so, after 2 consecutive non-scoring races, he's still sitting at 14 points, already 21 points behind the title leader.

What do you think about the chances of Heikki winning the title this year? he was mixing it up with the top scorers in the first 3 races and then suddenly, he's quite a long way behind - I hope he can bounce back in Monaco, however, I'm not too sure if that's one of his favourite circuits.

What do you think of his performance so far? Do you think he's the potential to develop into an absolute TOP F1 driver?

it seems Heikki is rarely being talked about and I hope he'll not become another Heidfeld in the sense that people never talk about him - I hope he'll become another flying Finn that makes his own mark.

I hope he does well in F1 (well he already kinda is but you know what i mean ) he comes across as a genuinely nice guy when hes interviewed. I dont think he'll win the the title this year although he might win a race or two but i was well impressed the way he came out first thing on Friday morning practice and stuck it right up the top of the timesheets.

Realistically he is probably out of the running for the championship, but I don't think you can question his performance. The 2 non-scoring races were not his fault. He is new to the team and only in his second season, I think there is a lot more to come.

The same as they were at the start of the season, essentially zero.

Raikkonen showed us last year that anything can happen.

Massa had 2 non-score, but he's now back in the title hunt. It's not looking good for Heikki but it's no over yet. A lot will depends on the car, if Ferrari maintains their edge through the season, neither Heikki or Lewis will win the championshp this year.

slim, but he can pull it back

Zero. Unfortunately that (and McLaren's wish no doubt) is that he is even more threat to Ferrari drivers with his "take no prisoners" approach.

He has the same chance as Lewis, Felipe, Rubens & Sato.

He's got no chance because he will always be McLaren's #2 driver and be forced, each race, to crash into one or the other Ferrari. Deliberately.

But I don't think he does have a chance anymore. He may get into the position of having a 'mathematical' chance of winning but he is this years Massa. Always kidding himself and every journalist who asks that he's in the running but in reality he never was.

It's a shame because I think his performances show he does have the speed.

"His title chances, which were zero before, are practically nil now!" as Murray would say.

That said, if the same hick up, that Heikki had in the last races, had befallen Lewis instead, the McLaren management would be in quite a frenzy right now...




Louis, it's not entirely true, we are discussing Heikki's WDC chances since October 2005:

http://forums.autosport.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=82846

His title chances are slim, unfortunately. He has been a positive surprise and doesn't seem error prone at all. It would never be easy against the faster Ferraris and Hamilton, but now it would really take some huge events in his favour.

He is lucky that Ferrari, McLaren and BMW are so close to each others, so the results can be mixed in the following races. The difference isn't that big as there are many cars fighting for the positions in front.

Julli

They just went from 0 to -1

I wish Kova would get the same equipment as Hamilton. Poor guy.

I'd say his chances are slim, but don't coun't him out completetely as Kimi was down 21 points last year and still claimed the title!

Uh . . . wow, flamebait tastic.

Kova drives Arrows chassis?

and avon tyres

it was obvious that his chances were around zero, and still are altough he's good.

I think he's quite wisely decided to settle into McLaren gently, but I expect to see him more aggressive from here on in. In Turkey you could see the hunger after qualifying, he is desperate to start earning wins. Although he's a long way behind, if McLaren have a run of 1-2 results (possible for the next two races at least) he can close the gap to the Ferraris somewhat. I think his best hope is for Massa to continue beating Raikkonen - while Massa remains in the title race there is no hope that McLaren will ask Kovalainen to act as support. Perhaps it is still too early to say if Kovalainen is going to turn out to be a Kubica (IMO up there with the 3 big names) or Heidfeld (best of the rest) type driver, I suspect it's the latter but I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.

After the US GB the gap was 26 points!

BTW, How many GB´s has McLaren survived without a car failure?? Last year zero, this year zero so far..

He still could do it but it's not likely. The best Kovi can realisticly hope for this season is 3rd or 4th overall.
Once he has gained a little more experience we can begin to seriously consider him.

