Valencia F1 GP: Red Bull wins, Vodafone McLaren 2nd and 3rd in dramatic showdown in Valencia

Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel bounced himself back into the spectacular race for the world championship title of the 2010 F1 season after he won and scored full points at the rather dramatic and eventful European F1Grand Prix in Valencia, while his team-mate Mark Webber tried to prove in his car that Red Bull gives you wings, and scored zero points. More to that later.

Vodafone McLaren driver and 2009 F1 World Champion finished second although he had to do a drive-through-penalty, while his team-mate and 2008 F1 World Champion Jenson Button finished on 3rd position.

Vettel led from the start, defending strongly against a forceful Lewis Hamilton in the Vodafone-McLaren and an enthusiastic Fernando Alonso in the Ferrari during the first corner, as Webber was stuck in the heavy traffic and dropped to ninth from second on the grid.

After a pit stop for the harder Bridgestone tires on the seventh lap the Australian Red Bull driver Marc Webber was finding back to his racing pace when terrible hurry made him ran into the back of Lotus’s Heikki Kovalainen approaching turn 17, in a carbon copy repeat of an accident between Rodolfo Gonzalez and Josef Kral in the GP2 race which took place during the morning.

Apparently Mark Webber was imagining that the Finn Lotus driver was getting ready to respond to the invisible blue waving flags to clear the racing line to be overlapped.

Webber’s Red Bull flipped backwards and landed upside down, flipped back on to its wheels, and then speared headfirst into the tire wall at high speed. The Australian emerged frustrated, threw the steering wheel out of his car but without a single scratch, whereas Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton moved clear.

By not pitting, while everyone else came in under the safety car to throw away their super soft tyres, BMW Sauber driver Kamui Kobayashi was flushed to the third place, where he stayed, keeping McLaren’s Jenson Button behind him, until the 53rd lap when he had to perform his mandatory pit to switch to the option tires.

That left McLaren Mercedes Jenson Button third behind Hamilton, who earlier had had to take a rapid drive-through penalty on the 27th lap after inadvertently overtaking the safety car as it emerged from the pits early in the race. Before entering the pit lane, he drove a couple of fast laps to be able to get back out again before Kobayashi slipped through.

Very interesting was the radio transmission between the Spanish Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso who contacted his team to know where his championship contender and former teammate and McLaren driver Lewis Hamilton landed after his swift drive-through penalty. He was instructed through team-radio by his race engineer in a very diplomatic and straight-forward manner to �be wise, mind his own business and to focus on his race.’

Both Ferraris lost out in their pit stops. Alonso was third behind Vettel and Hamilton when he stopped under the safety car on the 10th lap, but emerged 10th by the time things settled down on the 12th lap. Felipe Massa fared even worse, having to wait for his team mate to be serviced, dropping from fourth to 17th. They were doomed from that point onwards.

On a great day for Williams, Rubens Barrichello brought his FW30 home fourth after Kobayashi’s late pit stop, ahead of Renault’s Robert Kubica and Force India’s Adrian Sutil, who drove a great race for Force India and likewise benefited over team mate Vitantonio Liuzzi when both pitted at the same time when running nose to tail.

Kobayashi came out of the pits in ninth place behind Sebastien Buemi’s Toro Rosso and Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari, but on his fresh rubber he leap-frogged the Spaniard on Lap 56 and snatched seventh from the Swiss, who had driven a great race so far, at the final corner.

For BMW Sauber, it was a great race, as Pedro de la Rosa brought his C29 home 10th for the final point.

Renault’s Vitaly Petrov was 11th, chased by Mercedes GP’s Nico Rosberg, Liuzzi, Massa, Toro Rosso’s Jaime Alguersuari and Mercedes GP’s Michael Schumacher on a day when lap charting presented no difficulties.

After Lotus’s Jarno Trulli met early trouble and dropped back, and Kovalainen was hit by Webber in a disappointing 500th race anniversary for Lotus, the advantage in the new teams’ stakes switched to Virgin as Lucas di Grassi headed home Karun Chandhok’s HRT, team mate Timo Glock and HRT’s Bruno Senna.

Nico Hulkenberg, like Massa and Liuzzi, lost out in a double team pit stop while running 10th, in line for the final point, when his Williams’ right-rear tyre began to disintegrate and peel off on the 50th of the 57 laps due to other mechanical issues on the car and he had to retire.

Late in the race the stewards announced that Button, Barrichello, Hulkenberg, Kubica, Petrov, Sutil, Liuzzi, Buemi and De la Rosa are to be investigated for the speed of their in-laps behind the safety car.
As a result, Hamilton retains his world championship lead with 127 points to Button’s 121, while Vettel jumps up to third on 115 with Webber fourth on 103.

AE