Motor Sport British Grand PrixKimi Raikkonen's McLaren MP4-20 must be regarded as the favourite to win tomorrow's British grand prix at Silverstone.
But if you repeat that prediction to any other member of the McLaren team they clap their hands to their ears. Small wonder, because though the Finn's new steed has proved consistently the quickest car on the circuit this season a whole host of setbacks have conspired to prevent it regularly scoring points.
"I don't think anybody's got a chance compared to the McLarens here from what we've seen of testing," said Jenson Button, BAR's English driver, who got his own championship score off the ground in the French grand prix last Sunday. "They are going to walk it, I think. I don't really want to say that but I think it's true."
The great strength of the latest McLaren has been its ability to use the softer-compound Michelin tyre without concerns about wear or blistering. This is partly down to excellent aerodynamics but also to chassis dynamics, weight distribution and considerably more power from the Mercedes V10 engine than they enjoyed last year.
In the cockpit, Raikkonen is one of the great driving talents of his time, a man with such intuitive sense of balance and car control that the challenge of driving a 200-mile grand prix right on the limit of adhesion apparently exacts no toll in terms of stress of mental wear and tear.
Yet the car's potential has been squandered. Raikkonen has won only three races of the 10 so far this season, prompting McLaren insiders to concede that, to a large extent, the car has fallen short of expectations.
An engine failure in France demoted the Finn to 13th place on the grid and he was walking away with the San Marino grand prix when a driveshaft broke. He suffered a tyre failure in Malaysia and messed up both qualifying laps in Bahrain, eventually finishing third. And his most memorable retirement came when he crashed out going into the final lap of the European grand prix at Nurburgring when his right-front suspension broke as the result of his having flat-spotted a front tyre earlier in the race.
The team's fortunes have not been helped by the disappointing experiences of Juan Pablo Montoya, successor to David Coulthard in the McLaren line-up, who missed two races with a shoulder injury and has shown patchy form.
It was a year ago at Silverstone when Raikkonen began to put McLaren's revival on very serious display, taking pole position, leading the opening phase and finishing second to Michael Schumacher's Ferrari. This year the MP4-20 has been quick from the start, to the point where the test drivers Pedro de la Rosa and Alex Wurz, who took turns to deputise for the injured Montoya at Bahrain and Imola respectively, were able to score championship points on their guest outings.
Yesterday De la Rosa, who runs on Fridays as part of the arrangement allowing teams that finished outside the top three in the previous year's championship to run third cars in the first two free-practice sessions, immediately set the pace ahead of Toyota's test driver Ricardo Zonta, Button and Raikkonen.
"I always enjoy Silverstone," said Raikkonen, "because we get to drive some of the best corners of the season. You have Copse, which is probably the fastest corner we do all year, with speeds not dropping below 265kph as you take it flat out and on the limit, even though you tackle it from a blind approach.
"That then leads to one of the best complex of corners we have at any grand prix track - the Maggots-Becketts-Chapel S-bends, which make great demands on aerodynamic and chassis balance."
Further back Ralf Schumacher was fifth fastest in the first session ahead of Montoya and Michael Schumacher's Ferrari, most of the leading runners experimenting with tyres and fuel loads in order to keep their rivals guessing.
In the second hour-long session De la Rosa maintained fastest time ahead of Zonta but the other two McLarens of Montoya and Raikkonen moved into fourth and fifth ahead of the Toyotas of Ralf Schumacher and Jarno Trulli.
The championship leader, Fernando Alonso, moved up to seventh place.
"It was not too bad a day for me," said the Renault driver. "We still have some improvements to make to the balance but I am quite happy because we had no problems, the programme ran smoothly and the Michelin tyres seem very consistent."
Michael Schumacher wound up 10th in the second session. "I have to say the long runs we did were not too bad, although that was the case at Magny-Cours," the Ferrari number one said afterwards. "I don't want to make any predictions for the rest of the weekend."