I think his chances are slim to non-existant. Which is not to say I don't rate him. I think he's a fantastic talent but being so far behind (points-wise) and with such a strong and ARGUABLY favoured teammate ahead of him it'll be tough.

I don't think he needs to win the championship this year to have a great career though. What he needs to do is show Lewis up speed-wise in qualifying a few times (box ticked on that one) and beat him fair-and-square in a few races (box unticked so far but he was stronger overall in Turkey).

He needs to be more agressive in fending off Lewis at the starts but this could provoke another in-house civil war...

Maybe he just needs to put himself in the shop window for another top team so he can get the hell away from the Ron & Lewis show. If Hammy continues to be challenged and throws the dummy it could lead to problems down the line.

Interesting challenge for McLaren. Do they continue to treat Kovalainen equally since last year showed such a gap can be reeled in, or because it was Hamilton that was reeled in they work Schumacher style to ensure Lewis gets as many points as possible.

they will give him the chance i think, they have in the past and will do in the future, anyways the early season favouring of alonso actully cost them the title, or any other 2 point loss...

macca have had stuff break, just either none terminal, or in practise/qualy or tyre/wheel, which you could say either way...

not impossible we have a david/mika thing happen again too...

So did Hamilton.

Well in that case he certainly would not have a chance and neither would Hamilton regardless of how they split the same equipment, running tandem or taking turns

the real question is,

can he beat his teammate, first do that, and then we see where the championship is....


kova is starting to find his feet...


and also, this whole, 'same equipment' thing...., in a 400 million plus team, do people reaaaaaaaaally think they make the one car go faster than another car?? the drivers get the same equipment, why would any driver drive in a team where he knows the team itself is purposefully disadvantaging him, wouldn't that driver the moment he leaves the team, tell every other driver never to go there?? don't buy it


Go Kova Go, and beat hamilton!

I think that if his bad luck stops, he has a very good chance. In Turkey he could have won the race, and in Spain he probably would have got a podium. It wasn't his fault that his tyre blew in both races.

I think he's done well this year so far. If he's capable of ramping it up as he often state in interviews, then I would expect him to develop into a genuine threat as the season goes on. Lest we forget, everything about his racing past suggests he's capable of it, and one season hampered by a poor Renault chassis should not obscure that fact.

Whether he will have the ability come race day to better Hamilton remains to be seen. I think Hamilton is already a remarkable racer and will develop just as Heikki will. But he'll no doubt be close enough to win more than a few battles - even if I have yet to see the edge that makes me think he could win this particular war.

As for this season, I suspect Mclaren's best chance of stealing the WDC from Ferrari will be for Heikki to act as rear gunner for Hamilton and take points off the odd Ferrari. This asumes that Hamilton is well clear of him in the points standings come mid season, and that the team continue to close the gap on Ferrari in the development race.

Pretty slim now. He gotta start finishing races, and beating Hamilton regularly as well. I don't doubt his abilities, but it'll be quite an impossible battle to get close to the top guys in the WDC standings.

Despite the results not going his way (for a number of reasons) I actually think Heikki is starting to fancy his chances of taking on Lewis...

This is by no means me stirring the pot here, I really like Heikki as a driver and a person, and I do think he's quick, certainly in qualifying trim, but somehow in the races thus far Ive not seen anything that's really highlighted him as a serious title material, not yet anyway.

Thus far in races where he's had a fairly trouble free run to the flag, he's been mistake free and fairly consistent but he's not really set the world alight IMHO. Malaysia for example he was dropping off the back of Lewis when Hamilton had his tyre change issue, and despite Hamilton then being stuck behind a slower Red Bull for a long time, Heikki only ended up finishing 8s ahead of Lewis but 20s behind Kubica, with a fastest lap 0.5s slower than Hamilton. A similar thing happened in Bahrain where although he managed to pull the fastest lap out the bag in the final stint, it was all a bit too late because prior to that he hadnt been able to keep pace with the Beemers or the Ferraris and again finished 20+ seconds in arrears. In contrast it seems that whenever Hamilton has had an incident / handicap free race, he's been able to keep the Ferraris in sight, beat the BMWs, and win the third outright, and I do believe that had Hamilton been in Heikki's positions in Malaysia and Bahrain, he'd have probably finished higher up the order than Kovalainen did, or at least a lot closer to the cars ahead.

