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KIMI VICTORY SIGNALS NEW ''ICE'' AGE
Nick Heidfeld and Mark Webber completed the podium positions in a morale-boosting finish for the Williams team. The closing stages of the race saw extraordinary scenes as the two Renaults struggled with massive rear tyre degradation which provoked several successful, and failed, overtaking manoeuvres! Pole-sitter Raikkonen wasted no time in stamping his authority on the race, surviving a brake lock-up to lead through Ste Devote and crossing the line 1.2 seconds ahead of Fernando Alonso at the end of the first lap. By lap 10 the Finn had stretched his advantage to 3.2 seconds; by lap 20 he was more than five seconds to the good. Giancarlo Fisichella held a lonely third place behind team-mate Alonso, while fourth-placed Jarno Trulli found his mirrors filled with Webber’s Williams, which had bogged down at the start and lost two places. Just when things seemed to be settling into a rhythm, there was pandemonium at Mirabeau on lap 23 when Christijan Albers spun his Minardi and caused a big chain reaction incident. David Coulthard was the first to arrive on the scene and just managed to stop in time to avoid the errant Minardi, which was lying broadside across the track. A close-following Michael Schumacher was unsighted, however, and ploughed into the back of DC, breaking his Ferrari’s nosecone and doing terminal damage to the Red Bull machine’s suspension. A classic Monaco traffic jam ensued, and with the track completely blocked the officials deployed the safety car without delay. Suddenly all the teams’ strategic calculations went out of the window, and improvisation took over. Renault called both of its drivers into the pits to take advantage of stopping under the yellow, which meant Fisichella had to queue up behind Alonso before taking on service. McLaren had planned to do the same with Raikkonen, but Kimi didn’t hear the radio message until he had passed the pit lane entrance. As it transpired, that communication hiccup didn’t remotely threaten his command of the race. When the safety car pulled off at the start of lap 28, Raikkonen streaked away on a clear track, while Alonso had his hands full with a Renault that had been fuelled to the brim to enable him to go all the way to the end without another pit stop. The extra weight and the deteriorating balance of his Renault were already taking their toll on its rear tyres, and Alonso spent the rest of the race fighting a fraught rearguard action. Meanwhile Raikkonen continued on his merry way and had pulled out a luxurious 34.7-second lead by the time he made his one and only pit visit on lap 41, rejoining with 13 seconds still in hand over Alonso. The world championship leader showed how hard he was having to work to keep the Williams duo at bay when he took a novel line through the high-speed Swimming Pool complex on lap 53.
The pair rejoined in third and fourth places, sandwiched between the two Renaults, with Fisichella consigned to a similar defensive role to his team-mate and backing up a whole convoy of cars comprising Trulli, Juan Pablo Montoya, Felipe Massa, Jacques Villeneuve, Ralf Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello. Having so many cars running nose-to-tail around Monaco looked like a recipe for trouble, and, sure enough, Villeneuve obliged on lap 62 when he made a clumsy lunge inside Sauber team-mate Massa under braking for Ste Devote. One lap later Trulli decided he had had enough of following the painfully slow Renault of Fisichella and dived inside him at the ultra-tight Loews hairpin. The Toyota mechanics saluted what looked like a brilliant piece of opportunism by their driver. Alas, their joy was short-lived; in jumping across the fearsomely high apex kerb the Italian had damaged a tyre and was forced to pit at the end of the lap. Meanwhile Heidfeld and Webber had reeled in Alonso at a prodigious rate and resumed their frantic efforts to forge a way past. Alonso made his car as wide as possible but Heidfeld finally found a chink in his armour on lap 71, pulling off an exquisitely judged outbraking manoeuvre at the harbour-side chicane. Webber was eager to follow his team-mate’s example, and on the second of two rather desperate attempts he made a move stick at the chicane. Alonso was now in such dire trouble that he was caught by Montoya and co. with a couple of laps to go. Somehow the Spaniard managed to hold on to fourth and pocket some more valuable championship points from a race which had become nothing more than a damage limitation exercise. Montoya kept his head together to claim fifth after starting from the back of the grid, just ahead of the Schumacher brothers – who crossed the line virtually side-by-side – and Barrichello. Astonishingly, Fisichella in fourth and Barrichello in eighth were blanketed by just 1.083s after one of the most breathless climaxes to a race in recent years.
1. RAIKKONEN McLaren 1h44m51.210s Fastest lap: M.SCHUMACHER (1m15.876s)
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