F1 – BUTTON REIGNS AT SEPANG
- 27 May 2013
Damn it but don’t you just love wet races? Nobody has any idea what is going to happen and when. Not the drivers. Not the team managers. Not the commentators and certainly not the viewers. How wet? Intermediates or full wets? When to change? How much fuel to bung in while stopped? And even the big teams bugger up their strategy once in a while. This time Ferrari’s soothsayers got it all wrong and poor Kimi had to wallow around on full wets as the heavens stubbornly refused to open up. Oops. And following on from their qualifying blunder which saw Massa start from 16th on the grid…Oooohh dear…
OK in the end Jenson still probably deserved to win the Malaysian GP but he did still get just a bit lucky. He made a complete cock of his start from pole position and was fortunate to come out of the first turn complex in third place. From there he was stuck behind Jarno Trulli until the first stops while Rosberg in the Williams cantered away in front. Williams has a long and proud history of buggering up pit stops and lousy strategy calls and Sunday saw them produce the full range of their armoury. Nico’s first stop was way too early and way too long and put him back out on the track on slicks just as the rain was coming. Six laps later he was back in for full wets when, as Glock proved, intermediates were the best choice. Five laps later he was back in for intermediates just as it started to really rain. Two laps later, back in for full wets. A distant eighth and half a point was the end result. Mind you, they did a better job then Ferrari……
In mitigation it must be said that at the first round of stops most drivers picked the wrong tyre (full wets) except Timo Glock. After a shocker of a start which saw the Toyota as low as 15th place, once on the inters he climbed from 11th to 2nd in just six laps carving as much as ten seconds a lap out of the leaders. Had he stopped just one lap earlier for full wets he may well have won the race But he didn’t and by the end of that one lap, Button who had stopped, was back in front on a track that was turning into Lake Titicaca. By the time Timo had stopped, rejoined and repassed Nick Heidfeld the red flag had arrived and so he ended in third place behind the BMW-Sauber pilot who had only stopped twice, and made the right call both times.
The other star of the conditions was Red Bull’s Mark Webber. Careful to avoid last weeks fate he made a cautious start to run seventh early on behind Alonso with whom he was to have a monumental scrap. On several occasions the Red Bull got in front only to see the Renault’s KERS system blast Alonso back past on the long front straight. After some highly entertaining side by side stuff through turns one and two Mark finally slithered past and simply vanished. Then the rains came and although on full wets Webber blew by four cars on his out-lap and was up to third place from 14th in just six laps when he was called in to put some inters on. It was of course, the wrong call at the wrong time and just one lap later he was back in for another set of wets and he rejoined in sixth on lap 30. He was still there on lap 31 but as he crossed the line after his 32nd lap he was second and hauling in Button at a great rate. But the red flag then came out and the race was called as of the end of lap 31. Typical of the poor sods luck Although his luck as been a bit better than Heikki Kovalainen’s in the McLaren who is yet to complete a racing lap this year.
Anyway who knows what would have happened if the race had continued. With cars on different tyres and different fuel loads, some with KERS, some without, Hell maybe Fisichella would have won in the Force India. Oh that’s right, no he wouldn’t have. He spun off at about 25 miles an hour on about 3 feet of water.
You just gotta love the rain.
Sam Snape
08-04-2009