It could be that he's been continuing his softly softly approach but given the speed he can extract in qualifying I doubt that. I wouldnt go as far as saying he could be the new Trulli just yet, but I have thus far been slightly disapointed with his race day performances.

Great comment Locoblade, I have the same feeling too about Malaysia.

At Bahrain, he said he's locked up/flat spot his tires in the first laps when defending/challenging Kimi, that's why his speed wasn't good. But then I didn't really see much fire from him in the 2nd or 3rd stint.

His qualifying performance has been really good, hopefully, he can turn this into exceptional race performance, soon!!

As long as Hamilton is in the running, Heikki won't have a chance.

that's probably his goal from day one, the first man you need to beat is your teammate.

Exactly. However, he seems to be the better Macca driver already. I wonder how long it will take for Britons to catch onto that. I mean people only notice his points score, when something much more significant has been seen on track. A bit like Kimi in 2002, DC outscored him, but that was only a small part of the story.

Agreed. Just like in 2007 KR outscored FM but that's only a small part of the story.

Agreed. The whole story covers outscoring Lewis and Fernando too.

Heikki is certainly fast but his qualifying performances are not the whole story. Personally I feel that Hamilton has been concentrating more on achieving more consistent race stints than last year and also has issues with the soft-tyre overheating for his style compromising the qualifying. For example Hamilton has often been quite fast on hard tyres in Q1 and then falls back a little on the softs. Judging their respective pace solely by qualifying is a bit simplistic, particularly as Hamilton has always characteristically been a stronger racer than qualifier.

In fact, Lewis did not outscore Fernando. 109:109.

Given the importance of qualifying in F1, I'm sure Lewis and Kimi would love to qualify higher on the grid, I don't buy they take a more relaxed approach to qualifying and prefer to concentrate on race pace. Interestingly, so far this season, both Kimi and Lewis had problems with car setup and the tyres.

How are you working that one out, from qualifying I assume?

In 5 races thus far, Heikki and Lewis have yet to have a "straight fight" to the flag with both cars, in all 5 one of them has had a problem or made a mistake whilst the other has had a fairly clean race. In the three "clean" races Lewis has had (Oz, Barcelona and Turkey), he's performed significantly better in terms of competitiveness to the rest of the grid than Heikki has in his two relatively "clean" races in Bahrain and Malaysia.

Its possible thats simply the car that wasn't as competitive at those two circuits so the results flatter Hamilton slightly, and until we get a few races where both are running at their potential we won't really know, but from where Im sitting, Heikki seems to have the upper hand in quali but Hamilton has the upper hand in race pace.

First he needs to show he can beat Lewis over a whole normal weekend, then he needs to show he can win a race, and then we can start to talk about a championship.

Doing a comeback like Kimi did last year seems very unlikely to me:

- Heikki isn't as experienced as Kimi
- He has a big disadvantage not only to the championship leader but also to his team-mate... a team-mate which is the undeniable leader of his team, and so far has seemed quicker when it matters
- McLaren have been consistently slower than Ferrari and occasionally slower than BMW. That's a lot of other cars to worry about. McLaren will need to make a jump in performance if this is to happen.

Sorry, can't see it happening, at all.

realistically speaking - none

In fact, he didn't say Lewis outscored Fernando, just that Räikkönen outscored both of them.

Oh, silly me, sorry Man of the race

So why did Lewis end up 2nd and Fernando 3rd in the WDC? They should have been joint 2nd no?

i actually think that Heikki in the long term will be a more sucessful driver than lewis. he is consistent does not do banzai dirving and lastly he is FINNISH.

as they say to finish First your must first FINNISH