Maldonado was the unexpected pole-sitter when Lewis
Hamilton, who had qualified half-a-second clear of the field,
was excluded from qualifying and thus made to start from the back of the grid.
The McLaren driver coasted to a halt immediately after setting his fastest lap
in order to ensure a sufficient sample of fuel would be available for
scrutineering, but the stewards ruled that this contravened the rules as the
fuel shortage was a result only of human error on the part of the McLaren team.
Hamilton could at least take comfort from the fact that most
of his championship rivals also suffered a poor qualifying session – his teammate
Jenson Button failed to even make the Q3 cut on merit, qualifying eleventh
(tenth after Hamilton’s penalty), with Red Bull’s Mark Webber one place behind.
Sebastian Vettel did make it into the final session, but elected to save tyres
and only set sector times en route to seventh on the grid. Alonso would on the
other hand start alongside Maldonado in second place, with the two Lotus cars
of Romain Grosjean and Kimi Raikkonen occupying the second row.
At the start, Alonso replicated his excellent getaway of last
year to out-drag Maldonado during the approach to the first corner to lead in
front of his adoring fans. Behind, Raikkonen was able to move ahead of teammate
Grosjean, who in turn made contact with Perez which resulted in a left-rear puncture
for the Sauber. Rosberg was thus able to sneak by Grosjean for fourth place,
with the sister car of Michael Schumacher gaining two places from its starting
position of eighth.
Alonso was able to initially press home his advantage, but
Maldonado was surprisingly able to peg the gap at just a few seconds throughout
the first stint, during which the entire field was using soft compound tyres. Alonso
was first to head for the pits on lap 10, switching to hard tyres, with Maldonado following
suit one lap later. Both of the Lotus cars instead opted for a fresh set of
softs for their second stints.
Schumacher meanwhile found himself stuck behind the Williams
of Bruno Senna after his first pit-stop, and was clearly anxious to pass the
Brazilian so as to keep pace with Rosberg and Grosjean ahead. The seven-time
champion set himself up to overtake Senna around the outside at the first
corner on lap 13 with the help of DRS, but then tried to dart to the inside at
the last minute. In his indecision, Schumacher’s car slammed into the back of
the hapless Senna, abruptly ending the races of both drivers.
A few laps later, Rosberg was demoted a place by Grosjean at
the start of lap 16 with the help of DRS, with Vettel now up to sixth position
ahead of Button and Kamui Kobayashi. Back at the front, Maldonado continued to
keep race leader Alonso in check, pitting for another set of hard tyres at the
end of lap 24. The Venezuelan then put in an excellent out-lap, which combined
with Alonso being held up by the lapped Marussia of Charles Pic served to give
him the lead after the Spaniard stopped for fresh hards two laps later.
At this stage of the race, Maldonado was on a charge. He incredibly
began to get away from Alonso at the start of the third stint, but the two-time
champion closed in as the third round of pit-stops loomed. Maldonado made his
final stop on lap 42 for a further set of hard tyres, while Alonso followed
suit two laps later and resumed just behind his adversary.
Alonso was able to haul his Ferrari to within a second of
Maldonado’s Williams, but was never really in a position to make the pass in
spite of the assistance from DRS. With a handful of laps to go, Maldonado began
to ease away again, whilst Alonso was forced to shift his focus to defending
second position from Raikkonen, who had been reducing the gap between himself
and his Ferrari successor at a rate of over a second per lap throughout the
final stint.
Maldonado therefore duly crossed the line to take a well
deserved maiden career victory, Alonso taking a joint championship lead alongside
Vettel with second position. Both of the Lotus cars lost ground during the
second stint with their ill-judged choice to equip softs, Raikkonen and
Grosjean thus consigned to third and fourth places despite their eye-catching
end-of-race pace.
Behind the top four, there were a number of exciting battles
for position. Kobayashi made up for the disappointment of Perez’s early
disaster by overtaking Button during the second stint at turn five and Rosberg
during the final stint at turn ten, also taking advantage of a drive-through
penalty for Vettel to take a superb fifth position. Vettel’s penalty was
administered for ignoring yellow flags, and after dropping from sixth to ninth
was able to recover his position by making his way back ahead of Button, a recovering
Hamilton, and Rosberg, whose tyres were shot to pieces by the end of the race.
The Mercedes driver was nonetheless able to fend off
Hamilton, who put in a spirited drive from last place on the grid. The Brit put
off his first pit-stop all the way to lap 14, at which point he had climbed all
the way up to fourth place. The McLaren pit crew made another minor blunder as
Hamilton was forced to bounce over an errant tyre as he left his pit-box, but a
long, fast second stint put the former champion into contention for a decent
amount of points. The only driver to pull off a two-stop strategy, Hamilton ultimately came within a whisker of overhauling the struggling
Rosberg and finished a valiant eighth.
Button finished in ninth, having struggled to get to grips
with the hard tyre all weekend. Nico Hulkenberg put barely a foot wrong to
claim the final point for Force India, holding up Webber all the way to the
chequered flag. The Australian was the first to switch from soft to hard tyres,
but found himself caught up in traffic and failed to make much headway before
losing further time with a nose change during his second pit-stop. Jean-Eric
Vergne came home twelfth for Toro Rosso ahead of teammate Daniel Ricciardo and
the second Force India of Paul di Resta, while Felipe Massa endured another
difficult race as he too was penalised for ignoring yellow flags – the Brazilian
ended up a lowly fifteenth place.
Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov finished sixteenth and
seventeenth for Caterham, ahead of Timo Glock’s Marussia and the HRT of Pedro
de la Rosa. Along with Schumacher and Senna, also failing to complete the race
were Perez, whose wheel came loose after his second pit-stop, Pic, who suffered a
driveshaft failure shortly after being handed a penalty for holding up Alonso,
and Narain Karthikeyan, who parked his HRT early on due to a wheelnut issue.
Maldonado’s incredible performance has given us a fifth
winner in as many races, and the pace of Lotus would suggest there’s every
chance of that particular streak being extended. With the top seven drivers separated
by just twenty points, we are still almost none the wiser after a quarter of
the season’s races as to just who will be heading to Brazil with an eye on the
title. The expectation heading into the 2012 season was that it had the makings
of a classic, but nobody could have expected the degree of unpredictability and
openness we have enjoyed so far. Long may it continue.
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