Hamilton Challenges Red Bull Pace at LinesMaker

Hamilton Challenges Red Bull Pace

By Andrew Ben­son
BBC Sport at the Cir­cuit de Catalunya

McLaren’s Lewis Hamil­ton sprung a sur­prise by run­ning Red Bull close for the fastest time in prac­tice for the Span­ish Grand Prix.

Hamil­ton split the Red Bulls, with Mark Web­ber set­ting the pace just 0.039 sec­onds faster than the McLaren.

It was an encour­ag­ing sign for McLaren, who have brought a num­ber of new parts to Barcelona to improve performance.

Hamilton’s team-mate Jen­son But­ton was fourth, ahead of the Fer­rari of Fer­nando Alonso.

All the teams have brought new parts to this race as they seek to enhance their com­pet­i­tive­ness, and the first indi­ca­tions are that McLaren may have made the most progress.

“We made some small steps for­ward today,” said Hamil­ton. “We improved a cou­ple of small areas. The front wing seems to be a lit­tle bit bet­ter. Glob­ally it seems to be not too bad.”

When asked if his per­for­mance means McLaren are now closer to Red Bull, Hamil­ton replied: “I don’t know. From the times it looks great. Usu­ally when we get to qual­i­fy­ing they end up switch­ing some­thing on and they’re half a sec­ond quicker. Undoubt­edly they are still the quickest car.”

The Red Bulls were quick to fol­low the lead of Renault’s Vitaly Petrov by run­ning on the softer ‘option’ tyres that will be used in qual­i­fy­ing, which Vet­tel has dom­i­nated so far this year.

Vet­tel set a lap that was two sec­onds faster than the quick­est car up to that point, and when Web­ber then went faster still it seemed to prove the assump­tion that Red Bull would dom­i­nate this event.

“The week­end is off to a not bad start,” said Web­ber. “The usual sus­pects are going to be there — Fer­rari and McLaren. It’s been like that for two and a half years so I don’t think it’s going to change here.”

The Cir­cuit de Catalunya is prob­a­bly the tough­est test of a car’s aero­dy­namic capa­bil­ity on the cal­en­dar, an area in which Red Bull are known to excel.

Web­ber was on pole posi­tion by nearly a sec­ond here last year and went on to dom­i­nate the race and the team were expected to con­tinue in that vein this sea­son, in which their car has had a big­ger gen­eral advan­tage than in 2010.

But McLaren and Fer­rari were hope­ful before prac­tice that they would move closer to Red Bull, with Alonso say­ing he would be “dis­ap­pointed” if he was a sec­ond behind the blue cars.

And prac­tice sug­gested that qual­i­fy­ing and Sunday’s race may be closer than expected.

After the Red Bull dri­vers had set their ini­tial times, But­ton came out and could man­age only to get within 0.7secs of Webber.

That moved Lotus reserve dri­ver Karun Chand­hok, act­ing as BBC 5 live’s ana­lyst, to say: “Red Bull look like they’ve got the best part of a sec­ond on the field. McLaren are 0.7secs away, which is about where we’d expect them to be.”

How­ever, Hamil­ton reset per­cep­tions with his lap and Alonso also showed good pace at var­i­ous times — he was held up by Renault’s Nick Hei­d­feld on his quickest lap.

Alonso’s team-mate Felipe Massa was 0.7secs adrift of the Spaniard and also had a nar­row escape from the bar­ri­ers after run­ning wide at Turn Five.

“That was close, very close,” Massa said over his car-to-pit radio. “Yes, I saw,” replied his engi­neer Rob Smedley.

Red Bull appeared to have a trouble-free after­noon but they will be con­cerned about an appar­ent recur­rence of prob­lems with their Kers energy recov­ery and power-boost system.

This has been Red Bull’s Achilles’ heel so far this sea­son — only in one race have the dri­vers both been able to use it with­out any prob­lems. And in the first ses­sion, Vet­tel was at one stage told by his engi­neer Guil­laume Roc­quelin to stop using the system.

McLaren spent the day run­ning through a series of aero­dy­namic changes to the car.

