MAGNY-COURS, France — Felipe Massa won his third race of the season and took the lead in the Drivers’ World Championship with a victory in Sunday’s French Grand Prix in his Ferrari.
Kimi Raikkonen started from the pole and led until lap 38, but a broken exhaust robbed his Ferrari of power and he ceded the lead to Massa. Raikkonen still managed to hold onto second place, however, and scored points for the first time in three races.
“It would have been hard for me to beat Kimi on the track,” said Massa, who is leading the championship for the first time in his F-1 career.
“I would have been happy with second, but a win makes me even happier.”
Jarno Trulli, meanwhile, was ecstatic after finishing third in his Toyota, his first podium since the 2005 Spanish Grand Prix and Toyota’s first since the 2006 Australian Grand Prix.
The Ferraris looked strong all weekend. Raikkonen was comfortably cruising out front when his engine started to sound flat halfway through the race. The right side exhaust pipe had broken and the engine lost power.
Once in front, Massa controlled the pace. When light rain made some sections of the track slippery late in the race, he got even more conservative.
McLaren Mercedes could have challenged the Ferraris, but because of Lewis Hamilton’s 10-place grid penalty [for his accident with Raikkonen in Canada] and Heikki Kovalainen’s five-place grid penalty [for obstructing Mark Webber in qualifying], they lined up 10th and 13th, respectively. That’s a long way behind the red cars.
To make matters worse, the McLaren duo got stuck behind Nelson Piquet in the early laps. Then officials gave Hamilton a drive-through-the-pits penalty because they determined he had gained an advantage by going off the track after passing Sebastian Vettel.
“I believe I was ahead on the outside,” Hamilton said, “and I couldn’t turn in on the guy; otherwise, we would have crashed, so I took the outside line, lost the back on the marbles and went over the curb. I continued because I don’t believe I overtook him by going over the curb; I actually took him before that.”
The penalty, which Hamilton refused to say whether it was justified or not, dropped him out of contention for scoring any points and he ended up 10th.
Things went better for Kovalainen, who fought his way up to fourth and put plenty of pressure on Trulli, who beat him by just .679 of a second.
“I tried everything I could to overtake him,” Kovalainen said, “but I just couldn’t quite make it. He defended third place very well.”
Trulli, remembering how he lost third place in this same race in 2004 in the final corner, indeed fought hard.
“It was wheel to wheel like in go- karts,” he said.
Although he managed to stick with Trulli and Kovalainen for a while in the closing laps, Robert Kubica had to settle for fifth in his BMW Sauber.