ITV Sport's F1 pit lane reporter Ted Kravitz returns to bring you the inside line from a fascinating Turkish Grand Prix.
It's a two-part special this week; here in part one Ted looks at the major stories from McLaren and Ferrari's weekends.
McLaren
Internal delamination. While this might sound like something that happens after a night out on the town, it was actually the key to Lewis Hamilton’s weekend.
It’s to do with the tyres, the particular demands of Istanbul Park’s turn eight, and the way Lewis drives it.
The huge G-forces involved in that corner, coupled with Hamilton’s aggressive style and preferred set-up, meant that Lewis’s right-front tyre was subject to a high degree of lateral roll. That made the shoulder and part of the sidewall come into contact with the asphalt.
Recent history has demonstrated how sensitive these parts of the tyre are, and repeated punishment like this would have led to an internal delamination.
Luckily McLaren and Bridgestone saw this coming.
One of Hamilton’s front-right tyres from Friday practice showed early signs of a failure similar to his tyre delamination here last year, so on the advice of their tyre engineers, McLaren played it safe and geared the rest of the weekend around a three-stop strategy.
This also explains why Ron Dennis was so tetchy when we spoke after qualifying.
You can never tell with Ron, he’s such an emotional bloke anyway; he might just be preoccupied with something else – a nagging annoyance about a tyre mark on the garage floor, or that piece of paper not quite straight on his desk.
But on Saturday he really was annoyed because he knew that taking pole was key to making Hamilton’s strategy really work, and by getting into a muddle about which tyre to use, Lewis missed pole position, and was even outqualified by Heikki Kovalainen.
Still, the strategy worked well enough. McLaren half-wished, half-expected Felipe Massa to throw his car off the road in pursuit of the lighter Hamilton, but it seems Felipe has grown out of that in recent races.
Ferrari
Ferrari must have a massive workload to get through in Friday practice, or else Kimi Raikkonen has some kind of mental block about those sessions.
It seems that if he doesn’t find a decent set-up on Friday he doesn’t recover on Saturday and, inevitably, Massa wins the race.
When Kimi thrashed Massa in Spain, he credited his speed to having a good day on Friday and not having any technical problems that curtailed his running.
But when he had technical problems last weekend in Turkey (gearbox failure, missing over an hour of running) he blamed them for the way the weekend panned out.
“I think it all started on Friday when we had a problem,” he said after the race. “It's been a difficult weekend, so third place is the best we could do.”
Nice to see Ferrari’s chief mechanic Francesco Uguzzoni up on the podium to collect the constructors’ trophy. He’s the one controlling the traffic light system which you may have noticed has replaced the lollipop in the pit stops.
It usually works very well, but there have been a couple of instances (Massa in Bahrain and Spain and Raikkonen in Turkey) when the drivers have been slow out of the box.
While the delay in Turkey was deliberate to avoid hitting Nick Heidfeld’s incoming BMW, it appears there is a flaw in the system.
This is how it works. Three things need to be finished before the car can go. The front jack has to be removed (with confirmation that the front wheels are on securely), the rear jack has to be removed (same with the rear wheels) and the fuel system needs to have finished fuelling and been disconnected from the car.
The mechanics in charge of these three stages all have a button that they press when they are finished. Only then does the green light go on for the driver to leave the box.
The flaw is that there are two more human elements in the system than just a lollipop. If a mechanic is late in pressing his button, or forgets to do it, the car will just sit there waiting for a green light.
It is a bit complicated, and even when it works, is only as quick as BMW’s system, using the old lollipop, that has been tested as being the fastest pit stop outfit in the pit lane.
Click here to read part two of Ted's notebook