(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.
Iveco supplies the
Scuderia Ferrari with vehicles that transport the Formula 1 Grand Prix cars to
the world championship race tracks. The company is very proud of its
partnership with Ferrari and puts great value on the use of its products by such
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Iveco employs almost 25,000 people and runs 24
production units in 11 Countries in the world using excellent technologies
developed in 6 research centres. Besides Europe, the company operates in China, Russia,
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