[Jack_Bauer]

Felipe Massa leads home teammate Kimi Raikkonen for a Ferrari 1-2 finish at the Turkish Grand Prix. It was the second year running in which the young Brazilian took a pole-to-flag victory at the Istanbul Circuit, clearly a circuit which he loves. The result allows Ferrari to close the gap to McLaren in both the driver's and contructor's championships as McLaren had a disappointing day with Alonso 3rd and championship leader Hamilton back in 5th. It was a very much needed faultless race from the two Ferrari drivers which they will look to build on as they head to their home race at the Monza circuit in two weeks time.

The start of the race was crucial as ever, and it was where things started to go wrong for McLaren. They may be regretting putting both drivers on the harder tyre while everyone around them were on the softs. The fact they were starting from the dirty side of the track just compounded their traction disadvantage, and after slow getaways Hamilton had lost out to Raikkonen's Ferrari and Alonso was getting swamped by the fast-starting BMWs. Hamilton really needed to at least get between the two red cars to have a chance of fighting for the race win, but it wasn't to be. The Ferraris weren't massively quicker but, they were just a small fraction quicker throughout the first stint and slowly but surely dropped Hamilton's McLaren. Alonso was bunched up behind the BMW of Heidfeld but could not get past until the pitstops, by which point the front three were out of sight.

It was a two horse race at the front and the two Ferraris seemed very evenly matched. Raikkonen got very close on a few occassions, particularly while making their way through the traffic. Massa almost cracked under the pressure at one point, locking his brakes into turn 12. Raikkonen got right onto the gearbox of Massa but the Brazilian just managed to close the door in time. Raikkonen ended up setting the fastest lap of the race in the dying moments, as if to send out a message that he was by no means outclassed by his teammate, but it will count for nothing at the end of the day. Massa has now jumped ahead of Kimi in the standings by one point; Raikkonen must surely be ruing his mistake in the final couple of corners of his qualifying lap which denied him his chance of pole.

The crucial moment of the race in terms of the championship race came on lap 42 when Lewis Hamilton's right front tyre punctured/delaminated on the run down to turn 9. He was forced to limp back to the pits with rubber flapping around on the right front corner, damaging his front wing. Fortunately for Hamilton the damage wasn't significant enough for him to need to change front wing. Ron Dennis has said that Hamilton had 5 laps more fuel than the Ferraris and could possibly have closed up to them in the final stint, but obviously that all went out of the window. In the end Hamilton nursed the car home to 5th place, losing places to Alonso and the strong-performing Heidfeld in the BMW. Disappointing for Hamilton, but in truth it could have been a lot worse under the circumstances.

Outside of the front runners there were good performances by the likes Kovalainen, Rosberg and Button. Kovalainen made it up to P6 and by the end of the race was just a fraction of a second behind Hamilton. Renault clearly put together a good strategy, going much longer in the first stint allowing him to pick up several places. Rosberg too had a strong race up in 7th place for Williams, ahead of the strangely out-of-sorts Robert Kubica. Jenson Button did well to recover to 13th place after starting on the back row after their nightmare day yesterday. He showed decent race pace throughout, made some good passes, finishing four places and half a minute ahead of teammate Barrichello.

Prior to this race Jean Todt reportedly told his Ferrari team that in order to win the titles they will need to score 1-2 finishes in virtually every race from now until the end of the season. They couldn't have got off to a better start to their late season push with a pretty much faultless weekend which will really put the pressure on the McLaren team. Hamilton now leads the title race with 84 pts, Alonso on 79, Massa on 69 and Kimi on 68 as they head to the Tifosi heartland at the ultra highspeed Monza Circuit.

Race Result

1. Massa
2. Raikkonen
3. Alonso
4. Heidfeld
5. Hamilton
6. Kovalainen
7. Rosberg
8. Kubica
9. Fisichella
10. Coulthard
11. Wurz
12. Schumacher
13. Button
14. Davidson
15. Liuzzi
16. Trulli
17. Barrichello
18. Sato
19. Vettel
20. Yamamoto
21. Sutil
ret. Webber