FORMULA ONE BRITISH GRAND PRIX:RED BULL Racing crashed the much-anticipated Jenson Button party at Silverstone yesterday, Sebastian Vettel claiming a crushing lights to flag victory ahead of team-mate Mark Webber on a day when the runaway championship leader could only struggle home sixth.
Silverstone and the British Grand Prix was supposed to the moment that crystallised the fairy- tale Jenson Button has been living for the past four months. After six wins from the opening seven races, driving for a team that shouldn’t exist, a home win at the crucible of British motorsport was supposed to distil the dream season into one shining moment of flag-waving glory. There was some small irony that it was the very fact this was England in the summertime that was to prove his undoing.
On the only other occasion Button has been bested, in China in April, it was cold, wet and miserable, just the kind of weather you can bet will characterise a race in middle England in mid-June. But while the rain failed to materialise the cold temperatures did and, just as in Shanghai, Button had to give way to the Red Bull Racing cars, machines which work far better in cooler climes than the Brawn.
After Friday’s practice sessions Button had bemoaned an inability to get heat into his tyres and, if anything, the situation worsened in qualifying the next day, an evil-handling car stranding him sixth on the grid and left to watch pole-winner Vettel celebrate his heavily modified car’s sublime handling in the post-qualifying press conference. The story was repeated in the race.
Button made a poor start, dropping back to ninth, and endured a long, arduous battle to claw his way back to his starting position. At the front, and almost in a different time zone, Vettel had held off Rubens Barrichello and was busy opening a cavernous gap in the opening stint.
By the time the leaders dived towards the pitlane for the first time for fuel and tyres, the German held a 20-second lead over Barrichello.
Button was nowhere and desperately battling to clamber into the points.
Like Button, Barrichello was struggling with grip. The Brazilian lost second to Webber in the first stop and was soon embroiled in a tussle with Williams’ Nico Rosberg and Ferrari’s Felipe Massa for the final podium slot. It was a battle he eventually won, with Massa taking fourth ahead of Rosberg, Button, Toyota’s Jarno Trulli and the Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen.
“If you don’t get the tyres in their working range, it doesn’t matter what car you’ve got, it doesn’t work,” Button said afterwards. “The pace just wasn’t there, and that’s the way our car is with the low temperatures.
“But there you go,” he added,“hopefully this will be the worst race of the year. And after struggling so hard to get three points, in a way this might be an important three points.”
Button needn’t to worry just yet. Despite the dropped points, the Briton sits on 64 points, 23 clear of Barrichello, with Vettel in third on 39, figures which suggest that even if the Red Bulls cars are now on the pace of the Brawns, reliable points for Button, who has yet to have a retirement, should still secure the Englishman the title.
The painful statistics, though, weren’t deflecting Vettel from celebrating his second win of the season at a venue he claimed had fuelled his childhood racing dreams.
“It is fantastic, it shows we are on the right way,” he said. “I also want to thank Silverstone: it’s only my second time here and I enjoyed it so much. The cheering was fantastic, the emotions, especially when I crossed the chequered flag, just fantastic.
“This is what I was dreaming of when I saw my first grand prix here in the era of Mansell and so on,” he added. “It’s unreal now to think I am here, I have made it and I have won this grand prix.”
Vettel added that upgrades to his RB5 car had given him a significant advantage.
“We have made a nice step forward,” he said. “I think we have improved the car a bit everywhere and it all came together. We were quite dominant today.”
That dominance is likely to be tested at the German Grand Prix in three weeks’ time. Temperatures at the Nurburgring in July are likely to fall back into the range of the Brawn GP cars and despite the leap forward made in Britain, Red Bull Racing team principal Christian Horner admitted the championship-leading team will still be hard to catch.
“We knew coming here that we needed to score four points more than Brawn at every grand prix and we managed eight or nine today,” he said. “They still have a formidable lead, and the circuit has suited us very well, but we will try to keep the pressure on them.”
While Vettel may not have been eyeing the standings, Button clearly had been and asked if he now feared for the second half of the season the Briton smiled: “I haven’t had sleepless nights thinking about the championship.
“We’ve just got to hope that the Nurburgring is a bit warmer than here,” he said. “They’re going to be very quick, their new aero package helped them a lot. But I don’t think it’s as big as it looks.”
