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Ferrari's Felipe Massa won the French Grand Prix yesterday and moved top of the overall standings after his third F1 victory of the season.
Brazilian Massa overtook teammate and pole sitter Kimi Raikkonen with 32 laps to go and held on to win by 17.9 seconds for the second consecutive Ferrari sweep at the Circuit de Nevers.
"It was fantastic, I didn't expect that. Sometimes you need a little bit of luck and today we got that," said the Brazilian driver, who has taken half of the races since retiring from the first two of the season.
Massa leads the title race with 48 points - two points ahead of Robert Kubica of BMW Sauber, who finished fifth. Raikkonen trails Massa by five points in third.
"It's nice but my dream is not just to lead the championship, my dream is to win the championship," Massa said.
Toyota's Jarno Trulli finished third ahead of McLaren's Heikki Kovalainen, who had started 10th after a five-place qualifying penalty. Teammate Lewis Hamilton's frustrating day was compounded by an extra penalty that left him out of the points in 10th and the British driver now trails Massa by 10 points.
Massa's eighth victory meant F1 has a new leader for the fourth straight GP. The 27-year-old driver is the first Brazilian to lead the championship since three-time champion Ayrton Senna - a span of 15 years.
Raikkonen lost the edge when his exhaust came undone and Massa passed for Ferrari's eighth win in 12 races at the venue. The Italians rebounded from poor races at Monaco and Montreal that had robbed them of the early season momentum after four wins in the first five races.
Red Bull's Mark Webber was sixth ahead of Renault's Nelson Piquet jnr, who earned his first F1 points after eight races. Teammate Fernando Alonso, who had started third, rounded the points in eighth.
But Hamilton was defiant yesterday, blasting media critics and vowing to fight his way back into the title race.
The 23-year-old Briton, penalised 10 places on the starting grid and then hit by a further drive-through penalty, started 13th and finished 10th.
It was the third time in eight starts this season that Hamilton had failed to score. Two races ago he was leading the standings.
Hamilton's message to Formula One officials after the race was uncompromising.
"There is nothing you can do that can distract me. So you can keep on giving me penalties, whatever you want to do and I'll keep battling and I'll keep trying to come back with a result," he said.
The British Grand Prix at Silverstone is next, marking the halfway point of the season, and Hamilton said he would be a contender there.
"I absolutely 100 per cent aim on bouncing back there, regardless of what's written in the papers tomorrow," he said.
"I'm going to go back to the workshop tomorrow ... and we're going to focus on the next race and we're going to hit them hard."
Hamilton, who has moved to Switzerland for tax reasons and to escape public attention, has been hailed as a hero in Britain since he stepped into the limelight as a sensational rookie in 2007.
However, he was panned for ramming into the back of Raikkonen's Ferrari in the Montreal pit lane, the crash that earned him the Magny-Cours penalty, with newspaper headlines ranging from "Crash Dummy" to "Lew Silly Boy".
"I found out that there was a lot of negativity in the media, and that's to be expected," Hamilton said before the race. "That's what they do: they build you up and then they break you down, but they can't break me."
- REUTERS
