Rubens Barrichello took another chunk out of team-mate Jenson
Button’s championship lead as he led an emphatic Brawn GP 1-2 in
Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix.
But any disappointment Button may have felt at losing the
intra-team duel was more than offset by relief at the fact that a
disastrous race for Red Bull Racing all but eliminated Sebastian
Vettel and Mark Webber from title contention.
Webber was sidelined in a first-lap collision with Robert Kubica’s
BMW, while Vettel mustered just one point for eighth place after a
scrappy drive.
The net result was that Barrichello has trimmed Button’s
championship lead to 14 points, but Vettel and Webber are
respectively 26 and 28.5 points adrift with 40 points still up for
grabs.
The Brawn duo used superior one-stop strategies to overhaul the
two-stopping McLaren of Lewis Hamilton, which led the early stages
from pole position.
Having qualified ahead of Button, Barrichello was best-placed to
lead the one-stop challenge and stayed close enough to Hamilton to
breeze past him when the world champion made his second pit
visit.
Hamilton dropped to third behind Button, but chased his countryman
for all he was worth in the closing stages before dramatically
crashing on the final lap at the exit of the first Lesmo.
The accident promoted Kimi Raikkonen to a surprise podium finish
for Ferrari, the Finn repeating his Spa trick of fending off a
faster Force India, this time Adrian Sutil, thanks to his KERS
power boost.
Sutil harried Raikkonen all the way but had to make do with fourth
place, easily the best result of his young F1 career, and
underlined his pace by setting the race's fastest lap.
But like former team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella at Spa, Sutil would
likely have beaten the Ferrari had he been able to stay ahead in
the early laps.
Hamilton had made a textbook getaway from pole, but the similarly
KERS-equipped Raikkonen was even sharper out of the blocks from the
second row and put two wheels on the grass in a bid to pass the
McLaren down the outside.
His McLaren rival comfortably covered his advances, however, and
the Ferrari had to settle for taking second place away from Sutil
going into the chicane, while behind Barrichello crucially moved to
the head of the one-stoppers after taking fourth away from Heikki
Kovalainen.
Otherwise the rest of the pack all managed to expertly navigate the
tight Rettifilo without incident and any chicane-cutting.
However, the usual frantic action associated with a first lap at
Monza would only be delayed until the second chicane.
First Webber’s championship hopes suffered what is surely a
terminal setback after he collided with the fast-starting BMW of
Kubica in the middle of the Roggia.
The Red Bull driver spun out into the gravel, while Kubica suffered
damage to his front-right wing endplate - race control soon
ordering the Pole to pit as bits of the wing remained flailing off
his car.
Then Kovalainen lost out to the second Brawn of Button into the
second Lesmo, the championship leader bravely hustling his BGP 001
down the inside of the McLaren after Kovalainen had been caught up
trying to repass Barrichello.
The Finn, who just minutes before had been considered in a prime
starting position for the race after qualifying on a fuel-adjusted
pole, was then amazingly relegated to seventh after the similarly
Mercedes-powered Force India of Tonio Liuzzi simply outdrove him
down the backstraight.
But while the second McLaren’s afternoon had unravelled already,
race leader Hamilton immediately got on with trying to build the
kind of lead he needed to make his two-stopping strategy
work.
The world champion pulled 2.1s clear of Raikkonen by the end of lap
three, with a succession of fastest laps ensuring his advantage was
up to 3.5s three laps later, with third-placed Sutil in turn
closing to within a second of the Ferrari.
The one-stopping Brawns, meanwhile, were generally lapping around a
second off the pace in fourth and fourth, the pair told over the
radio on lap eight that they needed to lap within 0.9s of the
race-leading McLaren to make their strategy work.
Barrichello duly responded, the Brazilian – whose one stop would
come one lap later than his team-mate’s – at this stage just over a
second clear of title rival Button and beginning to eek further
clear.
On lap 14, two laps earlier than expected, Hamilton peeled into the
pit lane for his first stop with a 6.8s lead over Raikkonen, with
the Brawn duo 17 and 20.5s respectively adrift.
After Sutil on lap 16, and Raikkonen a lap later, then pitted and
returned in the same order behind Hamilton, Brawn were promoted to
the lead and now really needed to turn up the wick as their heavy
starting fuel loads burned off.
In truth, the next 10-12 laps couldn’t have gone any better.
Appearing to push each other to the car’s limits around the
challenging high-speed circuit, the pair’s pace proved too strong
for the now heavier Hamilton behind.
While often matching each other for sector time after sector time,
Button was invariably a fraction faster and managed to close his
once 3.5s deficit to 2.1s by the time of his one and only stop on
lap 27.
Nevertheless, Barrichello still emerged from his own pit stop a lap
later with his advantage increased once more after a slightly
quicker service and a better in-lap.
With Barrichello now truly in the box seat to take the victory
should Brawn’s one-stopping plan work, all attention turned to
whether Hamilton, now back in the lead, could build a big enough
advantage to hold the lead through his second stop.
However, as it turned out, he only had five laps to do so and his
14s lead over Barrichello was no where near enough to rejoin either
ahead of, or between, the two Brawns – the pair in sight but
realistically just tantalisingly out of reach.
Nevertheless, never one to give up easily, Hamilton set about
closing down second-placed Button over the remaining 20 laps and
got the gap down to under two seconds with just a couple of laps to
go.
But, in the end, the world champion’s renowned racer’s instinct
would cost him what would have been just his third podium finish of
the season.
Having just set the fastest time through the first sector on the
last lap, he then lost the back-end of his car as he went over the
Astroturf on the outside of the kerb at the first Lesmo, Hamilton
losing control and slamming nose-first into the inside wall.
The accident littered debris all over the circuit, meaning the
safety car was called, and the Brawns were afforded the luxury of
cruising around the remainder of the final lap, Barrichello leading
home Button for the team’s fourth 1-2 of the season.
Hamilton’s crash also ended Sutil’s hopes of catching Raikkonen,
the German having lost his chance of jumping the Finn when they had
pitted together for the final lime on lap 38.
With Ferrari’s pit stall at the top of the pit lane, Raikkonen
appeared set to lose the position when a hesitant lollypop man put
his lollypop up, down, and then up again as the pit stop came to
its conclusion, the confusion causing his driver to get a
stuttering exit.
However, Sutil was suffering his own pit dramas at the same time,
the Force India man knocking over one of his mechanics after
slaloming into his pit box – the lost time meaning Raikkonen still
got out ahead.
With the pair eventually finishing nose-to-tail in third and
fourth, Fernando Alonso matched his and Renault’s best result of
the season to claim a morale-boosting fifth after a lonely
afternoon.
The Spaniard had made full use of his car’s reintroduced KERS
system to make up ground at the start after an initial poor
getaway, and then raced typically consistently on his one-stop fuel
load.
Kovalainen’s early slide meant he could do no better than sixth,
while Nick Heidfeld produced one of the drives of the day to take
seventh from 15th on the grid following BMW’s engine problems in
qualifying.
Red Bull inherited the final point with Vettel, but given Brawn’s
resounding 1-2, that may be little comfort for the Milton
Keynes-based outfit.
After initially making a decent start from ninth, Vettel quickly
lost ground and didn't have the speed to respond and was lucky to
finish at all after a wild ride across the gravel at the second
Lesmo corner.