In the always-boring second part of Patty’s far-too-long 2009 season review, we look back at Jenson Button's continued domination of the season's early stages, and the steady and inexorable mid-season Red Bull fightback.
The F1 teams rolled into Spain with Jenson Button and Brawn very much installed as title favourites, and the Barcelona weekend, a fan favourite at literally no point since it was added to the calendar, saw the team dominate again. But the first signs of some dissatisfaction from the formerly happy, smiley Brawn team became evident at this weekend.
Although Button secured another pole position at the track, he only just nosed ahead of Vettel’s Red Bull, and by now, the Brawn team were having to compromise Button’s strategy in order to keep him ahead. Sadly for Red Bull, Vettel then ruined his race by bogging down on the line and spending most of the rest of the race stuck behind Felipe Massa’s recalcitrant but KERS-assisted Ferrari, only getting past late on when the Keystone Cops Ferrari pit crew failed to give Massa enough fuel to run flat out to the end of the race and the Brazilian was forced to back off. Meanwhile, the real scrap at the front between the Brawn twins was decided on strategy. Button’s engineer made a mid-race call to switch from the assumed optimum strategy of a three stop back to a two stop, while Barrichello remained on the three stop, and Button won comfortably. Cue the first murmurs of team orders in the Brawn team. They would not be the last.
But if the Brawn team were busy shouting at each other, the rest of the F1 teams were starting to stomp their feet in petulance at the FIA’s 2010 rulebook, as teams started to hint that they wanted no part of a budget-capped sport. The FIA didn’t seem to care, as they had all manner of weird and wonderful teams queuing up for a spot on the 2010 grid, but Ferrari were angry, going as far as unsuccessfully seeking an injunction against the FIA’s new rules, and releasing a mad waffling statement where F1 with these new teams was branded as "GP3".
Amid this backdrop of moaning about money, it seemed ironically appropriate that the teams headed to Monaco next, to allow for the delicious stupidity of watching team bosses discussing potential cost-cutting measures from onboard an enormous yacht, with the teams eventually ordering the FIA to drop the rule changes or they won’t race anymore, which is the sort of mature response the situation really needed.
As far as the actual racing went around the principality, it was business as usual for early-season Button. He successfully secured another pole position in a qualifying session that was notable for a pathetic crash for reigning champion Lewis Hamilton during the first section, on a weekend where the McLaren MP4-24 finally looked like having some genuine pace for once. Hamilton was left to endure a dismal race at the back of the field, while the man who was raking fans off the Hamilton bandwagon and onto his own at a rate of knots wrapped up his fifth win from six races with a flawless drive around the tight Monaco circuit. The only mistake Button made all weekend was after the chequered flag, when he parked his car in the wrong place at the end of the race and was forced to run across to Monaco’s uniquely naff podium setup. When that is your sole error for the season, and you lead the championship by 16 points (from his team mate) and 28 points (from Vettel, who contrived to crash his Red Bull at Ste Devote), you know it’s been a good start to the season.
As the teams left the principality, the FIA-FOTA scrap over future direction of their caviar budgets the sport continued to grow in pathetic intensity. Williams broke ranks over the standoff and signed up for 2010, after feeling “legally obliged” to do so, and were promptly suspended from FOTA, while the new teams rolled in on the deadline day for entries into 2010, with a bewildering array of half-arsed teams throwing their lot into the hat marked "We’re in, but I can has budget cap plz?". Predictably, the FOTA teams also submitted entries, despite insisting they wouldn’t, but included a number of caveats insisting they would only compete if the rules changed to something they wanted.
The tedious rumbling over the rules continued as we headed to Turkey, with Red Bull finally looking like having surmounted the gap to Brawn after they finally got their new diffuser working in Monaco. Vettel secured his first pole since China, though Button had the advantage on fuel, and the race itself promised to be an epic cat-and-mouse scrap at the front, as Vettel tried to gap Button by enough to keep his lighter car ahead come the dreaded pit stops.
In the end, that promise lasted all of about a dozen corners, as Vettel made a mistake on the opening lap and allowed Button through, where the Brawn man’s superior strategy allowed him to secure win number six from seven races. In contrast, his team mate made another rubbish getaway and spent the rest of his afternoon in Istanbul driving into other cars, successfully nobbling both Heikki Kovalainen and Adrian Sutil before deciding to give up eleven laps from the end.
