Well that was certainly an interesting three week break of the 2013 Formula One Season wasn’t it? I could write an entire blog post on just the drama that took place after the Malaysian Grand Prix through qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix. Let’s tick off some highlights from the break and Shanghai….
In the days after my last post Sebastian Vettel made quite the display professing how deeply sorry he was for disobeying team orders and passing Mark Webber for the win at Kuala Lumpur…….. only to tell everyone in China that he would do it again. If it wasn’t clear before it certainly is clear now that Vettel wears the pants at Red Bull Racing.
It is very obvious that Red Bull has been the team to beat in Formula One for the last few years but the performance of the crew on the red headed step child’s side of the garage in China was abysmal. Mark Webber running out of fuel during Q2 and then losing a rear wheel during the race was almost comical when put in the context of what happened in Malaysia. The conspiracy theory folks out there must be having a field day with this race.
Pirelli once again brought their own controversy to the track with their soft tire and as a fan I thank them for it. This soft tire gave us a fantastically interesting qualifying session on TV and what I can only imagine was an extremely boring one in person. Thank god for a DVR and the ability to fast forward through completely empty track for the majority of the sessions….
Q3 gave us single flying laps from the contenders on the soft tire with Lewis Hamilton scoring his first pole position for Mercedes. Nico Hulkenburg, Jenson Button, Sergio “bumper car” Perez, and Vettel all elected to take slow single laps with the medium and much more durable medium tire allowing them to start the race with a much longer first stint. It was an interesting gamble and probably worthwhile for the struggling McLaren team but debatable for Vettel.
Love him or hate him, the tire strategy did provide us with an impressive display of speed by Vettel for his final 5 laps of the race. Vettel was able to claw back an amazing 11 seconds from Hamilton in these 5 laps and played out in real life every iGP Managers nightmare of 4 bright red soft tires on a last lap charge to the finish. Vettel came up just a few feet short of the bottom step of the podium but it was a remarkable example of the difference between the two compounds and their performance.
Force India continued their run of bad luck in what is looking to be the leading team in the second tier. Adrian Sutil must have hit someone with a wine glass in a past life to keep having the bad luck he has been having this season. Esteban Gutierrez buried what showed to be a respectfully quick Sauber into Sutil under braking creating a chance for the Force India team to have a quick barbeque in the pits when it caught on fire.
And now to the real story of the weekend which undoubtedly has to be Fernando Alonso riding his prancing horse to a DOMINATING victory in China. Alonso and his Ferrari where able to manage their soft tire stint better than any other team and after Hamilton pitted from P1 on lap 4 to change his destroyed soft tires was never challenged again. The only thing more impressive then Alonso’s performance on the track was the garage shots of his girlfriend!
With Alonso and Ferrari’s performance this weekend it is unavoidable for me to look back to the last race in Malaysia and once again question the poor decision to keep him out with the damaged front wing which ultimately led to the end of his race resulting in zero points. Alonso now sits 9 points back from Vettel and 6 points back from Kimi Raikkonen in the standings which would likely look very different if not for this poor decision.
With the race win Fernando Alonso scored his 31st career victory tying him for 4th place all time with Nigel Mansell’s glorious mustache. Alonso and Ferrari clearly are riding a wave of momentum after their stellar performance in China and heading into the Bahrain Grand Prix next week look to close the gap to Vettel in the drivers’ standings and Red Bull in the constructors championship in which they only sit 5 points back.
Ferrari may need to just stay out of the way and the squabbling Red Bull drivers will take care of that for them!