Stung not only by
Lewis Hamilton's comeback victory at Hockenheim, but also by the apparent turnaround in the performance stakes between itself and
McLaren, Ferrari headed back to Maranello for a week of intensive head-scratching ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix.
While content to admit that the Woking team had better pace over one lap, the Scuderia was confident that it had the upper hand in race conditions, but that clearly wasn't the case in Germany, where Hamilton showed the field a clean pair of heels in the opening laps, and was then able to reel in
Felipe Massa and
Renault's
Nelson Piquet Jr to claim the win in dramatic fashion. World champion
Kimi Raikkonen, meanwhile, was barely a factor all weekend.
With Massa coming home third and Raikkonen fifth, it was a second successive poor result for
Ferrari, following its
Silverstone debacle, and team boss Stefano Domenicali admitted that there were mysteries to be solved if the Scuderia was to halt Hamilton's charge at the Hungaroring.
"Being unable to exploit our usual race pace and economical use of tyres was one of the most critical points of the weekend," Domenicali conceded, "Normally, we know that McLaren are fast over a single lap, and that this is a trade-off with consistency and pace during the race.
"Unfortunately, [at Hockenheim], we have seen that that was not the case. In qualifying, of course, they were really strong but, if you consider the fuel that they had for Lewis and [Heikki] Kovalainen, Felipe's lap was really good. This time, if you think that, in the first stint, we were slower by half a second, it shows that there is something that has to be really understood.
"We need to go deeply into the details without making any quick solutions because that's the mistake that we shouldn't make at this moment."
Although largely dry for the
F1 runners, Hockenheim was plagued by a gusty wind, but Domenicali was unwilling to draw any swift conclusions that changing conditions may have hampered his team's performance.
