MANAMA, Bahrain — After only the first three races, the 2008 F-1 season has turned into a three-way battle for the top honors.
Ferrari scored a comfortable one-two in the Bahrain Grand Prix, with Felipe Massa winning the race for the second year in a row and Kimi Raikkonen following up his recent victory in Malaysia with a second place at the Sakhir desert circuit.
There’s a long way to go in the 18-race championship, of course, but thanks to a strong race in Bahrain in which Robert Kubica finished third and Nick Heidfeld fourth, BMW Sauber headed back to Europe leading the Constructors’ Championship for the first time ever in the team’s three-year history.
BMW Sauber has 30 points while Ferrari is second with 29 followed by McLaren, which had “a day to forget” according to Mercedes-Benz chief Norbert Haug, with 28.
Raikkonen leads the Drivers’ Championship with 19 points ahead of Heidfeld with 16. Then comes Lewis Hamilton, Kubica and Heikki Kovalainen tied with 14 points each.
“For sure it will be a very competitive season,” said Massa, who earned 10 points in Bahrain after two pointless races in Australia and Malaysia.
If not for some traffic in Q3, Massa would have started the race on pole. It didn’t matter, however, as Kubica’s advantage of qualifying in the prime spot evaporated when the red lights went out.
“I had massive wheel spin at the start,” said Kubica, who lost the lead to Massa at the start and second place to Raikkonen on lap two. “I hit some debris in the first corner of the second lap. When I drove through the oil, I was sure I had punctured my tire, as at that point I didn’t have the information about the oil.”
Massa went on to lead 52 of the 58 laps. Raikkonen settled for second in an ill-handling Ferrari.
The BMWs were not fast enough to beat the Ferraris, but they were close enough for Kubica and Heidfeld, who ran third and fourth most of the afternoon, to lead six laps during the second round of pit stops.
Kovalainen started and finished fifth in his McLaren. Hamilton qualified his McLaren third but ended up 13th after screwing up his start and losing seven places and later smashing into the back of Fernando Alonso’s Renault.
“I let the team down today,” Hamilton said. “The whole weekend has not been ideal, starting with the accident on Friday. I messed up at the start, as I didn’t hit the switch early enough and therefore had not engaged the correct engine setting, and the anti-stall kicked in.
“I lost a lot of places, but things were still salvageable at that point. Then I had the incident with Fernando. I was behind him, and I moved to the right, and he moved to the right and that was it.”
Some people thought that Alonso had brake tested Hamilton, but Alonso denied it. And Renault backed up his claim by showing the telemetry which proved he was at full throttle and gaining speed when Hamilton hit him from behind.