MOTORSPORT: Webber loses crucial ground in F1 title chase

Red Bull's lack of pace a worry - and now queries on car's legality
The German Grand Prix could not have been a lot worse for Mark Webber. Australia's Formula One world championship contender collected only four points from eighth place in his Red Bull car.

Ferrari's championship leader Fernando Alonso scored the maximum 25 points with his third win of the year. Although Webber qualified third he started eighth because of a five-place grid penalty for a gearbox change after Friday's practice sessions.

Now the Red Bull cars are under the official microscope, with queries about the legality of the torque mapping in their Renault engines. While they were allowed to race unchanged in Germany there will be further investigations this week.

Across the Atlantic, Aussie Will Power recovered from a lowly grid position after an engine change for the IndyCar race on an airport circuit at Edmonton in Canada this morning to storm to third place as Penske teammate Helio Castroneves won from Japan's Takuma Sato.

While Alonso's F1 lead over Webber has blown out from 13 points after Webber's British GP victory two weeks ago to 34 now at the halfway point of the season, the Aussie's reigning world champion teammate Sebastian Vettel is not as close to him as he might have been -- and is still yet to win his home race, or any GP in July.

Vettel crossed the finish line second but a 20-second post-race penalty for running wide off the Hockenheim track while overtaking Jenson Button's McLaren-Mercedes on the second last lap dropped him from second place to fifth -- and gave him only 10 points instead of 18, so he's still 10 behind Webber.

In a huge form turnaround, Button wound up officially second and Kimi Raikkonen third in his Lotus-Renault, from 10th on the grid, and is now fourth in the championship.

Lewis Hamilton's 100th GP was a horror, with a puncture on his McLaren early and ultimately retirement that has dropped him a place in the championship to fifth, 62 points behind Alonso.

However, Button's result put McLaren back ahead of Lotus in the constructors' championship, still led handsomely by Red Bull from Ferrari. Michael Schumacher started third, set the fastest lap in his Mercedes but finished seventh, behind both Saubers.

The other Australian driver in the race, 23-year-old Daniel Ricciardo, finished 13th (one place ahead of Toro Rosso teammate Jean-Eric Vergne) after starting 11th (and again out-qualifying Vergne).

Toro Rosso team boss Franz Tost admitted the Ferrari-engined STR7 car "is lacking some pace at the moment" after looking so promising early in the year.

Toro Rosso technical director Giorgio Ascanelli looks like paying the price for the deterioration, not attending Hockenheim and Tost saying he was "on holidays". Autosport's website reported that Ascanelli "is set to part company with the team".

Meanwhile, Webber was unhappy with what transpired for him at Hockenheim after his second win of the season at Silverstone.

"I had no pace today and wasn't quick," he said. "I couldn't stay with people that I normally can, so we'll look into it and come back in Budapest [at next Sunday's Hungarian GP]... I'm disappointed, as I expected to get more out of today's race... Normally Sundays have been OK for me, but not today.

"After the first lap it wasn't too bad, I got Lewis, but after that I was just hanging on... This is a completely different track [to Silverstone], but we have to be quick in all conditions -- and today we weren't for whatever reason."

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said: "Mark's afternoon was always compromised by the gearbox penalty. We were aggressive at the first stop, it didn't work out as we hoped and he seemed to struggle a bit with the long-run pace on the harder tyre. Possibly the lack of running on Friday and key set-up time cost us there."

Ferrari declares its car still not the best
Fernando Alonso's victory was the 30th of the 2005-06 world champion's career and he's further entrenching himself among the sport's greatest. He took pole position in wet conditions and was always in charge of the race, despite pressure from Vettel and Button.

Alonso's now been in the points 22 races in a row -- just two races short of Michael Schumacher's record.

"That was fantastic again, pole position ... victory," Alonso said. "The [economic] situation is not great in Spain, but a Spaniard won with an Italian car designed by a Greek -- and this Spaniard won in Germany!

"We did not have the quickest car. McLaren and Red Bull had a little bit extra, but not enough to get past... The team took a few strategic decisions that were spot on... I didn't have a moment to relax.

"If I think back to where we were in Jerez [in Spain, during pre-season testing, where the Ferrari looked hopelessly uncompetitive], or Australia at the first race, I have to thank everyone at Maranello for the fantastic way in which they reacted to the situation.

"I said that the month of July would be crucial, with 75 points up for grabs in four weeks -- and so far we have brought home 43, so we will try and finish the job in Hungary."

The win was Ferrari's 219th in F1 and team principal Stefano Domenicali said it had been "like a 67 lap qualifying run!"

"I find it hard to remember watching from the pit wall such a tight race from the start to the chequered flag," he said. "Fernando was perfect -- not one mistake, not one hesitation, pushing to the maximum for an hour and a half. What a driver!

"The team were also great, managing everything to perfection. We expected to face some stiff opposition and that was the case: to keep ahead of them, we had to do a better job."

The Red Bull technical controversy
The governing Federation Internationale de l'Automobile's technical delegate Jo Bauer reckons the Red Bull RB8 cars of Webber and Vettel are illegal, but the stewards -- while not fully agreeing with the team -- did not preclude them from racing in Germany.

However, one of the stewards, ex-F1 driver Derek Warwick, said of the heated pre-race discussions: "It's certainly not the end of it."

F1's technical working group will consider the matter more intensely early this week. It is obvious that Red Bull's genius designer Adrian Newey will have wanted to recover some of the lost performance after the "blown diffuser" on last year's dominant RB7 was outlawed.

The FIA's Bauer said at Hockenheim, in referring the matter to the stewards, that "it appeared "the maximum torque output of the Renault engines in the RB8s was significantly less in the mid-rpm range than at earlier GPs.

"In my opinion this is therefore in breach ... of F1 technical regulations as the engines are able to deliver more torque at a given engine speed in the mid-rpm range," he said. "Furthermore, this new torque map will artificially alter the aerodynamic characteristics of both cars, which is also in contravention of [technical directive] 036-11."

Close to the start of the race the FIA issued a statement that said: "While the stewards do not accept all the arguments of the team, they however conclude that as the regulation is written, the map presented does not breach ... the F1 technical regulations and therefore decide to take no action."

That meant no action at Hockenheim only.

Renault's F1 engine chief Cyril Dumont, pleased that no breach had been found by the stewards in Germany, said: "F1 is a tight environment and we have to try to find every hundredth of a second that we can. We're not racing lawn-mowers and we were pleased to show that our package was very strong today -- our pace was not far off the win."

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said: "There is nothing in the regulations that talks about the intent of a rule, so it [the torque mapping] either complies or it doesn't."

It could be a weak of intense technical controversy leading up to the Hungarian race -- the last before a four-week break in the season.

"I had a normal start and held position on the opening lap, so at least we did not make life more difficult than it needed to be," Ricciardo said. "However, it was clear in the opening laps that I could not match the pace of those cars around me and I was fighting quite a bit with some understeer.

"After that, I lost places to the Saubers [of Kamui Kobayashi and Sergio Perez] and Nico Rosberg (Mercedes) and could not stick with them.

"At the first stop, I asked for some more front wing to get rid of the understeer and the second stint was a little bit better.

"I ran the final stint with even more wing and that was the best the car had been all afternoon and I was hoping to catch Paul Di Resta [Force India-Mercedes], but with eight laps remaining, I started to lose grip at the rear end and that was it.

"We tried a bit of everything today, but unfortunately we did not have any answers."

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