McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton took home the spoils for current Formula One season leader Sebastian Vettel when he won the Chinese GP over the weekend. It was an action and drama packed race that saw Hamilton spoiling Vettel’s chances of a hattrick of wins after the latter’s impressive run with wins in Australia and Malaysia.
Vettel seemed adamant not to lose grip of the title when he finished second, only 5.1 seconds behind Hamilton but the order of the day would go to Vettel’s team mate Austrlian Mark Webber who finished third. Webber started the race on P18, making his way up the standings to the podium. Hamilton’s team mate Jenson Button meanwhile finished fourth with Mercedes GP’s Nico Rosberg on fifth and Felipa Massa and Fernando Alonso from Ferrari following behind. Down the pecking order comes 7 time world champion Michael Schumacher, Vitaly Petrov of Lotus Renault and Sauber’s Kamui Kobayashi.
The race began with some drama in store when Vettel, who began at pole nearly had to start in the pits when his car refused to start but the engineers did well to activate the engine just seconds before the race started and from the word go, the McLaren cars overtook Vettel with Rosberg closing in. After the dust settled, it was Hamilton first, Button second and Vettel third and the thrilling race was pretty much decided on pit stop strategies. Button and Vettel had both pitted at the same time and Button basically gave his position to Vettel when he dived into the Red Bull’s counter.
With that result, Hamilton moves in closer with 47 points on second while Vettel still leads with 68. Jenson Button’s fourth place puts him third in the overall standings with a 38 point position, 1 point ahead of Webber while Ferrari’s Alonso and Massa have 26 and 24 points each respectively. Lotus Renault takes the next 2 spot with Petrov holding 17 points and Nick Heidfeld with 15 points. Schumacher’s return to the race has not been as positive as many would have dreamed of and he is now at eleventh having scored only 6 points, and he is behind Sauber’s Kobayashi who has a 1 point lead. The circus heads out to Turkey for the next race in the next 2 weeks.
