Leitura obrigatória

Leitura mais do que obrigatória o texto abaixo. Muito boa a análise do jornalista Edd Straw, do site Autosport.
Saima disponibilizou em seu KRS e eu trago aqui para vocês. Muito bom mesmo!!!

The reigning world champion had a poor season by his own standards, and ended up playing second fiddle to Felipe Massa at Ferrari. But occasional flashes showed that his incredible speed is still in there somewhere, so what went wrong? Edd Straw explains.

Everyone had a theory for Kimi Raikkonen's underwhelming 2008 season. Was he demotivated? Was one world championship title enough for him? Was he enjoying himself a little too much off track? Was he letting his fitness slip a little? Was it all about the tyres? Was the balance of the Ferrari F2008 wrong for him? Was he on the cusp of retirement?

As ever, the reality of the situation was far more complex than such broad brush strokes allow, but what was beyond question was that by the final third of the season he was looking every bit the number two to team leader Felipe Massa.

So was Kimi just slow in 2008? Well, actually he wasn't. Astonishingly, the Finn claimed ten out of 18 fastest laps over the course of the year, matching Michael Schumacher's all-time record for a season. Granted, fastest laps are not necessarily the best indicator of overall race performance - after all they only reflect a small snapshot of a 200-mile grand prix - but in the case of Kimi, that one statistic is the key to understanding his problems.

Even during his more lacklustre performances, the Finn was capable of setting fastest laps, and he frequently did. The Hungarian Grand Prix, where he qualified a distant sixth and was only promoted to a third-place finish by Massa's last-gasp engine failure, is a classic example of that, as is Singapore where he was a massive eighth-tenths off Massa's pole lap. Yet despite two poor races, he still added a couple of marks to the FL column.

In simple terms, this doesn't add up. How can you combine being one of the quickest drivers over one lap in a race with so often under-delivering in qualifying? Most often cited as the root of the problems were the Bridgestone control tyres. Like a number of other drivers, including BMW Sauber's Nick Heidfeld, Raikkonen struggled with tyre warm-up in qualifying, meaning that his front tyres weren't at their optimum operatingtemperature throughout a qualifying lap. Once again, there is more to this than meets the eye.

The way the tyres performed was more of a symptom of the problem than the absolute cause. After all, as Bridgestone's director of motorsport tyre development Hirohide Hamashima points out, weren't these the same tyres that, despite difficulties adapting to at the start of the year, Kimi won the title on in 2007?

"Of course, the tyres may have some responsibility, but I believe that car set-up affects him more than tyre warm-up because those compounds have been used for two years already," says Hamashima. "Last year Kimi didn't mention it, but this year many times he has complained about tyre warm-up.

"So basically I think that the car characteristics are different from last year to this year - the Ferrari has a little bit more of an understeer tendency. That's why Kimi couldn't control the car so well in qualifying, but sometimes had a quickest lap during the race."

Here things begin to add up. As a rule, the Ferrari F2008 understeered. This meant that Raikkonen struggled in qualifying, particularly as the season went on and the prevailing characteristics of the car edged further towards understeer. Add in a few tyre warm-up difficulties to exacerbate the problem and you have car No.1 languishing on the second or third row of the grid.

Come the race start, it's a similar situation with the car understeering. However, as the first stint goes on, the Bridgestone tyres begin to wear. In terms of balance, this would generally move the car's behaviour towards oversteer, meaning that Kimi finds the car more to his liking a little later in the stint.

But by then, he's bottled up behind the odd BMW and Heikki Kovalainen, maybe even a Toyota or two, and can't exploit that speed. It isn't until he finds some space in the second or third stint that he is fully able to show his speed once the tyres have transformed the handling of the car.

That was the story of too many of Raikkonen's races in 2008.

"Basically the tyre is going to an oversteer tendency during the race," says Hamashima. "Maybe the car is a little bit understeery, but as the tyres move more towards oversteer Kimi finds a good balance and as a result could get the best lap in the race."

