Lewis Hamilton’s 2008 Monaco Grand Prix turned messy in a matter of seconds when he ran wide at Tabac on the sixth lap, clipped the barrier and picked up a right-rear puncture. The McLaren limped on without damage to the rear suspension or rear wing, and because the incident came near the end of the lap, Hamilton was able to crawl back to the pits without losing quite as much ground as he might have done.
That is why the race still gets searched now: it captured Monaco at its most punishing, with the wet surface turning small errors into major swings in position. Felipe Massa had led away from pole in his Ferrari, Hamilton had already pounced on Kimi Raikkonen’s sluggish getaway at the first corner, and by the time the field had settled, the narrow streets were demanding complete precision from drivers who usually had none to spare.
Hamilton’s puncture was only one flashpoint in a race that kept breaking open. He returned to the track fifth, two laps after his mistake Fernando Alonso ran wide at the top of Massenet and hit the barrier, then David Coulthard made the same error moments later before Sebastien Bourdais piled into the back of him. The safety car was needed, and under today’s standards a race with that much damage would likely have been stopped with a red flag; in 2008, the safety car was enough to keep Monaco moving.
The wet also exposed the limits of the cars themselves. Drivers had the option of an extreme wet tyre, Raikkonen later received a drive-through penalty for a tyre timing issue before the race, and Alonso, who chose the extreme wets, would later crash into Nick Heidfeld’s BMW at the Fairmont hairpin. Heikki Kovalainen’s McLaren rear wheel also tagged the Williams front wing of Nico Rosberg. Martin Brundle summed up the spectacle bluntly: these were the finest drivers in the world, but in those conditions the cars felt hopelessly inadequate, and they were never designed to be going around hairpins at 20m.
Monaco is difficult in the dry, but the 2008 race showed how quickly it becomes unforgiving when the rain falls. Hamilton’s brush with the barrier was not the one that ended his day, and the fact that he could rejoin fifth after a right-rear puncture says as much about his recovery as it does about how little margin there was for anyone else.