It seems strange to say it, but here we are, not even halfway through this stupidly long review, and we’ve just mentioned the champion’s last GP win of the year. Button left Turkey with a 26 point gap to Barrichello, a 32 point gap to Vettel, and a 33.5 point gap to Mark Webber, who was one of three drivers to spend the year blighted by an ugly .5 points next to his score after the Malaysian debacle. But his lead would never again be as strong as this, and the rest of the season was an exercise into whether any of the trio of contenders could reel in their deficit to the Brit.
Before the next round, though, the dullard rules war came to a head. The FIA announced a strange entry list the week after the Turkish race, a list containing new boys USF1, Campos and Manor Grand Prix, who hadn’t even figured in the pre-deadline entry announcements. Furthermore, the FIA added asterisks next to the names of McLaren, BMW, Toyota, Brawn and Renault, indicating that they only had “provisional” entries, though the FIA assured themselves that both Ferrari and the Red Bull twins had already signed deals to remain on the grid for 2010 and beyond, something none of the teams really agreed with.
As we arrived in Britain, for the championship leader’s home grand prix, the smelly stuff well and truly hit the fan, metaphorically speaking. FOTA announced they were over F1 and were going to build their own series, to which Max Mosley’s response was little more useful as saying "I know you am, but what am I?".
The British GP rumbled on against the background of the childish infighting, with Vettel dominating what at the time looked to be the last GP at Silverstone for a good long while, what with Donington Park so certain of being ready for the start of their new 17-year deal in 2010. Vettel secured pole and romped off to the race win, leaving Button mired down in the midfield and an eventual sixth place. Easily the most uncompetitive outing of his season to date, and a mess-up blamed on the cold conditions and the Brawn car’s inability to generate heat in the tyres. It was an excuse that we’d get used to hearing.
Mercifully, the FIA-FOTA war ended in the days following the British race, and predictably, there were no real winners. Some greedy manufacturers met Mosley halfway on cost-cutting, Mosley himself agreed to stand down, and all the fans that had seen FOTA’s leaked provisional calendar for their breakaway series and dreamed of returning to places like Argentina, Imola and Adelaide saw their hopes shattered as it dawned on everyone that literally nobody really cared about the fans, and that we’d be back in Bahrain again next season.
Still, the good news was that the teams arrived in Germany with everything sorted, aside from a minor (by F1 2009’s standards) media incident when Bernie Ecclestone tried to take some heat off the beleaguered Mosley by inexplicably telling a newspaper that Adolf Hitler "got things done". Though the actual context of his comments proved that he hadn’t really meant any malice or harm by what he said, the logic of a man running a major international sport, whose partner at the head of the sport had only himself recently fended off accusations of enjoying the odd Nazi-themed S&M session was utterly baffling. Almost as soon as Bernie had plastered his unique type of verbal diarrhoea over newspapers everywhere, he quickly clarified and apologised for his comments.
The fact that the next race took place in Germany, a country not a million miles away from Hitler’s name, made Bernie’s comments all the more ludicrous. Thankfully, the actual on-track action delivered a story to make everyone happy and forget the badness outside, as perennial luckless loser Mark Webber finally bodyslammed the monkey on his back and picked up his first GP win, having dominated qualifying and the race. In a rare break of tradition, his bad luck for the weekend, picking up a drive-through penalty for his slightly robust defence off the line against Barrichello’s Brawn, failed to ruin his day and instead he fought back to take the victory with ease, underlining Red Bull’s prowess at that point.
Barrichello was more than a little unhappy after the race, as he slipped back to 6th place following a botched pit stop. After all the team orders moaning after the Spanish race was rekindled, as Barrichello complained that Brawn had "thrown away the race". Thankfully, his anger was tempered by his amusing "it would be a lot of bla, bla, bla, bla..." comment, and when Ross Brawn stepped in to explain to the Brazilian that actually no, the team hadn't cocked up his race for the dubious reason of making Button finish ahead of him, while costing the team more points in the process.
So with the midway point of the season reached, Button’s pace had suddenly evaporated, and his championship lead (68pts) was reduced over Vettel (47pts), the resurgent Webber (45.5pts) and Barrichello (44pts). Elsewhere, reigning (and by now, very much outgoing) champion Lewis Hamilton finished a lap down in last place in Germany after a first lap tangle, and had registered just nine points in the first nine races.
Mercifully for Hamilton, and James Allen’s ‘special alone times’, though the rest of the season was much better…
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