One thing tho, Alonso's qually lap at Monaco was amazingly hooked up. Hamilton or no Hamilton.
Just wanted to put this and the comments before it about Hamilton and Alonso at Monaco last year into perspective. I hope not to be annoying just to show you where i got the information from when I said Lewis was faster. I was not being blinded, it came from an article by Mark Hughes who is very good at technical analysis(Im not). Anyway, here it is, its a good read. Sorry its so long
"Lewis's unfinished Monaco business
Tuesday, 20 May 2008 00:00
After four straight defeats by Ferrari, Lewis Hamilton and McLaren need a big weekend in Monaco to signal that they are truly in the hunt for this year's title.
The Woking squad was a dominant force in the Principality last year, although Hamilton had to play second fiddle to team-mate Fernando Alonso, who controlled the race from pole position.
But, as Mark Hughes explains, the '07 results disguised the reality that Hamilton was the pace-setter around the tortuous street circuit from the moment practice got underway. So Lewis has some unfinished business to attend to this weekend...
Monaco represents a great chance for Lewis Hamilton to get his world title assault back on course.
His McLaren-Mercedes should be just as well suited to the unique challenges of the track as last year’s car was.
In particular, the way the MP4-23 heats up its tyres very quickly should give it the front-end bite so crucial to getting direction change around the tight streets.
The fact that those corners are all of very short duration means there will not be the usual downside to the tyre warm-up characteristic – that of overheating the rubber as the corner goes on.
Besides which, Hamilton will be on an absolute mission, still feeling aggrieved at how he was denied victory here last year in favour of then-team-mate Fernando Alonso.
There remains rancour about how Hamilton reacted to Alonso’s victory last year, some feeling he behaved like a sore loser who’d been beaten fair and square.
But that view does not stand up to close analysis.
Anything more than a surface look at that weekend suggests that Hamilton was the quicker driver throughout – and by a significant margin.
Alonso’s performance was faultless, but that only translated into victory because of circumstances outside his control.
Where Hamilton was wrong in his angry post-race assessment was in assuming there had been any team favouritism towards Alonso; there had not.
The team made the decisions they did to maximise their chances of a 1-2 finish – and it was simply circumstance that decided which of the two drivers benefited from that approach.
So, although last year’s Monaco Grand Prix is ancient history now, it’s worth a recap to underline just what a dynamite force Hamilton is at this venue.
The surface analysis shows Alonso on pole, Alonso leading all the way, Alonso setting fastest race lap. Ergo, Alonso was the faster driver.
Actually, not so. There were several tracks last year at which Alonso was the faster McLaren driver, but Monaco was not one of them.
The misleading picture is all to do with fuel weights, a subject that turns off many a casual follower but which is absolutely crucial in fully understanding how last year’s Monaco GP played out.
Alonso was on pole but Hamilton was just 0.2s behind despite carrying five more laps’ worth of fuel. Around Monaco the cars use around 1.8kg of fuel per lap and each 10kg of weight costs 0.25s of lap time.
Do the sums and Lewis had done a near-identical lap to Fernando when account was taken of their respective fuel weights.
But this was despite being baulked by Mark Webber’s Red Bull from Mirabeau to the tunnel entry. Alonso had been baulked too – by Robert Kubica’s BMW in the last couple of corners. So because of the traffic the actual grid times don’t definitively answer the question of who was really quicker.
But there’s a clue when comparing the sector one times, the part of the track stretching from the start line to the entry to Mirabeau.
Both drivers got clear runs through this sector – and Hamilton's last run was faster than his previous benchmark time by 0.35s. He was on course to improve by 0.5s over the lap as a whole. This makes perfectly believable his claims that he could have been on pole by 0.3s despite carrying an 0.225s weight penalty in extra fuel.
There are other clues too. At the beginning of the final qualifying session, the skies were overcast and it was looking like it might be about to rain.
McLaren had new tyres fitted to both cars and gave Alonso and Hamilton instructions to go flat-out immediately rather than doing the usual fuel-burn laps, just in case this should turn out to be the only opportunity of doing a lap on a dry track.
Alonso recorded a 1m16.1s, Hamilton a 1m15.9s – again, despite the extra couple of tenths’ worth of fuel. Meaning that on these runs, weight-corrected, Lewis was 0.4s faster.
It turned out that the rain held off, so the new tyres had been wasted because the session got faster as fuel was burned off and the line of surface rubber made the track grippier – and thus it all came down to the traffic-compromised final runs.
Hamilton had been 0.3s faster than Alonso since Thursday practice whenever they were running together on the same specification of tyre.
Alonso ended up heading the times in both these sessions, giving more ammunition to those who contend the Spaniard was faster.
In fact, Hamilton didn’t complete the first session because a starter motor component fell into the gearbox.
It was while he sat out the last half-hour that Alonso took advantage of the rubbering-in of the track to eclipse Hamilton’s earlier time. When they had been running on track at the same time, Lewis was a consistent 0.3s faster.
In the afternoon session Hamilton crashed on his first lap of the softer, grippier tyre option. Again, Alonso was fastest by the end, but there was no basis for comparing their speed.
When practice began again on Saturday morning, Hamilton took up where he’d left off, again 0.3s faster than his team-mate, this time in wet conditions.
In Q1, when they each did one run on the harder tyres, Hamilton was quicker by 0.374s. Fitting the softer tyres for Q2, he did one run and was quicker than Alonso by a whopping 0.6s.
However Fernando had made an error on his lap and so went out again for a second attempt, taking advantage of the track rubbering-in to set a lap 0.048s faster than Hamilton’s earlier effort.
Again, this is sometimes used to illustrate that Alonso was quicker, but this is to ignore that it was his second attempt and that Hamilton made only one run during a time when the track was slower.
In summary, every time there was a basis for direct comparison of speed through the practice sessions and into qualifying, Hamilton was conclusively faster.
Looking at race speed, Alonso set the fastest lap, on lap 44. At this time he had 10 laps of fuel still on board. On the very next lap, Hamilton – with 18 laps’ worth of fuel on board, an extra 0.36s – set a lap just 0.2s slower.
Again, taking fuel weight into account, the Briton was faster.
In order to protect themselves from a safety car being deployed before they had stopped, McLaren in effect split their strategy.
They brought Alonso in for his first stop as planned on the 26th lap, but called Hamilton in just three laps later rather than the planned five.
This prevented him from leapfrogging Alonso, but also protected the team from losing a place in the event of a safety car to cars such as Kubica’s BMW, which was running a one-stop strategy.
At the second round of stops, Alonso was brought in three laps early (again to cover a possible safety car), Hamilton was brought in ten laps early – thus finally denying him any chance of getting ahead.
The order had effectively been decided by Alonso getting into the first corner in the lead. It was immaterial to the team which of the drivers headed the 1-2; all that was important was protecting the 1-2.
The only way Hamilton could have avoided being the one who was compromised was to have qualified on pole. And for that, he needed not to have been baulked.
There was no conspiracy against him – that is clear. But what is equally clear is that he was the faster McLaren driver throughout the weekend.
There is a huge amount of unfinished Monaco business for Hamilton this weekend. All he needs to do is channel that into a devastating performance."
