F1: "I prayed" says Hamilton

The two happiest men in motorsport will have sore faces this morning: both Hamilton and Rubino couldn't keep the miles of smiles under control. Inside (mostly - but sometimes it bubbled out) they both giggled constantly.

Rubino was pleased to have demonstrated that, given the car and the conditions, he is still a very fast driver. His performance was made all the more impressive by the fact that both Hondas had been almost last in qualifying in the dry. Button, who had queued behind Barrichello in the pits to fit extreme wet tyres was as fast as Barrichello - until he hit a patch of standing water which was so deep his car became a plank skating across the surface. He spun - but in the face of oncoming traffic had to drive off the track, where like so many who suffered small accidents he became bogged down in the sodden gravel trap.

It's often said that the rain is a great leveller: and so it proved. Although Ferrari had already levelled the playing field on Saturday by being notably slower than expected. Massa's car was not just a slug, it was a slug that would not go where he pointed it. He had had a serious accident on Friday, and needed a car he could have confidence in. He didn't get it. And on Sunday, in very wet conditions (although not, mostly, heavy rain) the car would not turn right without trying (and often succeeding) to spin and after the race Massa said he was even having trouble keeping the car going in a straight line.

Silverstone is built on the perimeter road of an old airfield. It's flat with long straights and corners with small inclines. And it has poor drainage. So rain stays where it lands. There are puddles that are deeper than the clearance under a racing car. That means that there are two opportunities for aquaplaning: first when the car slides over the water, its tyres failing to clear down to the track due to speed - there's a limit to how much water a tyre can physically squeeze out as it passes. The second is when the water is so deep that the tyres are not big enough to reach the track before the bottom of the car skates across the top of the puddle. In aquaplaning, the driver has no control over the car until it comes to a halt, or nearly so, and the tyres can get a grip, so to speak.

Aquaplaning can happen at any time - corner or straight, even to a driver who is driving within the conditions as he sees them for he can't tell how deep a puddle is until he hits it. In the British GP yesterday, on-off rain and the rapidly drying (in some parts) track meant that what had been a small puddle one lap was anything but the next; and the opposite was true, too.

The first spin was Webber. He had done a fantastic job in qualifying and until the dying second of qualifying looked like taking pole. As the race started, he was hustled to fourth by Hamilton's audacious jump up the white line from third and Raikkonen's bold move from fourth. But as he went into Becketts Corner, down one of the few bits of landscape on the Silverstone track, he turned in a little too abruptly and ended up going backwards down the track in the face of more than a dozen cars all racing from the start in blinding spray. He was very lucky to be able to "hide" on the outside of the corner because, facing the wrong way, there was no red light on his car to show where he was. Had anyone taken a brave (or foolish) wide line around Becketts' to try to overtake, he may have had a serious accident with Webber's stationary car. Webber battled his way up the field to 10th - although like most finishers, his climb up the field was aided by retirements.

Coulthard, in his last British GP having announced that he will retire at the end of the 2008 season (but keep his licence and still work for Red Bull) said he had a touch with Vettel (which Vettel didn't seem to notice) They spun off together, balletically, and bedded down into the gravel which, being sodden, proved to be the most prominent indirect cause of retirements: no one that went into the gravel came out all afternoon. Even the cranes were reluctant to go into it if it were possible to get the cars out by any other means.

Ferrari had a weekend that demonstrated disarray. Not only did they fail to give Massa a drivable car, but they made an uncharacteristic dog's dinner of the strategy: they watched Alonso - who was proving that, despite the spoiled brat that everyone is coming to hate, he is truly an outstanding driver - who started the race on a set of intermediate wets - and kept the same tyres at his first pit stop. Ferrari followed suit - and it cost Raikkenon, on some laps, more than four seconds a lap. Having realised this mistake, they had to work out how best to fix it: bring him in and do an extra stop or leave him out, losing time, until they could fuel him to the end.

