If Adrian Newey was asked to sketch a circuit that would get the most out of his Red Bull RB6, it would look something like the Hungaroring. The antithesis of the today's typical Tilke-designed tracks, it features a raft of medium-speed corners with very few straights, perfect for a car with a copious amount of downforce but a fairly meagre Renault powerplant. Mark Webber was able to take full advantage of this fact to stroll to his fourth victory of the season, but only after teammate Sebastian Vettel shot himself in the foot having looking a sure-fire bet for the win.
The performance advantage the Austrian cars enjoyed on Saturday was enormous. While 1.2 seconds would normally be seen as a staggering margin to be languishing behind your rivals in qualifying, it was good enough to take 3rd on the grid yesterday afternoon behind the Red Bulls. That's just what Fernando Alonso did, with Vettel on pole and Webber in 2nd place simply out of reach for the Ferrari pilot. Felipe Massa joined his teammate on the second row, with Lewis Hamilton only managing 5th place after bemoaning his car's lack of pace. Nico Rosberg was next for Mercedes, ahead of the two impressive Renaults of Vitaly Petrov and Robert Kubica, the former outqualifying his teammate for the very first time this year.
Due to the relatively little amount of other racing the Hungaroring sees compared with most other F1 circuits, starting on the dirty side of the grid is particularly disadvantageous at this circuit. Webber discovered this the hard way at the start of the race as he saw his teammate hook up a perfect start, with Alonso rocketing past him too. Petrov also took full advantage of his clean grid slot to move up to 5th place at turn 1, even if Hamilton did quickly demote him back to 6th a corner later. Meanwhile Vettel had wasted no time in stamping his authority on proceedings at the front escaping from the clutches of Alonso at a rate of almost a second per lap. However everything changed on lap 16 when the deployment of the Safety Car in response to the wayward front wing of Tonio Liuzzi threw a major spanner into the works for the German.
Unsurprisingly, almost the entire field scrambled for the pits, with the only notable exceptions of Webber and Barrichello. What followed with so many cars in the pits were scenes that wouldn't have seemed out of place in an episode of Chucklevision. First, Rosberg's right-rear went AWOL as the Mercedes left its pit box, sending said wheel hurtling down the pits where it was fortunate to cause minor bruising to just one unlucky mechanic. Meanwhile, a few pit boxes further down the way, Adrian Sutil and Kubica drove clean into each other, as the former attempted to enter his pit box and the latter leave. While Sutil was out on the spot, Kubica was slapped with a token 10-second stop-go penalty, just to add insult to the injury of now being last. The Pole soon called it a day after, with the offending parties of Mercedes and Renault both awarded $50,000 fines by the stewards.
Today I, and Vettel it seems, became aware of a rule that dictates that you cannot leave a gap of more than 10 car-lengths between yourself and the next car under Safety Car conditions. As Webber escaped at the front having not yet pitted, Vettel paid the ultimate price by serving a drive-through penalty that dropped him behind Alonso, but more crucially allowed the Aussie to build the gap required to pit with his lead intact.
The 25 laps between the restart and Webber's eventual pitstop were devastatingly fast – so much so that he still had 8 seconds in hand over the squabbling pair of Alonso and Vettel, who just couldn't find a way past the Spaniard. So, Webber's path was clear to romp to a thoroughly deserved chequered flag that propelled him back to first place in the driver's standings. Alonso continued Ferrari's mini-resurgence to take a creditable 2nd, ahead of a livid Vettel who knew full well that he and he alone had squandered yet another pole position.
Massa took 4th at the very place he suffered a horrific near-fatal accident one year prior after Hamilton suffered a gearbox failure soon after his pitstop. That also meant Petrov was promoted back to 5th place where he stayed for the remainder in by far his best drive of the year at his 'home' race. The same can be said for his GP2 rival Nico Hulkenberg who had a fine drive to 6th, ahead of Sauber's Pedro De La Rosa who added himself to this year's scoreboard with 7th. Button trundled to a lacklustre 8th place to top off a disastrous weekend for the McLaren team who lost the lead in both sets of standings, ahead of the other Sauber of Kobayashi in 9th who had an outstanding run from the back row of the grid.
The final point for 10th was fiercely contested between erstwhile Ferrari stablemates Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello. After leaving his pitstop very late, his Williams easily had the measure of Schumacher's Mercedes on fresh super-soft tyres. When Schuey made a small slip-up in the final corner with a few laps to go, it gave Barrichello the impetus he needed to make the pass. That he did, but not before being brusquely shoved towards, and very nearly into, the pit wall by the ruthless and unapologetic German, for which he rightly got a 10-place grid drop for next time out at Spa.
As F1's summer break gets underway, just 20 points separate the top 5 championship contenders. Vettel had a golden opportunity to be that man at the front, but hardly for the first time this year, his own error cost him dear. He who makes the least mistakes from here-on in is likely to be he who comes away with the silverware come the end of the year.
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