After four consecutive victories, the championship-leading Ferrari team and their defending world champion, Kimi Raikkonen, are expecting to be the dominant force again in Monaco on Sunday. The Finn, who leads this year’s title race ahead of Ferrari teammate Brazilian Felipe Massa, is convinced the Italian scuderia is in excellent shape.
Formula One title contenders McLaren left Turkey with their confidence up on Monday despite being beaten for the fourth race in a row by champions Ferrari. Lewis Hamilton finished second at Istanbul Park but the 23-year-old Briton described Sunday’s race as the best of his career after having to make an extra pit stop to ensure his tyres lasted safely.
Ferrari’s Felipe Massa won the Turkish Grand Prix from pole position for the third year in a row on Sunday after tyre concerns slowed Lewis Hamilton’s challenge. The Brazilian took the chequered flag 3,7 seconds ahead of the 23-year-old McLaren driver, who ran most of the race on the harder tyres and had to make three pit stops compared with his rival’s two.
Lewis Hamilton has told his critics to be patient with him and not expect him to achieve too much at an early stage of his career. The 23-year-old McLaren driver opened his second season in Formula One well with a big win in Australia, but he has struggled in the races since then and has fallen nine points behind Kimi Raikkonen in the drivers’ standings.
Veteran rockers Queen, along with Razorlight and Simple Minds, will top the bill at an Aids benefit concert in London next month to mark Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday, organisers announced on Tuesday. Precisely 46Â 664 tickets will go on sale for the three-hour gig in Hyde Park on June 27, which is in support of the former South African president’s 46664 campaign against HIV/Aids.
Ferrari’s world champion Kimi Raikkonen stretched his Formula One lead to nine points with a dominant win from pole position in the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday. Brazilian Felipe Massa sealed Ferrari’s second successive one-two finish, and third win in a row, with McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton taking third place to revive his title challenge after a disappointing last race in Bahrain.
McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton said on Thursday he had learnt his lesson and was ready to make amends in Spain this weekend for his disappointing last race in Bahrain. ”Obviously I won’t be making the same mistake again,” he told reporters at the Circuit de Catalunya.
World champion Kimi Raikkonen believes his Ferrari team are set to cement their recent resurgence by winning this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix. As Formula One continues to reel from the controversy surrounding a sex scandal involving Max Mosley the leading teams have all upgraded their cars in preparation for the start of the ”European” season.
Defending world champion Kimi Raikkonen wants to erase from his memory bad results at one of his bogey tracks on Sunday by winning this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix. The Ferrari-driving Finn, who roared back to life in this year’s title race by winning the Malaysian Grand Prix ten days ago, has never won on the sand-blown circuit built in a desert.
Brazilian Formula One driver Felipe Massa this week vowed to bounce back from his fruitless start to the season. The Ferrari man retired from the first two Grands Prix of the season in Australia and Malaysia and already trails Great Britain’s Championship leader Lewis Hamilton of McLaren by 14 points.
Defending drivers’ world champion Kimi Raikkonen bounced back to form and back into the scrap for this year’s title when he won the Malaysian Grand Prix for Ferrari on Sunday. But the Italian team’s hopes of a dream one-two finish were wrecked by Brazilian Felipe Massa spinning off while running second.
It has only taken two races of the new season for McLaren to get on the wrong side of Formula One officials — and Fernando Alonso — again. The team — kicked out of last year’s constructors’ championship — were back in trouble on Saturday, penalised for their drivers causing interference during qualifying for the Malaysian Grand Prix.
Brazilian Felipe Massa secured pole position for the Malaysian Grand Prix on an all-Ferrari front row on Saturday. Driving in hot and humid conditions under heavy cloud cover, Massa was joined at the head of the field by Formula One world champion team mate Kimi Raikkonen, who lapped 0,482 seconds slower than the pole sitter’s time of 1,35.748.
Former champion Nigel Mansell has hailed Lewis Hamilton as the Formula One driver to beat while rejecting comparisons between the 23-year-old Briton and golfer Tiger Woods. ”Lewis is the man to beat,” said Mansell, who took his title after winning the 1992 season-opener in South Africa.
Formula One championship leader Lewis Hamilton expects conditions for this weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix to be the toughest he faces this year. Days after his brilliant win for McLaren at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, where the race-time temperature was 39 degrees Celsius, he said it could be even more sweltering at the Sepang circuit.
McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton avoided the mayhem around him to open the Formula One season with a pole-to-flag victory in a crash-strewn Australian Grand Prix on Sunday. The 23-year-old Briton, last year’s rookie sensation, finished 5,4 seconds ahead of Germany’s Nick Heidfeld in a BMW Sauber.