Why would they make such a decision? Aside from assuming that they could do anything Renault could do, and do it better, not changing the tyres may have been judged as the quickest way of getting the car out of the pits. The fuel strategy developed on Saturday was irrelevant when the rain came on Sunday but the cars already had fuel for a dry race. Fuel consumption would have fallen by perhaps 10 to 15% as the cars ran far off their top speeds - fifteen second a lap slower than qualifying. At the top end of the range, each mile per hour uses more fuel than the previous one, so the saving in top speed is a very significant factor. Hamilton, who had led from a very early stage, came in for a pit stop one third of the way into the race. At that point, no-one outside McLaren knew whether this was when he had originally planned to come in, or whether he had been fuelled light and, had the race been dry, he would have come in around lap 15 when an extra second in the pits would have been a cheap way of buying an extra three or four seconds on the track in the first stint. Raikkonen was just over two seconds behind Hamilton as Hamilton's team prepared.

Maybe Ferrari decided they could get the jump in the pits by short fuelling Raikkonen and not changing his tyres. Maybe they had kept him out hoping Hamilton would come in and they could hare off whilst there was a clear track, but simply ran out of time. Or maybe they were making a typically margin-of-the-rules Ferrari call: Raikkonen had been much harder on his tyres than Alonso and they were almost bald. It could be that Ferrari were expecting the conditions to dry. If they did, then he would scrub off the last patches of tread - and leave him with tyres that are slick and softer than the soft dry compound. In cool, dry conditions, that would have given them a significant advantage.

Whichever it was, the Ferrari came down the pit lane two second behind Hamilton. Hamilton's car had new rubber fitted; Raikkonen's did not. The Ferrari shot out of its box, and Hamilton, taking no prisoners after his pit lane debacle where he ran into Kimi's car at the pit lane exit, pulled out in front leaving less than a car's length apart. But then they hit the track proper and from then, it was all over. Raikkonen dropped off the pace being overtaken by anyone who came close. His team kept him out until the window for the second stop, brought him in and fuelled him to the end, giving him a new set of intermediate tyres. And he fought back to eventually end up fourth.

For some time, Renault have been saying that they have improved the car immeasurably but they are handicapped not by the car itself but by the fact that their engine specification was frozen prior to optimum development and so the car is good but the engine is slow. Finishing 6th on the tyres he started on demonstrated just how good the Renault and Alonso are. And except for being caught out by the conditions, like half the field, Piquet was going well, too.

But after all that, it was Hamilton's day. Drivers like nothing more than to win their home GP and fans like to see it - even if tribalism usually makes them support another team. Regardless of the team colours on display, Silverstone erupted in cheers when Hamilton passed Kovalainen but that was nothing compared to when he came up behind Raikkonen and Alonso - and marshalls waved blue flags to tell them to move out of the way so they could be lapped. That rivalled the cheers when he crossed the finishing line more than a minute ahead of the second place man Heidfeld and when he walked out onto the podium as the 12th British winner of the British GP and the first for more than a decade.

Half-way through the season, the points could not be closer: literally. Hamilton, Massa and Raikkonen are all on 48 with Hamilton edging ahead due to more wins. Kubica's the quiet man with 46 points despite a DNF at Silverstone.

The announcement last week that the British GP will move to the track many fans have been arguing for - Donnington Park - from 2010 seems entirely vindicated by the terrible conditions at Silverstone. Although the FIA and FOM say that this is due to a lack of investment at Silverstone - and it's true that the GP organisers have been more and more demanding over facilities for teams and spectators. Ecclestone pointed out that F1 is a major revenue generator for the UK but the government refuses to support it. The British Racing Drivers' Association, which owns Silverstone, could not raise the money to meet the demands of the FIA and FOM. Eccelestone says that the money needed would have been "less than 0.002% of the money the government will spend on the Olympic Games."

The previous owner of Donnington, Tom Wheatcroft, had always said that F1 was welcome but that the track was already suitable. It was a matter for F1 whether they came, not for him to change his venue for them. Last year, the track was sold, and the new owners have taken a different view and promised to spend GBP100 million. The track will lose none of its character as one of the best designed "country road" tracks in the world but facilities for teams and spectators will be upgraded. The track was last used for an F1 event in 1993 - a race won by Ayrton Senna in the wet.