Of course, there were races where the characteristics of the circuit - Magny-Cours for example - meant he was able to get the tyre warm-up right in qualifying and was able to excel on Saturday afternoon. There were also times - Spa for example - where Raikkonen was able to charge to the front on the opening lap, and we witnessed a performance worthy of a world champion.

But, the fact was, there were just too many races where his struggle to adapt his driving style to the understeering Ferrari F2008 undermined his chances.

Ironically, the Belgian Grand Prix, the very race that could have heralded his return to form, was the one that seemed to kill off his chances of defending the drivers' title. Although he again qualified disappointingly, it was largely as a consequence of a mistake and he claimed to have made a stride forward with the handling.

"I am happier with the car now, but the mistake I made didn't help," he said at the time. "So we didn't get exactly what we wanted but at least the car feels better."

He made amends for the mistake with a scintillating first couple of laps. Pushing Massa towards the grass on the run to Les Combes on the opening lap was definitely the Kimi of old, not a demotivated shadow, and once he had capitalised on Lewis Hamilton's La Source spin on the second lap to take the lead a couple of corners later, he was gone. This really could have been the race that turned things around. Then, in the closing laps, it rained.

Hamilton carved into his lead and passed him - controversially - into La Source in the closing stages. With the Ferrari hardly a user-friendly car in the wet, he did amazingly well to retake the lead from Hamilton, only to crash at Blanchimont later that lap. Ten points became none and in the remaining five races he didn't even look like winning a race.

By his own admission, the motivation had waned a little despite being able to secure an extra year on his Ferrari contract to take him through to the end of 2010, a deal understood to be a result of him scoring a certain proportion of the team's net total of points over the previous 18 months.

"That is the way it is," Raikkonen recently told Finnish TV station MTV3 when asked about his motivation. "If you know you are fighting only for third place then you maybe don't have the same speed for the whole race as normal. If you have no chance to overtake or improve your position, it is definitely not very interesting. When you are driving for the title, naturally, things are completely different."

Other than in Shanghai, where he had to let Massa past for second place, he was very much the junior partner at Ferrari in the title run-in. And you wouldn't completely blame Kimi for becoming a little demotivated - there were times when it wasn't just the handling of the car that wasn't on his side.

Wind back to the Spanish Grand Prix and things were looking very good for him. He had just won in Barcelona - his second victory in the opening four races - and was nine points clear of Hamilton in the drivers' championship. Things were looking very good; certainly far better than they were last season when there were suggestions he was under pressure for his seat after a difficult start to his Ferrari career.

In the next four races, Raikkonen was beset with catastrophic luck that cost him big points. At Monaco, he had pole position but was given a drive-through penalty because the team failed to get his wheels on quickly enough before the start. No points. In Canada, he was preparing for a pit-exit drag race with Robert Kubica when Hamilton clattered into the back of him at the traffic lights. No points.

At Magny-Cours, he was supreme, obliterating Massa in qualifying and cruising to victory when some exhaust damage dropped him to second. Two points lost. At Silverstone, he was carving into Hamilton's lead prior to the first pit stop, only for Ferrari's dodgy weather forecast to lead to him being sent back out on worn standard wets on the brink of a deluge. More points gone begging. Big points.

But ranged against that bad luck, there was also a second half of the season during which there were too many races where he looked more like an also-ran than a defending champion. Not even the occasional majestic performances in Spain, Bahrain, Magny-Cours and Spa can counter that.

Two wins could have been three or four. That could have kept him at the sharp end of the title chase. That could have given him the boost he needed to find that extra few tenths he needed. The fact was, that wasn't how it turned out and Raikkonen has to be considered one of the disappointments of the season in terms of delivering on his ability. Those days when he was on his game served only to remind us of just how good he is.

The question is, can he bounce back after what was, pound for pound, the worst season of his F1 career? With the return to slick tyres expected to make the control Bridgestone tyres oversteery even on qualifying laps, don't bet against the driver who simply became "The Finn" in 2008 regaining the right to insert "Flying" into his name next year. But if he has another year like 2008, who knows what the future will hold.

Beijinhos, Ludy