This was a great victory for Jenson Button, carved out rather than gifted, owing a lot to great strategy from the Brawn team and a little to luck, in that main rival Sebastian Vettel didn’t get a clear run. Brawn had all sorts of concerns going into this race.
The late switch to a Mercedes engine means that the radiators and cooling are not perfect and this race was always going to test that.
Button had to turn his engine down a little at times just to be sure, but the car was once again very reliable.
The worry for Brawn coming out of this weekend is that they are starting to lose ground in qualifying, because they haven’t done any development work on their single-lap pace and so others are starting to get ahead of them.
On Saturday both Toyotas and Vettel outpaced them with similar fuel levels or more and Jenson’s grid slot made him vulnerable to the KERS car of Lewis Hamilton, who passed him easily into turn one.
But that aside it was a stunning team performance, with the strategy spot-on.
Today was all about clear air: Button had it, Vettel didn’t.
Frankly the two cars were probably very evenly matched this weekend, but Button’s race was made on the first lap when he managed to pass Hamilton.
Vettel couldn’t and sat behind the McLaren for the first stint, losing 10 seconds in the process.
In clear air once Hamilton pitted on lap 15, Vettel was very fast, but then when he came out of the pits on lap 19 for his second stint (having pitted later than his rivals), he was stuck behind Jarno Trulli – whose Toyota team had made the curious decision to put their drivers on the hard tyre, which was a second per lap slower than the soft.
So Vettel lost more time to Button, another 10 seconds in fact.


The decision to put Trulli on hard tyres at the first stop cost the Italian a chance of victory and certainly cost him second place today.
Toyota had the two fastest race laps and showed great pace in qualifying, but that decision lost them a shot at their first ever win in F1.
Four cars started on the hard tyre and it was clear from their performance in the first 10 laps that the tyre was up to a second per lap slower than the soft.
Toyota’s Pascal Vasselon went for it anyway, because they planned a long middle stint and perhaps felt that the soft tyre would not manage 25 laps.
But by going down that route they made their drivers vulnerable to attack.
Very quickly Trulli had Vettel and Hamilton on his tail and it was clear that Vettel would leapfrog him at the second stops, which is exactly what happened.
McLaren were flattered a little by the track this weekend. It suited their car with the long straights on which KERS was a real advantage.
That said, they brought 12 detailed car improvements to this race and made a huge step forward.
With Hamilton 22 points shy of championship leader Button, and from what I’ve seen in terms of McLaren’s development, I think Hamilton will contest this world championship with Button and Vettel.
I think he’ll be winning races before the summer.
McLaren have done a stunning job, by far the fastest rate of development of any team.
If you look at the fastest race laps, McLaren was the fourth fastest car today, just under 0.4s off Trulli’s benchmark time.
When I first saw this car at the pre-season Barcelona test it was over two seconds off the pace and even in Melbourne it was well over a second behind.
If they carry on at that rate – and they still haven’t got their double diffuser, that comes in Spain – they will be contenders.
Today was the first time we saw the true effect of KERS on the racing. It made a big difference and proved that variety is the spice of life.
When some cars have it and some don’t you get variety in performance and it makes for great racing.
I was surprised that Button was able to pass Hamilton down the straight at the end of the first lap.
Hamilton hit the KERS button and pulled away, but Button slipstreamed him and passed very determinedly into turn one.
On other occasions, Kimi Raikkonen used the KERS button to repass cars which had passed him coming out of the pits.
Kimi was my driver of the event based on his performance over the whole weekend.
He was really strong in the first two parts of qualifying and it was only because he didn’t have any more new tyres in Q3 that he qualified where he did.
In the race he started 10th and finished sixth, which was the biggest improvement of any runner n the top half of the field, where it is hard to make up places.
But for a sticking wheel nut in his second pit stop he would have been fifth ahead of Rubens Barrichello.
He started well, making up three places and kept a very high rhythm after that.
He was strong in retaining and regaining positions after pit stops and gave Ferrari a real shot in the arm.
Team principal Stefano Domenicali said that this sixth place was the minimum that the team should expect to get, but it’s got them off the mark and now we’ll see what they can come up with on their B-spec car in Barcelona.
A new car cannot come fast enough for BMW at the moment.
They had a total nightmare this weekend on a track where they took pole last season.
Both cars sustained some bodywork damage, which slowed them even more, but they were at the back of the field today, miles off the pace.
Williams also had a miserable time, once again failing to turn a competitive car in practice into one which scores points.
They were the second slowest team on race day in the fastest race laps chart, which isn’t right for a team with a double diffuser.
I fear that they have failed to capitalise on the head start the diffuser gave them at the start of the year and now they are being swallowed up by the teams who have greater development budgets.
Barcelona next, which will be a little bit like the start of the season again, with a lot of pretty much new cars.
But it’s not the start of the season, it’s a quarter of the way through and Jenson Button has amassed an impressive 31 points.

 

Did you write this?

 

no my bad i forgot to put the source

 

This is a very interesting season, thx L.N.O