UpdateF1 >> Formula 1 News > Button wins shortened race

Brawn take another win

A curios race, the Malaysian Grand Prix. In fact, it could be taken as an example of why races should not be run, in this country, at this time of the year.

The race began in the dry, and a great start it was for Nico Rosberg, from the second row in the Williams, positively flew off the grid and went down the inside into the lead at the first corner. Jenson Button was slow away and allowed Jarno Trulli to take second place, while Robert Kubica failed to move off the grid and when eventually he did get going, he retired almost immediately. He had been complaining of strange noises from the engine on the warm up lap, so presumably it was a terminal problem.

Out front and Rosberg looked pretty comfortable, while Button set about getting on with the job and Barrichello, in the second Brawn, looked pretty meaty too. Heikki Kovalainen, meanwhile, added to his retirement rate by spinning out almost immediately, and this is a man who really needs to buck up his ideas before long.

Radar screens were showing that rain was imminent, but the opening laps were dry; Sebastian Vettel was the first to stop, having been fuelled light in a damage limitation move thanks to his penalty, and the rest followed in unison over the next couple of laps. Button, fuelled slightly longer, immediately put in a couple of very quick laps and, when he emerged, did so comfortably ahead of Rosberg and Trulli.

A strange gamble at this point came from Ferrari, who opted to put Raikkonen on full wet tyres in the hope that the rain came now. It didn’t, and Kimi found himself half a minute off the pace for the next few laps. Shortly afterwards the rain began to fall at the back of the circuit, and a few laps later came the rush to change to wet tyres. Raikkonen, having wasted his original set, was forced to change to another, hence negating any advantage that he may have found.

When the order settled down and the lap times were listed, it became clear that one team had made a very wise gamble: Timo Glock, in the Toyota, had switched to intermediates, and as the rain had not escalated into anything like the expected monsoon, was lapping as much as ten seconds quicker than the rest of the pack. The young German was driving beautifully, and picked off car after car, aided further as the rest picked up on this and dived back into the pits for intermediates.

As the rain Gods would have it, they chose the moments after this to unleash the full force of the storm, and with lightning striking the top of the stands it became clear that a change back to full wets would be in order. This played into the hands of the only man who had opted not to make the change back to intermediates, Nick Heidfeld in the BMW, and he found himself in second place, behind the masterful Button who, again, failed to put a foot wrong.

The rain now became ridiculously heavy, and drivers were calling for the race to be stopped; shortly after Giancarlo Fisichella went helplessly off track the safety car was deployed – this was just after lap 31, and even behind the Mercedes it was clear that visibility was practically zero.
Cars were sliding off the track even when crawling, and red flags were waving before long.
What followed next amounted to confusion, for we waited for three quarters of an hour, with cars and drivers sitting on the grid in the monsoon, before we officially had a declaration of race over.

The result is believed to be as follows, with Jenson Button winning from Nick Heidfeld and Timo Glock; these two were in reverse order when the safety car was deployed, but the result was taken at the end of lap 31, the prescribed one lap before the official finish of the race. Jarno Trulli was classified – provisionally – fourth ahead of Rubens Barrichello and Mark Webber, with Lewis Hamilton in seventh and Nico Rosberg eighth.

A disappointment for those who wanted to see full race distance, but the conditions were simply too bad. Let’s hope for better weather when we reach China.

Written: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:15:12