How Raikkonen's resurgence exposed Ferrari's weakness

Kimi Raikkonen's improved form was rewarded with pole at Monza, but Sebastian Vettel's setback in the title race showed how the team's indecisiveness with the Finn could come back to haunt it.

Jonathan Noble Sep 6, 2018, 11:22 AM

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When Formula 1 races are snatched by the kind of small margins that allowed Lewis Hamilton to mug Ferrari at Monza, it becomes all too tempting to dissect the weekend in a bid to find the moment the war was won and lost.

What if Raikkonen and Vettel hadn't battled so hard on the first lap, thereby gifting Hamilton the sniff he needed to draw alongside his world championship challenger at the second chicane and turn the race on its head.

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Author Jonathan Noble

Jonathan Noble is Motorsport.com’s Formula 1 editor. Having graduated from University of Sussex Jonathan worked for sports news agency Collings Sports reporting on F1, F3, touring cars and other sports, with articles appearing in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Reuters, Autosport and other publications. In 1999 he moved to Haymarket Publishing to become a senior editor at Autosport Special Projects, and one year later he became Autosport’s grand prix editor. In 2015 he moved to Motorsport Network, becoming the F1 editor for Motorsport.com. He is also a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers, and sits on the FIA Media Council.

Jonathan has won multiple awards for journalism - in 1991 he was the winner of the Guild of Motoring Writers’ Sir William Lyons’ Award for young journalists, in 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Individual accolade for consumer journalism in the Haymarket wards, in 2011 he won Haymarket’s Scoop of the Year, and in 2018 he was awarded a prestigious Medaglia d’Oro at the Lorenzo Bandini Awards for his contribution to F1 journalism.