The Ultimate Feel-Good Grand Prix

Sebastien Vettel wins the Italian Grand Prix at historic Monza, in an Italian car, which isn’t a Ferrari and he does so from pole position, driv...

Sebastien Vettel wins the Italian Grand Prix at historic Monza, in an Italian car, which isn’t a Ferrari and he does so from pole position, driving away from a McLaren. He’s the youngest ever winner by a year and everyone in F1 is happy for him.

The story will go down in history as something very special. It is like James Hunt winning at Zandvoort for the tiny Hesketh team. The Toro Rosso team has Minardi DNA still running through its veins. Most of the guys who toiled for Paul Stoddard and Giancarlo Minardi are still there among the 168 employees. They have a workforce which is less than 20% of the size of the top teams and one of the smallest budgets in the field.

But it shows that it is possible for an independent team to win and the important point is that Vettel and Toro Rosso did all of this on merit. He didn’t win because leading cars retired in front of him. He won because he did a better job than anyone else in qualifying and then rode his luck in the race, making all the right moves at the right time and driving with faultless precision.

VETTEL ASSURED AND IN CONTROL

Vettel looked so assured and in control of this weekend. He was fastest in the second part of qualifying, took the pole by a tenth from Heikki Kovalainen and then led for 49 of the 53 racing laps. He was lucky in a couple of respects; starting the race behind the safety car meant that he could control the start and had good visibility in the opening stint. Then later in the race, his second stop on lap 36 came at a time when it was clear that the intermediate tyre was the one to be on. Alonso had pitted on lap 30 for inters and was going very quickly by the time Vettel came in. Although the forecasts said more rain, the Toro Rosso team had no choice but to go for inters. If they’d gone for wets he’d have burned them up very quickly.

Up to that point, with 17 laps to go, if it had rained the race would have been Hamilton’s. He had fought his way through the field impressively from 15^th place on the grid and was poised in second place, fuelled to the finish with wet tyres on. But once it became clear that he too would have to pit for inters, that second unplanned stop meant that he dropped down to 7^th place, which put him behind Felipe Massa.

Hamilton had got himself in front by running a one stop strategy, while Massa, who pitted on lap 22, far earlier than anyone expected, had to stop again and this co-incided with the right moment to go onto intermediates. So the pendulum swung back Massa’s way. In the end the championship picture doesn’t really change. Hamilton leads by one point rather than two. It could have been far worse after his disastrous tyre choice in qualifying on Saturday. Equally, had it rained, as forecast in the second half of the race, he would have probably won, with Massa 7^th. So there were a lot of points at stake and it cancelled itself out.

WHAT WOULD THE ONE-STOPPERS DO?

The joker in the pack today was the trio of cars who did a one stop strategy and lucked out that their pit stop co-incided with the right moment to switch to intermediates. This trio was Kubica, Alonso and Heidfeld, who ended up in front of Massa and Hamilton and restricted them to some minor points places. Hamilton pitted only 3 laps earlier than Alonso, but the track wasn’t ready for inters at that point and once it was he was doomed to make another stop, which cost him 28 seconds, five positions and six points.

Massa will be disappointed that he started 6^th while Hamilton started 15^th and finished in his wheel tracks, but nothing like as disappointed as Raikkonen and Kovalainen will be. Raikkonen again found incredible speed at the end of the Grand Prix, but for most of the race he was unable to make any impression from 14^th on the grid. Unlike Hamilton he went for a two stop strategy from there, which was the wrong choice. It kept Hamilton behind him initially, but he didn’t have the speed in the middle part of the race.

Kovalainen’s girlfriend will find it hard to console him tonight. He knows that he should have easily beaten Vettel today. He started with four laps more fuel, so when you adjust their qualifying times to allow for the extra fuel, he had been 3/10ths faster than the German.

OUT OF RHYTHM

But he never settled into a high enough rhythm in the race, as he has not on many occasions this year. He ought to have been able to keep close to Vettel and then do enough in the four laps between Vettel’s stop on lap 18 and his own to pass him for the lead. Instead he fell to 11 seconds behind by the time Vettel stopped. His middle stint was very short; just 12 laps and it just didn’t work out for him today. He knows he should have done better. He said that he had problems with the wet tyres at the start and then with the brakes, but the conditions were the same for everyone and he just wasn’t fast enough.

Kubica did well from 11^th on the grid to finish on the podium. He drove strongly on a very heavy fuel load at the start and the luck went his way when the time for inters co-incided with his stop on lap 34. In contrast Mark Webber and Nico Rosberg lost a lot of ground. Webber was third in the opening stint and pitted on lap 22, same time as Kovalainen. He came out behind Alonso and Kubica, who were one stopping. His second stop was on lap 34, when he was lying fourth. A slow stop lost him around eight seconds and brought him out behind Heidfeld and Massa as well.

Rosberg struggled all race with tyre degradation, in other words the Williams was taking too much out of the wet tyres. He was on a one stopper similar to Hamilton’s, so he had to make the extra stop, just 5 laps later, when the track demanded inters and this dropped him down to 17^th.

PRESSURE ON THE OTHER RED BULL

Back to Vettel, I’m delighted for him and it raises all kind of interesting questions. It puts a bit of pressure on the Red Bull team as they are now behind Toro Rosso in the constructors’ championship using essentially the same car with a different engine. Christian Horner put a brave face on the outcome, claiming some credit for the Red Bull Technologies company, which designs the cars.

Vettel will go across to Red Bull next year and will be the junior driver to Mark Webber, but one who has already won a race! That will be a strange situation! He will probably also be thinking that he might have had a more competitive drive if he’d waited a bit longer before signing. I hope Red Bull builds a quick car next year. He still needs to mature, he’s only in his second year in the sport, but this win has put him on the map. It was uncanny to hear the German national anthem followed by the Italian on the podium, so reminiscent of Schumacher and Ferrari all those years.

Is he the next Schumi? Too early to say and he’s a very different kind of character. If anything Hamilton was more Schumacheresque today with some uncompromising driving, particularly when battling Webber and Glock, whom he put on the grass.