Raikkonen revives hopes as Alonso fails to score points

McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen revived his Formula One title hopes yesterday by winning the Hungarian Grand Prix while Renault's championship leader Fernando Alonso failed to score.

The Finn's fourth win of the year cut the Spaniard's advantage to 26 points and made up for the previous weekend's German Grand Prix agony, where he retired while leading to hand victory to Alonso.

Ferrari's seven times world champion Michael Schumacher finished 35.5 seconds behind, a huge margin, after starting on pole position.

Alonso was 11th, his worst finish of the year so far, after an afternoon of hard labour prompted by a brush on the first corner of the race with Ralf Schumacher.

"It looks better now than after the last race but it's just unlucky that we always seem to throw away 10 points and then he (Alonso) gets it and the next race we get it back," said Raikkonen.

"We are just going backwards and forwards the whole time. But there are still six races to go and if we can do this kind of result and maybe something happens to him we can still fight for the championship. That's what we're going to do."

McLaren cut Renault's lead in the constructors' championship to 12 points but their hopes of a one-two finish died when Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya retired with a suspected broken driveshaft while leading after 41 of the 70 laps.

Alonso's race was wrecked when he broke his car's front wing in a coming together with Ralf Schumacher's Toyota on lap one.

The 24-year-old pitted at the end of the lap and rejoined in 17th place at a circuit where overtaking is notoriously difficult.

The only consolation for Renault was McLaren's continued reliability woes, with Montoya crawling back to the pits to retire.

While Schumacher failed to hold off Raikkonen's challenge, losing out in the pitstops, he could take heart from an encouragingly competitive day for the champions.

The most satisfying moment by far for the German, whose championship hopes have all but vanished, came when he lapped Alonso before the half-way point.

Two years ago it was Alonso, then only just 22, who lapped Schumacher in Hungary on his way to becoming the sport's youngest race winner.

"I was pretty happy with the pace we were able to run," said Schumacher. "If we could have stayed in front after the pitstops we might have had a chance because it is so difficult to overtake."

Ralf's first podium

Ralf Schumacher took his first podium of the season, and first for Toyota, in third place ahead of Italian team-mate Jarno Trulli in fourth.

Briton Jenson Button, his BAR stripped of tobacco advertising before European legislation comes into force today, was fifth with Germany's Nick Heidfeld sixth for Williams.

Australian Mark Webber was lapped but collected two more points for BMW-powered Williams while Japan's Takuma Sato finally joined the pointscorers in eighth place for BAR.

Neither of the Red Bull drivers lasted a lap.

Austrian Christian Klien barrel-rolled spectacularly at the first corner and Briton David Coulthard crashed out after Alonso's Renault shed its front wing in his path.

Brazilian Rubens Barrichello, in the second Ferrari, also had a tough race after running into the back of Trulli's Toyota at the start and having to make an unscheduled pitstop for a replacement wing. He finished 10th.