Very unfortunate that the engine let him down. It's a good thing though that Raikkonen was able to drive his car until the end of the race. Apparently, he was forced to back away from Glock and to some conservative driving.
Fresh focus on Ferrari's level of reliability has been cast after the team revealed that Kimi Raikkonen was forced to slow down at the end of the Hungarian GP due to a problem that was unrelated to Felipe Massa's sudden engine blow.
Massa's misfortune was the second time in barely a month when a Ferrari driver had lost a race due to mechanical unreliability, although on that occasion, in France, he was the beneficiary as he inherited a win from a luckless Raikkonen. While the high-profile malfunction of his engine in Hungary has inevitably caused embarrassment at Ferrari, the team have also confirmed that Raikkonen had to end his pursuit of Timo Glock and second place in Budapest after they spotted another problem with his car.
"We just asked him to slow down in the same lap as we had the failure of Felipe," revealed team boss Stefano Domenicali. "We saw there was something on the mechanical side on the rear that was not properly working so we said that, on the same lap, to bring the car home."
Having just ordered Raikkonen to slow down, the team then suffered the ignominious shock of Massa's car crawling to a halt in front of their pitwall with smoke billowing from its broken engine. "Unfortunately we had no warning, we just had the smoke in front of us, and it was very bad," lamented Domenicali.
"Unfortunately there was no signal, no information, no warning on the telemetry."
With Ferrari collecting a paltry six points in Hungary rather than a probable eighteen but for their reliability woes, McLaren were able to narrow the gap to their rivals in the Constructors' Championship to a mere ten points. F1 is taking a three-week break before it returns to action in Valencia on August 24 but Ferrari's engineers should be braced for some hard work and long nights in the meantime.
"We cannot accept to have this kind of problems, even if it was only 10 kilometers from the end, we cannot have this problem of reliability because we are paying too
much of a price for it," rued Domenicali.
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They can't afford any reliability issues. They've already missed out on so many points earlier in the season due to mistakes.