Back to summarising after last week’s report, because it’s more fun to keep you guessing. Normal service might possibly be resumed for the Barcelona race, though if the Spanish Grand Prix provides its usual amount of action (for the uninitiated, ‘riveting’ refers not to the Spanish race itself but to something you’d rather be doing as you watch) you’ll probably be reading about something unrelated instead. Right, to business.
Vettel and Trulli were as good as inseparable all day, with the German winning a closely-fought battle. That much was expected. Jenson Button beating them both wasn’t.
Button had two things going in his favour today. The first was that his Brawn, which turned out to be as good as ever in race conditions after a lacklustre qualifying session, was one of the few cars that could post a reasonable lap time no matter what tyres it was on. The second was that the team that should really have beat him, Toyota, shot themselves squarely in the foot.
Having led comfortably enough in the early going, the Japanese squad might well have won with Trulli had they ran the same tyre strategy as everyone else. Instead, when everyone else saved the unfavoured medium tyres for the end of the race, Toyota ran them for a long stint in the middle of the Grand Prix. Trulli and particularly Timo Glock saw their pace vanish, while Button on the faster super-softs was able to maintain his pace. In clear air Jarno might still have had something for him after switching back to super-softs for the last stint, but Vettel had used his super-softs to leap ahead of the Italian during the final pit stop phase and didn’t have all that much difficulty keeping Kate’s Dirty Sister ahead in the final laps.
Not that you should think Button won this race solely because the men who could have beat him decided not to bother. That helped, yes, but he’d been jumped at the start by Lewis Hamilton’s KERS system – his ’special button’, as Sebastian Vettel called it – and would have faced a miserable opening stint behind the slower McLaren had it not been for a wonderful overtake at the start of lap 2. The move, made from some distance behind Hamilton after more judicious special button pushing from the reigning champion, was perfectly judged and, crucially, gave Button the opportunity to run in clear air at his own pace, keeping the Toyotas within striking distance. As in Malaysia, he jumped into the lead by driving like his backside was on fire after the cars ahead had made their first pit stops before him, the novel twist being that thanks to an electrical issue, his rump really was being seared.
Hamilton was the one of the only KERS runners to gain any meaningful ground at the start, surging briefly into P2 before settling into P4, a position he’d maintain to the end. The McLaren looked faster and more driveable this weekend, and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares next time out in Barcelona after it struggled so badly there in pre-season testing. Fernando Alonso was the other KERS runner to make a lightning getaway but found that the track ahead of him was occupied and the Astroturf alongside it wasn’t the ideal surface for performance driving, his only notable moment in an otherwise anonymous run to 8th behind Glock and Raikkonen, of whom more in a second. Alonso’s team mate and friend of petrolheadblog.com Nelson Piquet Jr will earn himself a stay of execution if his next couple of race performances are as good as his feisty, combative run to 10th today, a run in which he didn’t put a wheel wrong (and we’ll assume Barrichello’s hand-waving was either frustration at being held up legitimately or Rubens genuinely expecting that if he’d caught Piquet, he must be about to lap him) and ended up only a dozen or so seconds adrift of his illustrious team leader.
Is this Ferrari’s worst start to a season in history? Yes. It’s up for debate, apparently, but why? On the two previous occasions they’ve scored no points until round four, they’ve finished 5th (Jody Scheckter in 1980, Didier Pironi in 1981). Today, Kimi Raikkonen was 6th. Yes, today’s scoring system means his 6th is worth more points than 5th was in times of old, but it’s surely more important that his finishing position was lower than either Jody or Didier. The car lacks pace, has a KERS unit that’s only happy when it’s broken, and looks like it’ll be mired in the midfield for some time to come yet.
BMW would kill to be mired in the midfield. Both drivers sustained front wing damage on lap 1 (staying out on track until the end of lap 2 at reduced pace and bringing about a glorious free-for-all behind them involving what looked like half the world, all of them being passed by Mark Webber), and after pitting for repairs remained glued to the back of the field for the duration, coming home as the last finishers. Nick Heidfeld established a record for the highest number of consecutive race finishes with his 25th in a row, sadly passing on the opportunity to claim 19th place while punching the air and singing down the radio, but he did so without ever looking likely to progress up the order and with a KERS unit that might or might not have been working. BBC’s Ted Kravitz said there was ’some doubt’, so Christ knows how that driver-to-pit conversation went:
“Nick, when you push the KERS button, do you get more power?”
“Er…”
“Does it feel the same as it has all those other times you’ve used it?”
“Well…I mean…I’ve been a bit busy in here, and…”
“Nick, do a lap with it and a lap without it, see if there’s any difference…”
A word on the new technical regulations to round things off. The purpose of the 2009 aerodynamic rules is to allow cars to follow each other more closely and so allow for more overtaking. It’s starting to look as if they can indeed follow more closely, but somehow still not quite closely enough. Twice in the race, when first Hamilton and then Trulli had a queue of cars behind them, we saw a pack of three drivers circulating within a couple of seconds of each other with the slower driver in front never in any real danger of being overtaken by the quicker men behind. Today was the first instance of that this season, but then it was also the first dry daytime race of the season. One-off or sign of things to come? With the soporific Barcelona race coming up next, we might have to wait a couple of races to find out.
