UNITED KINGDOM / FILE: MOTOR RACING: Lewis Hamilton says he wants to win F1 title on the track as expert says McLaren is unlikely win appeal

McLaren's Lewis Hamilton said on Monday (October 22) he wanted to win the Formula One title on the racetrack, not weeks later on appeal. After letting the title slip from his grasp by one point in Sunday's season-ending race in Brazil, the 22-year-old Briton told reporters that to be promoted after some drivers had been disqualified would not be the way he wanted to become champion. The rookie, Formula One's first black driver and the title favourite before Sunday's race, needed to finish fifth or better but lost out to Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen after finishing seventh on a nightmare afternoon at Interlagos. Raikkonen won the race but the Finn's first title was overshadowed by a stewards' enquiry into the three cars that finished ahead of Hamilton. McLaren have said they intend to appeal against the stewards' subsequent decision not to penalise Williams' Nico Rosberg and BMW Sauber's Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica for fuel temperature irregularities. The aim would be to lift Hamilton above them in the classification, securing the points he needs to become champion instead. But former Cosworth chief Formula One engine designer Geoff Goddard, told Reuters on Monday (October 22) that McLaren's appeal is unlikely to be successful. Goddard, currently professor of motorsport engineering design at Oxford Brookes University said, "The colder the fuel, the smaller the volume, so if you've got a fixed sized tank you can put more volume in that tank because it's now shrunk the volume of the fuel. If you're feeding it through a hole, through the fuel filler, more will go through the hole per second, than if it was warmer. So you can speed up the refuelling rate - by a fraction. But it's such a tiny percentage, it's miniscule. If somebody's lost an event by a lap, for example, as Hamilton did, a man ahead of him who had colder fuel would not have helped him. So the stewards are quite right to say - look, it's racing we've finished the race, celebrate the championship, leave it at that." Checks after the race found that the temperature of the fuel pumped into the Williams and BMW Sauber cars broke the technical regulations by being more than 10 degrees celsius below the ambient temperature. Stewards found however that there was a 'considerable discrepancy' between ambient temperatures recorded by Formula One Management's timing monitors and the FIA-contracted meteorologists Meteo France. They ruled that there was therefore 'sufficient doubt' as to render a penalty inappropriate. As cooler fuel is more dense more can be put into the tank and it can be fed in faster. But Goddard says the advantage gained would have been miniscule and not affected the overall result. He added that even if the regulations were found to have been broken, the offending teams would most likely be fined and not docked points.

ITN Source | October 23, 2007

Tags:. .advantage. .technical. .somebodys. .monitors. .fifth