One of the perks of being in a supporting series for a Formula One race is that, hell, it's Formula One! It means that after your actual race, you get to watch even faster cars zip around the circuit. It's like dessert! F1 being what it is, their teams get track precedence over all others regardless of who is on track. That means during a Formula Ford race, a car might enter the pits only to find that he has to wait to get to his pit area because a Ferrari is being slowly pushed down pit lane to the scrutineers.
I almost don't have a point in posting this. I just wanted an excuse to post that sweet picture I took while in pit lane for our race. But it dawned on me while browsing through my iPhoto library that when I took this picture, Ferrari's outlook looked dismal. All weekend, their engineers were working on the car setup. We took a scooter around the track on Thursday and they were working on setup. On Friday, they were working on setup. This photo was taken on Saturday morning shortly before qualifying and they were still working on setup. When an F1 team works that much on setup during a race weekend, it usually means something is fundamentally wrong with the car's design.
So, when this photo was taken, it looked like this season would be a race between the two McLarens of Alonso and Hamilton. Had either of these two drivers actually taken the championship, like they should have this photo would have been about a bunch of engineers and mechanics struggling and losing. Instead, this photo is about a bunch of engineers and mechanics struggling and ultimately winning. You see, Kimi Raikonnen finished a dismal -- in Ferrari terms -- 5th in Montreal that weekend. But as finicky as the car was, all that effort put into it by the mechanics and engineers meant that Kimi got much needed championship points, especially over Alonso. The Ferrari mechanics and engineers could have settled. But they didn't that weekend in June. And it meant that come the end of the season, Kimi would take the championship in a highly implausible fashion by 1 single, solitary point, much to the surprise of everyone including the folks in this photo who probably thought all their effort was for naught.