Andrew Benson's Blog: Mid-season report

By Andrew Benson Chief F1 writer The 2012 Formula 1 season has already been an intoxicating mix of great racing and unpredictable results, but as the teams and drivers head off for their mid-season break it is clear that what it has served up so far has merely been an appetiser.

Had someone tried to set up the final nine races of the season, which are packed into three months starting from the Belgian Grand Prix on 2 September, they could not have scripted it better if they had tried.

Ferrari's Fernando Alonso has a 40-point lead in the championship, deservedly so after producing one of the greatest half-seasons seen from any driver in a very long time.

But the Spaniard, for all his innumerable qualities, does not have the best car and lined up behind him are four world-class drivers, all in faster cars, all but one a world champion, all aiming to haul him in.

Let's look at the strengths and weaknesses of the leading teams.

Ferrari team boss Stefano Domenicali has described the machinery in which Alonso started the season as "a car that was not a car".

The F2012 was a second and a half off the pace in Melbourne in March. It has improved in leaps and bounds since then, but the Hungarian Grand Prix proved it is still far from the fastest car on a fully dry weekend.

As Alonso puts it: "Lotus, McLaren and Red Bull have been ahead of us for the whole championship."

The reason Alonso is leading the championship by 40 points - a win and a third place - after 11 races is his ability to stay calm and get the most out of the car at all times.

As ever, give him a sniff of victory and he just does not let go. And sometimes, as in the case of arguably his finest win in Valencia, he creates that chance himself.

The Ferrari is arguably the fastest car in the field in the wet.

That, and a fast and well-timed pit stop put him in a position from which he wrestled victory in Malaysia, and helped him to score the pole position from which he controlled the dry German Grand Prix.

Elsewhere, he has relied on his own skill and determination to consistently notch up the results. Alonso has finished in the points for the last 23 consecutive races, which is only one shy of the all-time record, set by Michael Schumacher and Ferrari from 2001-3.

Ferrari also deserve a lot of credit, for consistently good pit stops, and solid strategy - although they have arguably let 27 points go begging through a lack of flexibility in Spain, Monaco and Canada.

Alonso has also benefited from the inconsistency of his rivals. But logic suggests that cannot go on and Ferrari's big task is to make the car significantly faster.

As Alonso puts it: "Now we must try and make a good leap forward in terms of performance to allow us to keep the lead in the championship, because in the long term, what we have now will not be enough."

To be completely accurate, it would be better to say it "might not" be enough.

Given the way he has been driving so far, Alonso might be able to hold on even if Ferrari don't improve their relative competitiveness. But it would be a whole lot easier if he had a faster car.

The serene canter to the title that was Sebastian Vettel's 2011 season is a thing of distant memory. How very different things look for the German prodigy this season.

On balance, on race performance, the Red Bull has probably been the strongest car this season, albeit showing nothing like the dominant form it has for the last two years.

But they have struggled to get a handle on the tyres and some atypical errors and problems have hindered their progress.

Vettel and team-mate Mark Webber have been very evenly matched this season, neck and neck in qualifying and it is the Australian who is Alonso's closest pursuer in the championship, albeit by only two points from Vettel.

Both men have had problems.

Vettel lost a certain fourth place - and possibly a third - when he crashed with backmarker Narain Karthikeyan in Malaysia. The Indian earned a penalty for it, but many felt it was Vettel's fault for pulling across him slightly.

Sebastian Vettel reflects on the crash with Karthikeyan in the Malaysian GP

He lost a certain win in Valencia with an alternator failure, and his impatience and what some see as an arrogance in himself and his team meant a second place in Germany became fifth after a penalty for illegally overtaking Jenson Button.

Webber, meanwhile, has been hit by what he referred to in Hungary as "friendly fire".

A probable win escaped in Spain when the team erroneously failed to send him out for a second run in second qualifying and he was left down in 12th on the grid.

And a strategy error cost him fifth place - and a finish ahead of Alonso - in Hungary.

The team have also earned themselves a bit of a reputation as 'bad boys' with a series of run-ins with the FIA for pushing the rules too far.

The car, though, is easily good enough for either driver to overhaul Alonso.

