So Felipe Massa is pissed off about Singapore 2008, where Renault’s Nelson Piquet intentionally crashed, allowing teammate Fernando Alonso to take the victory because of a refueling strategy that relied on that crash.
Massa ended up finishing 13th in Singpore, out of the points, and he lost the championship by one point.
What Massa is forgetting is that there were seventeen other races that year. He won six of them, so there were eleven other opportunities to get that one point. Let’s take a look at some of those where he stood a good chance to get that point.
Might as well start with the first race of the season, Australia. Massa qualified fourth but in the first lap he spun off. On the 26th lap he collided with David Coulthard, and he eventually bowed out with engine failure. Hard to say how many points he would have received, given I can’t find what place he was in when he retired, but he probably wouldn’t have got any given his spin and accident would have put him well out of the points.
Malaysia looked promising as Massa qualified on pole. He got jumped by teammate Kimi Raikkonen in the pits, but was racing a strong second until he spun on lap 30 and retired. I would count this as eight points lost.
Must we go on? He’s already lost eight points, more than enough to have won the championship. And that’s only after the first two races of the season! Let’s go on anyhow.
In the Canadian Grand Prix Massa was having a pretty good race. In his words, he was “fighting for a place on the podium.” A refuelling problem on lap 19 meant he had to make one extra stop. He finished fifth. Fourth was probably his had he not had the refuelling problem, and third was also possible. Let’s just say he would have finished fourth and give him one extra point.
The British GP can be summed up by this sentence: “Felipe Massa had an awful weekend and spun no fewer than five times in the race and finished in 13th place.” It was a wet race, admittedly, but other top drivers didn’t spin five times.
How about the Hungarian Grand Prix? Massa was leading comfortably when his engine gave up on lap 68 of 70. Ten points lost because of mechanical failure.
In Japan Massa ran into Lewis Hamilton and received a drive-through penalty for his efforts. He finished seventh. Drive-through penalties typically add about 20 seconds to a driver’s time (maybe more, maybe less), and given Massa finished only seven seconds behind Sebastien Vettel, one could possibly assume that he could have finished sixth, gaining a point.
There you have it. Twenty possible points Massa could have picked up. Nine of those are solely because of driver error. If you’re looking for your missing points, Felipe, look at yourself instead of trying to blame Renault. Of course, there’s always someone else to blame, isn’t there? There’s mechanical unreliability, bumpy tracks, too many cars in the pitlane so you can’t see that the pitlane exit light is red… Like Keith Collantine said, Massa “should pay more attention to the deficiencies in his driving that caused him to throw points away.”
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