The Spanish Grand Prix – Jenson Button Passes with Flying Colours

As Jenson Button enjoys his fourth victory of the season, having lapped reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton on the penultimate lap, t5m’s formula 1 devotee, Alex Walters reviews the Spanish Grand Prix.

In life, as in Formula 1, they say that one swallow doesn’t make a summer. In Australia we saw one. In Malaysia it appeared for a second time. A German shot it down in China, but in Bahrain it was back again. In Barcelona this weekend that swallow proved that summer is firmly here to stay, and Jenson Button is making hay while the sun shines.

Button’s performance this weekend was nothing short of sensational. Having snatched a final hot lap with just a second to spare in qualifying, he most certainly made it count. Dramatically slicing a tenth off Vettel’s seemingly impervious lap, Button ensured he would start from the front at the Circuit de Catalunya – a notoriously tough course to win on from anywhere but the front row.

For Button’s team it appears to be Brawn by name, Brawn by nature. The cars seem astonishingly resilient, and have managed a 100% finish record this season. Watching the Grand Prix from the Ferrari pit wall, Michael Schumacher must have felt a twinge of nostalgia. Rubens Barrichello playing second fiddle to a seemingly invincible driver in a seemingly invincible car? It could almost have been the glory days of the wily old German himself.

For Schumacher’s own team, however, it was a weekend of decidedly mixed fortunes. Kimi Raikkonen’s disastrous decision not to take a second lap in Q3 on Saturday resulted in his being knocked out before Q2, starting from a meagre 16th on the grid. A fortuitous opening and decisive use of the KERS system then powered him up the field, only for a hydraulics problem to put paid to his race.

Massa, however, enjoyed some newfound pace and edged ahead of Vettel into third, frustrating him by using his KERS system (a feature that the Red Bulls do not have) to prevent any chance of Vettel overtaking for the majority of the race. Had he managed it earlier, there is no doubt that the young star would have challenged the Brawns for the win. Yet Massa was undone by a disastrous miscalculation of fuel consumption. The mistake forced him to cede position to both Vettel and Alonso towards the end of the race in order to conserve enough fuel to allow him to finish. Strong words were exchanged on the team radio.

Sadly, McLaren’s improvement in Bahrain appears to have been something of a false dawn. Asked in qualifying whether he felt the car had improved, Heikki Kovalainen was optimistic. Hamilton was less diplomatic - the answer to the same question being a resounding “No”. Both cars’ sluggish performance in the race appears to endorse Hamilton’s view. It remains to be seen if anything at all can be done to salvage the young champion’s season.

Without the cool head of Ron Dennis to steady the ship, there is a sense that Hamilton’s professed loyalty to his boyhood mentors may be a finite resource. If Kimi Raikkonen’s career proves equally finite, as is speculated, then Hamilton might just be trading Woking for Maranello this summer. With the pop-star girlfriend, the tax haven in Switzerland and a world championship under his belt, surely a fire-engine red Ferrari was only a matter of time?