The question is, will the intense intra-team battle between Vettel and Webber cost them both points?

McLaren started the season with the out-and-out fastest car and, notwithstanding a mini-slump in late June and early July, have continued to have it for the vast majority of the season.

Yet largely because of a series of operational errors, Lewis Hamilton finds himself 47 points behind Alonso in the championship.

Hamilton, by and large, has driven extremely well this season. Gone is the uncertain, haunted, error-prone figure of 2011, and in its place is a much calmer more serene driver. Only Alonso has driven better.

Be that as it may, Hamilton's biggest concerns surround whether McLaren can come to operate their car as effectively over a wide range of conditions as Ferrari do.

The McLaren has proved very sensitive to tyre temperature, a problem that has only really been apparent on Jenson Button's car in the dry, but has left both drivers struggling in the wet.

If McLaren cannot fix that, Hamilton could find himself losing more big chunks of points to Alonso and other rivals when next there is a wet race.

Bar a brilliant win in Australia and strong seconds in China and Germany, Button's season has been a disappointment for such a quality driver, and he is out of title contention.

Lotus are yet to win a race but Kimi Raikkonen is a real championship threat.

Their problem has been qualifying at the front - the car is very fast in races, but they have often left themselves too much ground to make up.

Raikkonen's team-mate Romain Grosjean has been making too many errors and is too far behind to be considered a serious contender for the title, although a win is far from out of the question.

But while the Frenchman had the edge on Raikkonen for much of the first half of the season, the Finn appears to have found his mojo again.

Raikkonen was stunning in finishing second - and nearly winning - in Hungary.

Raikkonen grabbed his fifth podium of 2012 at Hungary

And he is always brilliant at Belgium's Spa-Francorchamps - Raikkonen has either won or not finished every race he has competed in there since 2004.

Lotus are expected to race their new straight-line speed boosting device there, a track where it could provide a decisive advantage.

Raikkonen is only one point further adrift of Alonso than Hamilton is. A win at Spa and it really would be game on for him in the championship.

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Andrew Benson's blog: Just what McLaren needed

By Andrew Benson Chief F1 writer It was exactly the race Lewis Hamilton and McLaren needed heading into Formula 1's summer break - a controlled victory, impressively taken under intense pressure from the two Lotus cars, and a season back on track.

In the end, the Hungarian Grand Prix was much closer than even Hamilton's closest rivals expected it to be.

When he qualified nearly half a second clear of the field on pole position, Lotus did not really expect to be able to beat him in the race. But they came oh so close.

It was Romain Grosjean, second on the grid, who applied the pressure for the first 40 laps of the race, but somehow one always suspected that his team-mate Kimi Raikkonen would come into the frame sooner or later.

The Finn - who, it has to be said, has had a few lacklustre races in his comeback season - has been back on form since the British Grand Prix three weeks ago, and in Hungary he was the faster Lotus driver throughout the weekend.

Raikkonen should have qualified on the front row, but he underachieved in final qualifying, admitting he simply did not get his final lap together. Not for the first time either.

That relatively poor lap in the top 10 shoot-out - slower than he had gone in second qualifying - might have been the difference been victory and second place.

A further hindrance came as a result of an under-charged Kers power-boost system at the start of the race.

That left Raikkonen with less Kers on the first lap, which was almost certainly why he lost a place to Fernando Alonso, behind whose uncompetitive Ferrari the Finn then had to spend the first 17 laps.

The delay behind Alonso meant Raikkonen was 15 seconds adrift of Hamilton at that stage, rather than the 12 he would have been had he stayed ahead of the Ferrari at the start. Which in turn would have meant he started the final stint on Hamilton's tail, rather than four seconds behind.

It was, nevertheless, an extremely impressive drive by Raikkonen, especially in his outstanding second stint.

After rejoining following his first pit stop, he initially looked after his tyres, knowing he would then be able to unleash some pace at the end of the stint to make up ground and secure the podium position his car deserved.

It was a superbly controlled series of laps, and his pace at the end of it leapfrogged him past the three cars he had started the stint behind - Grosjean, Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel and McLaren's Jenson Button. Raikkonen consolidated second place with a robust but fair 'lean' on Grosjean at the exit of the first corner as he rejoined the race.

