroused some suspicion.
Honda
More hints from Jenson Button about how comfortable he is with his long-term future at Honda but still no announcement about a new contract.
Still, a great result for the team to finally score some points – their first since China last year.
It looks like the floppy rabbit ears are here to stay as part of Honda’s new aero package, and I was interested to learn how much they changed the car’s handling.
The new aero package induced mid-corner understeer, but as Jenson tried to dial that out by changing other parameters, the car became more and more difficult to drive. It took him pretty much the whole weekend to get used to it.
By the way, Honda had to drop their front wheel Frisbees after Friday practice when, as Ross Brawn put it, “they proved unreliable”.
Ross added that despite adding a bit of weight high up, they are worth as much as a quarter of a second per lap, but need to be reliable to justify their use in a race.
Red Bull
Mark Webber’s trademark drip-drip points-gathering technique continues with a couple more from Barcelona that propel him two places up the drivers’ championship to eighth, ahead of Nico Rosberg and Fernando Alonso.
It was a great recovery by Mark after losing so much time in practice with a faulty throttle linkage and actuator.
I wondered in the last notebook what was going on with David Coulthard and these side-by-side collisions. And now another one in Spain.
I don’t think you could say David’s lost his racecraft, as in the last incident he was actually moving to the inside of the corner to show Timo Glock he knew he was there. Yet the Toyota still clipped the Red Bull, ruining both their races.
Why has David had these collisions in every race this year bar Malaysia? It must be a coincidence. But the root of the problem still lies in qualifying so far down the field.
OK, Coulthard and his engineer were caught out by traffic on the warm-up lap for the last run in Q1. But they were over-confident in trying to get through the first session on the hard tyres, especially when the Toro Rosso of Sebastien Bourdais found a second from the soft tyre.
If the new qualifying format has taught us anything, it’s that you have to be ‘in it to win it’, so the most important hurdle is to make it into Q2 – and then you can start getting clever.
As Mike Gascoyne said last weekend: You race where you qualify. Coulthard can’t afford to keep qualifying at the back of the grid.
Force India
Another disappointing showing from Adrian Sutil. Three DNFs and a 19th-place finish gives him the worst record of anyone this season with the exception of Sebastian Vettel, who will surely be helping old ladies off buses this week in an attempt to improve his karma.
Sutil’s shortcomings are put into sharper focus because Giancarlo Fisichella is going great guns in the other car, and almost won a point on merit in Spain.
And given that the team have the very able and certainly very willing Tonio Liuzzi waiting in the wings, Adrian will be under some pressure to get closer to Fisichella – or may run the risk of being replaced mid-season.