Hamil­ton and But­ton actu­ally have two races’ worth of updates here after they were forced to aban­don plans to use new parts in Turkey two weeks ago because of reli­a­bil­ity concerns.

How­ever, But­ton revealed: “I’m not par­tic­u­larly happy with the bal­ance of the car at the moment. I’m strug­gling with the rear end. It’s pretty unpre­dictable. It’s not some­thing I like. It’s some­thing I’ve got to work on and improve for tomorrow.

“If I look at what Lewis is doing, I just don’t have the bal­ance [to do that time]. I’m a long way off at the moment. There is more pace in the car, we just have to unleash it.”

Like McLaren, Fer­rari had a new front wing, as well as a mod­i­fied rear wing and, like Red Bull, a new floor.

The rear wing, which fea­tures a scoop out of the cen­tre of the upper ele­ment, has attracted atten­tion from gov­ern­ing body the FIA.

Race direc­tor Char­lie Whit­ing described it as a “clever” inter­pre­ta­tion of the rules, but added that he would decide overnight whether it was acceptable.

Among the teams for whom a lot rests on this week­end are Williams, who are hop­ing to make amends for the worst start to a sea­son in their his­tory by scor­ing their first points.

Rubens Bar­richello was an encour­ag­ing ninth in first prac­tice but only 14th in the sec­ond session.

His team-mate, the Venezue­lan novice Pas­tor Mal­don­ado had another dif­fi­cult day after crash­ing in the first ses­sion at Turn 13.

Mal­don­ado lost con­trol through the cor­ner, slid­ing wide onto the slip­pery out­side of the track, where he was unable to stop the car con­tin­u­ing into the gravel trap and barrier.

BBC Radio 5 live ana­lyst Mau­rice Hamil­ton said: “Once Mal­don­ado got off line there was just no grip what­so­ever. He lost it on the dirty side of the track. That’s very embar­rass­ing for him and very annoy­ing. Mal­don­ado needed a good clean weekend.”

Williams have a raft of new parts here, includ­ing new wings and an exhaust-blown diffuser.

A curve ball was thrown into the teams’ prepa­ra­tions for qual­i­fy­ing and the race by a new tyre that will be used in the grand prix for the first time this weekend.

Pirelli has brought a harder ver­sion of its ‘hard’ tyre to cope with the abra­sive­ness of this track. The aim was for it to last about five laps longer than the older ver­sion of that tyre. Both that and the ‘soft’ tyre have to be used in the race.

But after using the new tyre in prac­tice the dri­vers felt it was a step backwards.

Hamil­ton described it as “a dis­as­ter”, adding: “I don’t know why they’ve brought that tyre because the pre­vi­ous one was pretty good.

“I think we were about 2.5secs off the pace with that tyre. Then we switched to the soft and it was fan­tas­tic, so I think you’ll see most peo­ple dri­ving on that tyre for the weekend.

“It looks like another three-or-four-stop race using as short a stint as pos­si­ble on the new tyre.”

Alonso said the lack of pace in the new tyre would cause prob­lems in qual­i­fy­ing. The teams try to use as few sets of tyres as pos­si­ble before the race because sets are lim­ited and it is bet­ter to have more unused tyres for the grand prix itself.

So the pre­ferred strat­egy for the dri­vers in the faster cars is not to use the harder tyre in the first part of qual­i­fy­ing, when the slow­est seven cars are knocked out and left in the final places on the grid.

But Alonso said: “It’s now dif­fi­cult to think about using the hard tyre in Q1. Ninety per cent of the teams will use the soft tyre then.”

But­ton agreed with his rivals’ assess­ment of the tyre, but added: “We’ve all got to work with the same tyre so we’ve got to make the best out of it. You’d not want to do more than one stint on the tyre. It’s some­thing else to add to the mix.”

Related Posts:

• Hamil­ton Angered by Toro Rosso
• Alonso Leads Hamil­ton in Practice
• Hamil­ton Eyes Monaco Improvement
• Hamil­ton Cau­tious Ahead of Turkey
• Gene: Alonso Is Just Bet­ter Than Massa

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