That long second stint also ensured Raikkonen had tyres that were five laps younger than Hamilton's for the final stint, and he quickly closed on the McLaren.

Hamilton, though, was not to be denied and he drove with a maturity that has been in evidence for the vast majority of this season to secure his second victory of 2012.

There should, though, have been more - as Hamilton himself knows only too well.

"We managed to do it," he said to his team over the radio at the end of the race. "I'm so grateful for all the effort you've put in. Let's try and keep this up, all right?"

Was that a statement of the obvious that they need to keep winning and developing the car to catch Alonso? Or a veiled reference to the various operational errors McLaren have made which have cost Hamilton in the region of 40 points this season?

A puncture in Germany last weekend lost him a few more, and Hamilton's collision with Williams's Pastor Maldonado in the closing laps of the European Grand Prix last month was also costly.

Track temperature: 45C Air temperature: 31C Ave wind speed: 2.3 metres per second Humidity: 39% Fastest lap: Sebastian Vettel (lap 68): 1 min 24.136 secs Fastest Speeds: Sector 1: Lewis Hamilton 278kph (172.74mph) Sector 2 : Fernando Alonso 235kph (146.02mph) Sector 3 : Bruno Senna 254kph (157.83mph) Speed Trap: N Hulkenberg 307kph (190.76mph) There are those in F1 - including former drivers - who believe Hamilton should have been a touch more circumspect against the notoriously erratic Maldonado in Valencia.

Be that as it may, it is the only mistake one can lay at Hamilton's door in a season in which he has been driving impeccably - of his rivals, only Alonso can claim to be performing at a consistently higher level.

Yet, largely through no fault of his own, Hamilton is 47 points behind Alonso. That is a margin that will not be easy to make up even with a faster car, with the Spaniard driving as well as he is.

For Alonso, Hungary was a race of damage limitation - and despite finishing only fifth he managed it to the extent that his lead over second-placed Mark Webber of Red Bull is now six points bigger than it was on Sunday morning.

Alonso did lose some ground to Hamilton, Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel, but he will with good reason leave Hungary and head in to F1's summer break well satisfied with what he has achieved so far in 2012.

Ahead of the Hungarian race, on the back of two wins and a second place for Alonso, rival teams have been growing a little tired of the constant insistence by Alonso and Ferrari that they did not have an especially fast car.

But Hungary proved Alonso's point - in a straightforward dry qualifying session and race, they are a long way from setting the pace. Ferrari are well aware that even Alonso driving this well needs more help if he is to hold on to his lead.

That slight impatience with Ferrari was one of the more minor examples of what was a tense weekend in Budapest.

Far more serious has been the growing impatience of the other top teams with Red Bull's constant run-ins with F1's legislators.

Once you might see as an accident, twice perhaps unfortunate, but the latest row to brew up over the weekend was the fourth example of Red Bull pushing the technical rules to the limit this year.

Rivals are unhappy with both Red Bull's behaviour and the way in which the FIA are policing the rules.

The revelation in Hungary that Red Bull were asked last month to remove a device that theoretically allowed them to illegally adjust their front suspension by hand - which the team insist they never did - follows hot on the heels of the row over engine mapping in Germany a week ago.

That prompted a rule change ahead of the Hungarian race. Red Bull insisted it would have no significant effect on them, but their pace was always going to be watched closely.

They were slower in qualifying than they might have been expected to be at a track which should suit their car, but the way the race panned out it was hard to make a definitive judgement on their pace. However, their best laps and sector times suggested the Red Bull was indeed the fastest car on the track in the race. 

To prove it definitively, they will have to wait, for F1 now embarks on its mid-season break, when all teams have to down tools for two weeks, before getting back hard on it for the remainder of the month-long gap before the next race.

It is a break that many in F1 feel they need after a demanding first 11 races, and the remaining nine promise to be even more intense.

When F1 reconvenes at Spa in Belgium at the very end of August, almost everyone involved has a point to prove.

Despite Alonso's handsome lead, this championship remains very much alive.

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