With all of the talk based around FOTA and a breakaway series, many may have not even realized that one of the crown jewel events on the F1 calendar were taking place. What better weekend for the British crowd then hometown boy Jenson Button coming home with a hefty points lead and a seemingly bullet proof car.
Things however, did not work out how Brawn GP had hoped for their homecoming. Red Bull Racing came to Britain with loads of upgrades including a completely different aerodynamics package. Sebastian Vettel took those upgrades to full advantage and crushed the field. Within the first 17 laps, Vettel opened a 17 second lead on second place Rubens Barrichello. At that point he never looked back. So with the win pretty much over, it was time to loo at the battles that took place behind the leader.
Rubens Barrichello was the only true hope for Brawn and he did all he could to hang on to second place. However, a great Red Bull Racing mechanics team got the second RBR of Mark Webber out in time to overtake the second position. With the RBR team holding down first and second, the Brawn GP team that had hoped for a perfect weekend was left to consolidate and hold onto crucial points. Third place was the best Rubens could do and with that finish he was able to take a small bit out of teammate Jenson Button’s lead. Speaking of Jenson, the points leader never really had a chance this weekend at his car lacked pace all weekend. A sixth place finish was all he could bring about at his home race.
Ferrari were able to finish relativly well all things considered. The car had been terrible all weekend and good pit strategy saw Felipe Massa come up and finish fourth. Other hometown hero Lewis Hamilton suffered another nightmare race and was only capable of a 16th place finish.
Overall the race was pretty good considering how quickly it was over. The race for points positions proved to be great and the titles have shrunk by a few points. An interesting point that was brought up during the U.S. telecast was that this is the same points gap after the same number of rounds that saw Kimi Raikkonen take the title in 2007 by one over the Lewis Hamilton. Make of it what you want, but unless Brawn can answer the absolutely dominant pace displayed by RBR, we may not be done just yet.
