Hamilton Could Still Win The F1 Championship

[y2krog2000]

McLaren set to launch fuel appeal

Lewis Hamilton still has a slim chance of taking the F1 title after McLaren said they would contest a decision not to punish two other teams in Brazil.
Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen won the race to edge out Hamilton, who finished seventh, for the drivers' championship.

Race stewards then investigated alleged fuel irregularities by Williams and BMW Sauber, but decided not to punish them.

Had they been disqualified, Hamilton would have finished fourth, earning him enough points to become world champion.

McLaren notified motorsport's world governing body, the FIA, late on Sunday of their intention to appeal against the stewards' verdict.

The problems with the BMW Sauber and Williams cars centred on a technical infringement - a fuel-temperature irregularity - which could have given them an advantage.

Nico Rosberg finished fourth in his Williams while the BMW duo of Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld were fifth and sixth.

But after a three-hour hearing, the race stewards chose to impose no penalty on either team, ensuring Raikkonen could celebrate the first F1 title of his career by finishing one point ahead of Hamilton and McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso.


The outcome has upset former world champion Damon Hill, who has accused F1's race stewards of exercising double standards.

He feels McLaren have been on the wrong side of FIA decisions on more than one occasion this season while other teams have escaped censure.

"It does get quite difficult to see where the consistency lies," Hill told Radio 5live.

"If you go back to the beginning of the season, McLaren's argument is that Ferrari won the very first race using a device which was later found to be illegal by the FIA.

"They removed it but the result stood.

"It's very unsettling to have this appeal, but there is so much at stake and the FIA have to find somehow a way of being consistent.

"I can see how a couple of degrees fuel temperature can be regarded as being so negligible that it wouldn't make any difference.

"But we're talking about such tiny differences all the time in Formula One, there has to be a line where you're one side or the other."

Under FIA regulations, no fuel on board a car may be more than 10 degrees centigrade below ambient temperature - the prevailing temperature on the track.

But in initial findings there was a clear discrepancy.

Heidfeld's fuel was 13C lower than ambient at his first stop and 12C lower at his second.

Kubica's varied by 14C, 13C and 13C at his three stops, while Rosberg's was 13C and 12C out at his two stops.

Cooler fuel can give a car a performance advantage.

It is denser, so it can take slightly less time to refuel a car or marginally more fuel can be added in the same time.
Cooler fuel would also give a slight power advantage for about three laps before returning to the temperature out on the track.

However, the total advantage for each car over the race distance was almost certainly no more than a second.

There is some form of precedent not to exclude the cars.

In 1995, the Benetton-Renault of Michael Schumacher and the Williams-Renault of David Coulthard were initially disqualified from first and second in Brazil because their fuel did not conform to samples approved by the FIA.

But a week later the FIA, who said no advantage had been gained, reinstated the drivers' points, preferring instead to dock points from their teams.

Hamilton could only finish seventh in the final race of the season at Interlagos after a poor start, hampered by an apparent mechanical problem on lap eight when he dramatically slowed at one point, almost to a stop.

He could be seen rocking in his McLaren, virtually willing it to get going, while all the time the field streamed by.

Whatever the problem, his car finally regained power, but he was left with too much to do.

Finn Raikkonen, 28, led home team-mate Felipe Massa in a Ferrari one-two at Interlagos.

Alonso finished on the same points as Hamilton, but the double world champion from Spain was third on countback.

BBC SPORT | Motorsport | Formula One | McLaren set to launch fuel appeal