Lewis Hamilton got an early psychological edge over Kimmi Raikkonen, winning pole position for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix while the world champion will start near the back of the grid. McLaren’s Hamilton had the fastest times in the second and third runs of the three-phase qualifying session.
Back in the wild Sixties and Seventies, a Formula One hotshot would arrive bleary-eyed at his hotel, check out the nearest club and order a large drink or three. In 2008, his corporate-conscious counterpart is more likely to check into the gym and order an early call. ”I have busy testing days, busy marketing days and I have training days,” said Lewis Hamilton.
Ferrari are back on top, Lewis Hamilton is a title contender and two-time Formula One champion Fernando Alonso is back with Renault. Add night racing to all that and one of F1’s most exciting seasons in 2007 is set for a worthy follow-up in 2008.
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/ 19 February 2008
Top-ranked tennis stars Roger Federer and Justine Henin received the Laureus Awards on Monday as the world’s top sportsman and woman for 2007. Federer won an unprecedented fourth Laureus, all in succession, while Henin was voted top for the first time. South Africa won the world team of the year award after going unbeaten to win the Rugby World Cup.
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/ 18 February 2008
Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone on Sunday described abuse of Lewis Hamilton in Spain as an ”isolated incident” and said the sport did not need an anti-racism campaign. ”What it does, all of these things, it gives attention to the people that want attention,” the Briton added.
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/ 15 February 2008
Another week, another chance to gauge how our fine governing bodies are combating racism, with everyone’s favourite test case still England’s 2004 friendly against Spain in Madrid. Yet what’s often overlooked is that it was world soccer governing body Fifa that imposed the paltry £44 750 fine on the Spanish FA for the racist chanting.
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/ 13 February 2008
Britain’s Lewis Hamilton, the victim of racial abuse from Spanish fans earlier this month, took top honours on Tuesday in Formula One pre-season testing in southern Spain. The McLaren driver was fastest among the 16 drivers on the Jerez de la Frontera circuit with a time of one minute 19,102 seconds, beating his previous best time on the same track.
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/ 4 February 2008
Spain could lose both of its Formula One races following the racist taunting of driver Lewis Hamilton by spectators over the weekend. Governing body the FIA said on Monday that the racial abuse aimed at Hamilton, Formula One’s first black driver, during testing at the Barcelona circuit could result in sanctions.
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/ 1 February 2008
Former world champion Fernando Alonso has shrugged off his brief and disappointing flirtation with McLaren, confident that his return to Renault will restore his title credentials. The Spaniard has been welcomed back by the French team, with whom he won back-to-back Formula One world championships in 2005 and 2006, after a disastrous time with McLaren.
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/ 11 January 2008
There could be few more satisfactory presents for a racing driver’s birthday than a new grand prix car, and Lewis Hamilton beamed with delight as the new McLarenÂMercedes for the 2008 grand prix season made its entrance this week. ”We’ve gone to a lot of trouble,” Ron Dennis, the McLaren team principal, said before the unveiling.
Lewis Hamilton insists last year’s spying scandal and the heavy hand of McLaren team politics have been consigned to history as he takes aim at the 2008 Formula One world title. The British driver enjoyed a storming start to his career in 2007 and was on course to clinch the title before he was pipped to the crown by just one point by Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen.
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/ 27 December 2007
Lewis Hamilton believes the traumatic experiences of his debut season in Formula One can help him emerge as a team leader for McLaren. Hamilton spent most of the campaign embroiled in an increasingly bitter feud with teammate Fernando Alonso, while his team were caught up in the spygate controversy.
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/ 8 November 2007
Formula One’s spying scandal took a new twist on Thursday when Renault was accused by the sport’s governing body of possessing confidential information belonging to rival team McLaren. FIA summoned Renault officials to a hearing of the World Motor Sport Council in Monte Carlo, Monaco, on December 6.
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/ 2 November 2007
Fernando Alonso’s stormy year with McLaren came to a shuddering halt on Friday with the announcement that the Spaniard was leaving the team just one year into a three-year contract. The deposed world champion will quit the British team immediately even though his current contract had two years to run until the end of the 2009 season.
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/ 23 October 2007
It was a fitting climax to a dramatic season. The Brazilian Grand Prix followed form with an upset finish — Kimi Raikkonen of Ferrari taking the final race of the season to vault past McLaren teammates Lewis Hamilton and two-time world champion Fernando Alonso for the title.
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/ 22 October 2007
The McLaren Mercedes-Benz Formula One team said on Sunday night they were ready to appeal against a stewards’ decision at the Brazilian Grand Prix, keeping alive Briton Lewis Hamilton’s title dream. The announcement followed the stewards’ decision not to punish the BMW Sauber and Williams teams for using allegedly irregular fuel.