Motorhead: Button and Vettel's role reversal

(EUROSPORT) Action, overtaking, talking points – it might be a new season, but the Australian Grand Prix made it feel like Formula One has never been away.

On paper, too, it all looked rather similar to last year, with the top five drivers in last year’s championship finishing in the top five places in Melbourne.

But subtle shifts in the pecking order at Albert Park point to a complex and exciting 2012 championship, which may take considerably longer to decide than Sebastian Vettel’s one-man show did last year.

In fact, it looks as if the defending champion has swapped roles with Jenson Button for this year’s campaign, judging by the way the race played out.

The Brit was the new Vettel, getting out in front, controlling the race from the head of the field, and making driving look as easy as a Michelin-starred chef would cooking up beans on toast.

The German, by contrast, was the new Button, turning an unspectacular qualifying position into a very creditable second place with good strategy, enterprise and opportunism.

On race pace there was, on the face of it, little to separate Red Bull and McLaren. But McLaren had demonstrated their raw speed advantage in qualifying, and even if it turns out on future weekends that the two cars are well-matched on race days, getting out in front will be nine-tenths of the battle for McLaren. It’s one thing to set similar lap times, but it’s another altogether, even in the era of DRS and KERS, to be overtaking.

Button was understandably delighted with the 13th race win of his career. “The car is beautiful,” he told his race engineer as he coasted home on his lap of honour, “And she is quick.”

Indeed, Button’s McLaren was a sight to behold, responding to his every command like a faithful hound.

Compare that with Fernando Alonso, who was driving a dog of a Ferrari.

There’s something about Alonso’s style that makes him look quite brilliant when the car isn’t at its best. Not simply content to drive the machine well beyond where most had believed its limits lay, Alonso also managed to make it look difficult, as if to accentuate quite how good a drive he was putting in.

Ferrari’s problems run deeper than Alonso made them seem. After he was forced to fend off the visibly-quicker Williams of Pastor Maldonado in the latter stages of the race, Ferrari can consider themselves fortunate to possess the man who does the best job of minimising the damage in having a less-than-competitive car.

So despite Button and Vettel’s role reversal, Alonso’s doggedness proved that some things have stayed much as they were a year ago.

Alonso’s Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa had another race to forget, qualifying 16th and eventually retiring after a racing incident.

Fortunately Lewis Hamilton was nowhere to be seen for this particular Massa scrap, but despite the Brazilian and his compatriot Bruno Senna refusing to blame one another for the tangle, Massa is unlikely to take heart from going out while fighting for 13th spot.

As for Hamilton himself, he did a passable impression of the 2011 Lewis, with errors and bad luck costing him precious points.

The error came at the start, allowing Button to dive into the first corner ahead of him – and the bad luck precipitated from there.

Had he been out in front, it was unthinkable that his first pitstop would have left him stuck behind Sergio Perez. And without that hold-up, Hamilton might have gotten away with his second stop coinciding with the arrival of the safety car, allowing Vettel to jump him for second place.

Incidentally, pitting both your drivers on the same lap, as McLaren did on lap 37 with just a 10-second gap between them, must rank as Formula One’s equivalent of trying to score a Panenka-style chipped penalty kick. Mighty impressive when it comes off, but with an almighty risk of stubbing your toe and looking very silly, as Gary Lineker once did, if anything goes wrong.

Hamilton’s miscalculation was marginal, however, and on another day he might well have gone on to win from pole position. From the outside at least, he seems happier and more focused than he did last season, and McLaren have provided a car which can contend for the championship.

But if Hamilton needed any reminding, Australia showed that dominant machinery or otherwise, his team-mate could still prove the biggest obstacle to his title aspirations.

 

DRIVER OF THE RACE: Kimi Raikkonen (Lotus) – There were several strong contenders for the honour, with Alonso (12th to 5th) and Sergio Perez (22nd to 8th) unlucky to miss out – but given that this was Raikkonen’s return to Formula One, the award has to go to the Finn. Starting 18th and ending up 11 places higher was no mean feat, and despite errors he showed racing instinct to climb two places on a frantic final lap. To cap it all off, he was great value over the radio. Understatedly described by Lotus team principal Eric Boullier as ‘talkative’ over the course of the race, the Finn at one point asked why there were blue flags being waved by the stewards. Have you really been away that long, Kimi?

QUOTE OF THE WEEKEND: "It's going to be damn hard in Malaysia. It's going to be a lot hotter and we have cooling problems already, so it's going to be very hard. We don't want to bulls*** ourselves, it's going to be very difficult. With HRT I was under a false impression with the new car. I obviously knew there would be problems but I thought we could get in, and I am very wrong” – What HRT lack in sending drivers around the track in their cars on Sunday, they go a small way to atoning for by the sheer quotability of their driver Narain Karthikeyan.

COMING UP: About half an hour after the racing in Melbourne, the teams were packed up and preparing for next weekend’s Malaysia Grand Prix. With plenty at stake after race one, there’s everything to play for at Sepang. We’ll be building up to the race all week on Eurosport, and bringing you live text commentary from every session, starting on Friday.

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