Another well deserved win for Vettel and Red Bull, although he was pressurized for the second half of the race by Lewis Hamilton who could not get quite close enough at the end of the main straight to make a challenge for the lead. Jenson Button completed the podium trio after working his way through the field after a poor first lap which saw him down in 10th place after lap one.

Although an interesting race, it was difficult to follow with so many pit stops for tyre changes and Alonso’s progress or lack of it was very mystifying. He made a great start from fourth place to lead into the first corner, a lead he held until the second pitstops after which he slid down the order to finish over a lap behind the leaders.

Mark Webber was mighty in practice, taking pole by two tenths from Vettel, as he did last year. However he made a poor start and was stuck behind Alonso for a while and could do no better than fourth, nearly a minute behind Vettel.

Most worrying trend of the weekend was to see very few laps completed in qualifying. The leading cars ran as few laps as possible to conserve their softer tyres for the race. A lot of fans attend on qualifying day only due to high gate prices and in previous years have seen some very good battles for grid positions with most cars striving for low laps times until the very last seconds of the session. Not so these days. Most of the front runners complete the bare minimum. There is a good argument for unlimited use of tyres in qualifying and going back to just one stipulation for the race and that is to make it mandatory to use both soft and hard tyres at some stage, but go back to sensible compounds which will last for more than eight to nine laps.

Sebastian Vettel has increased his lead in the World Championship and it looks very unlikely that he will be caught this year if the Red Bull dominance continues.

01 Sebastian Vettel 118
02 Lewis Hamilton 77
03 Mark Webber 67
04 Jenson Button 61
05 Fernando Alonso 51
06 Nico Rosberg 26
07 Nick Heidfeld 25
08 Felipe Massa 24
09 Vitaly Petrov 21
10 Michael Schumacher 14

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