The constantly changing conditions in the Malaysian Grand Prix meant drivers and team tacticians couldn’t afford the slightest lapse.
Jenson Button and the Brawn GP brains trust judged everything perfectly to score their second win on the trot, while bold tyre gambles paid big dividends for Nick Heidfeld and Timo Glock.James Allen analyses the race’s pivotal moments and explains why Button and Brawn must now believe they have a real shot at the world championship.

This was a terrific grand prix, which was brilliantly managed by the Brawn team and Jenson Button through the four distinct phases of the race.
While others like Nick Heidfeld and Timo Glock made huge gains by being bold in their choice of tyres, they were languishing in the midfield in the dry conditions and therefore had nothing to lose when they made those calls. Button however, had everything to lose by making the wrong call. He had a poor start, letting Nico Rosberg, Jarno Trulli and Fernando Alonso go by, but once past Alonso he sat in Trulli’s wheel tracks as Rosberg made the early running, building a lead of just over three seconds.
Rosberg was very fast at this stage and the soft Bridgestone could take it, with no obvious deterioration in lap time. Button stayed close to Trulli through the opening stint and when the Williams pitted first, followed by the Toyota, Jenson made great use of the extra fuel he had to put in two very fast laps, which brought him out ahead of both of them after his own stop.At this time the race was quite finely balanced, as rain was due to fall, but had not come by the time Button stopped. So he had no choice but to put another set of dry tyres on.
Meanwhile Ferrari and Kimi Raikkonen made an insane gamble to out him on full-wet tyres on a dry track.
Their weather computer is the same as everyone else’s so it’s baffling that they would read it so very differently from the others.
Within a few very slow laps, Kimi’s tyres were cooked.Jenson had the lead, while the likes of Alonso, Lewis Hamilton and Heidfeld still had plenty of fuel on board.
But the advantage of the extra fuel was taken away when the rain started to fall, well short of the window for being able to refuel only once.
Now the race was firmly in Button’s control, as everyone came into the pits for wet tyres.He expected it to rain hard but it didn’t, so full-wets were slower than intermediates.
Glock, who famously gambled on dry tyres in Brazil last year and almost cost Hamilton the world championship, made another brave call and went for the intermediate tyres instead of the full-wets. It was clear very quickly that this was exactly the right tyre to be on, as Glock was between six and 10 seconds per lap faster than the leaders, albeit over half a minute behind.

Glock had started on the second row but fell back to eighth with a bad start. It’s tempting to say that without the poor start, Glock could have won this race, thanks to his inspired choice of intermediates when it rained. Again it shows how you need to put everything together to be a winner in F1. As the cars in front of him pulled into the pits to switch to intermediates, most also took the opportunity to fuel the cars to the finish of the race, including Button. He lost the lead to Glock, but Timo would have to stop again. The rain began to fall more heavily now and Glock took the opportunity to switch to full-wets. Heidfeld came into the reckoning at this point. He had stopped on lap 22, later than the other long-fuelled cars like Alonso and Hamilton, and put on full wets. This was his only pit stop of the race. When the front-runners like Trulli, Rosberg, Mark Webber and Rubens Barrichello went in for the full-wets, Heidfeld stayed out and vaulted from seventh to second. He was then passed by Glock on lap 32 before the race was suspended, but on the countback was awarded second place. Back to my main theme of this race and the masterful way that Brawn and Button managed the changing conditions. Jenson said afterwards that the car wasn’t very well balanced on wet tyres, so it was a credit to him that he was able to keep his pace up in the wet conditions – but the team did a brilliant job. If you compare his outcome with Rosberg’s you’ll see what I mean. Rosberg had the early lead and was on a similar strategy to Button, just four laps shorter on the first stop. He had the pace for a podium today. And yet he made stops on laps 27 and 30 and slipped from second to eighth, with the fourth stop from inters to wets, a stop other cars didn’t make. This could have happened to Button, but at every stage Brawn stayed calm and did what was required.
We also got to see just how fast this BGP001 car really is, when Jenson had to push hard in his two laps before his first stop in order to leapfrog Rosberg and Trulli.
He did a 1m36.641s on lap 18, which is a second faster than the next non-Brawn car! Only half-points were awarded, so Hamilton has just one point on the board, while Robert Kubica, Felipe Massa and Raikkonen have yet to get off the mark – and these four were expected to be the main title contenders going into the season!
This is great news for Button’s hopes of the world title, as he now has 15 points and at least two more races to take advantage before the McLarens, Ferraris and BMWs get their two-step diffusers.

 

I think that Glock was going to pass Button. I hate the fact that Nick Heidfeld was gifted a podium - but it happens. It happened to Rubens last year in the wet as well.

No points from Ferrari for the first 2 races of the season. I would be very scared to start up my car if I were on the team right now.

Lewis Hamilton is quietly doing some pretty amazing racing given all of the trouble he is going through.

I can't believe I stayed up all night to see a race that got rained out. Rain outs are for the Cubs in April!!

 

Unabashed nationalism FTW!

 

again Bravo Brawn !!!

overall, the race was

 

I must say that this race makes me hate Bernie even more. Going into the race so many people warned of what would happen by setting the race at twilight. They said that the light conditions would make driving dangerous and that given the way the weather works in Malaysia there was serious chance of a massive downpour that could delay the race and make it too dangerous to continue.

Sure enough it happened. I understand it was so that Europe had a better time to watch the race, but what about the U.S. The only race that we have remaining that's at a decent time is Brazil. We don't have Indianapolis or Montreal anymore. It would have been nice to have a race at midnight eastern rather than 5 in the morning. Europe has the majority of the races anyways.

 

+1. Malaysia has to be one of the most poorly planned stops on the calender. Bernie knew exactly what would happen in regards to the rain and decided he'd rather give people in Europe a shitty race at a good time than a good race at a shitty time. The US viewers got screwed the most because we got a shitty race at a shitty time! While the track is awesome, the weather in Malaysia is simply not adequate for F1 racing. Bring F1 back to North America, damnit!

 

the 5am start for the east coast actually worked out really well for me. it got my day started much sooner and i was able to spend a good 8 hours studying, but the race sucked and my 7 driver idea crashed and burned

 

I just ended up DVR'ing it, 4:00 am is a little too early for me, I'm still kicking the Z's at that time.

Overall the race was a little dissapointing, but all the pitstops and the threat of rain made it somewhat exciting.