Patronise F1

It may have been a brand new track, in a brand new country, in front of a brand new potential F1 fanbase, but the result of the Indian Grand Prix was another crushingly predictable victory for Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull. The German took pole, led every lap of the race itself and also secured fastest lap honours to become the youngest driver in F1 history to record a 'Grand Chelem'. Vettel also surpassed Nigel Mansell's 19-year record for laps led in a single season, as he continued to rack up new feats in his dominant 2011 campaign.

Once again, the race almost came to Vettel almost by default. The McLaren challenge that had threatened to cause Red Bull some problems in the final flyaways seems to have evaporated since Lewis Hamilton's pole position in Korea, while the Ferrari challenge never really materialised in the first place, and the Mark Webber challenge has been AWOL since mid-2010.

So the 2011 champion won again, and won well. And unfortunately for the Indian fans, there wasn't even much action to speak of behind the runaway leader, as Formula One arrived in India with more of a whimper than a bang. Still, as a first test of India's ability - and indeed its willingness - to host Formula One, the new Buddh International Circuit appeared to come through the weekend with flying colours. Which was something, at least.

Practice and Qualifying

The weekend got underway on a brand-new and overly dusty track with the first practice session, as literally seven or eight people in the new grandstands got to see F1 make its debut in India. They also got to see some laps from home heroes Narain Karthikeyan and Karun Chandhok, that latter only completing a FP1 cameo for the weekend at Team Lotus.

Chandhok made up for his brief time in the spotlight by becoming the first driver to set a timed lap of the track early in the session, though unsurprisingly he didn't stay top for long. Instead, it was Lewis Hamilton who finished ahead for McLaren, the 2008 champion surpassing Vettel's session-topping time in the final moments of the session to take the first bragging rights for the Indian weekend from the champion and his team mate Mark Webber.

Alas, those bragging rights came at a cost. Hamilton's late fastest time came while yellow flags remained out in the final sector for Pastor Maldonado's broken Williams. The stewards adjudged that Hamilton, along with Sauber's Sergio Perez after he made a late improvement of his own, had not respected the flags and slapped both drivers with three-place grid drop penalties for the race.

In FP2, driver continued to face a challenge from the grip-less track surface, with Maldonado adding to his FP1 breakdown by spinning out early on, at the same corner where Jaime Alguersuari had crashed his Toro Rosso in FP1. In terms of the times, Ferrari appeared to have come to the party, as the incongruous form of Felipe Massa topped a session for the first time in eleven billion attempts, with Vettel second and the second Ferrari of Fernando Alonso in third.

The Ferrari challenge didn't really last though, and Vettel moved into dominator mode from the start of Saturday's action, topping the final practice session before qualifying having been fastest during both the early race fuel simulations and the late-session qualifying simulations. McLaren's Jenson Button hung on gamely in second, from Webber and Hamilton, but Vettel was looking nailed-on for another pole position.

And after seeing Red Bull's perfect 2011 pole record ruined by Hamilton last time out, Vettel was in no mood to allow that trend to continue, comfortably wrapping up his lucky 13th pole of the season so far at the Buddh track. Hamilton was his nearest challenger, though that statement does rather stretch the definition of 'challenger', but the McLaren man's second place would translate to fifth on the grid after his penalty.

That would promote Webber onto the front row, despite another slightly soggy qualifying performance from the Australian, while Alonso and Button would make up the second row of the grid, with Hamilton slotting in alongside old friend Massa on row three. There was no way that could end badly, surely?

Massa himself provided some late-session entertainment when he walloped one of the new 'sausage'-like kerbs at the Buddh track, neatly snapping his car's suspension instantly. He took the usual driver line when faced with a challenge at a new circuit, and instantly whined about it. "I didn't take the kerb too strongly, I took a little bit of kerb and then my suspension didn't survive," he insisted, "So it can be a problem for the race." Don't worry Felipe, just make sure it doesn't happen again.

The rest of the top ten in Q3 was a familiar selection of faces engaged in a game of 'Let's not bother, eh?'. Nico Rosberg set a lap to take seventh for Mercedes, but Force India's Adrian Sutil and the Toro Rosso duo Sebastien Buemi and Alguersuari completed the top ten without a time to their names, preferring the increasingly-traditional 2011 tactic of saving their rubber for the race.

The big casualty of qualifying were Michael Schumacher, who again dropped out in Q2 and would line up 11th on the grid, while the grid order itself took a while to actually get sorted out, as along with Perez and Hamilton's penalties, the FIA also had to work with Vitaly Petrov's five-place penalty from Korea for his crash with Schumacher, and penalties for both HRT drivers, with Daniel Ricciardo dropping five places for a gearbox change, and home favourite Narain Karthikeyan dropping the same amount for blocking during Q1.

The Race

On the day of the race, and after some slightly disappointing-looking attendances on Friday and Saturday, the grandstands looked fairly well packed for the race itself. Alas, fears that some of the drivers had expressed about the dirty track surface proving a massive limiting factor to the chances of overtaking proved to be largely accurate. The inaugural Indian Grand Prix was more of a 2010-spec procession than a 2011-spec barmy overtakingfest.

Still, the opening lap at least provided some action, albeit not from the first few rows. Vettel kept the lead comfortably down into turn one, with Webber managing not to cock up his start for once to hold second place. Unfortunately for the Australian, despite finally making a good getaway, he managed to drop a place on the opening lap anyway, as Button scampered past down into turn three having got past Alonso in turn one when the Spaniard spectacularly missed his braking point. That dropped the Ferrari man to fourth, ahead of team mate Massa, who got past a slow-starting Hamilton for fifth.

Further back down the order, the racing resembled a demolition derby. Rubens Barrichello went steaming into turn one far too hot, clipping the back of team mate Pastor Maldonado and breaking the front wing on his Williams. He went straight on at the first turn as a result of that abject clumsiness, taking Kamui Kobayashi's Sauber with him. The Japanese driver then promptly tried to recover straight back onto the circuit, only to plough into the luckless Timo Glock's Virgin, ending both of their races before they had even really begun. There were more frolicks at turn four, as Daniel Ricciardo tagged the back of Jarno Trulli's Lotus, pitching the Italian into a spin.

Carnage further back then, but serenity at the front of the field. Vettel led Button by 1.3 seconds at the end of the first lap, with Webber initially hanging on to the McLaren and trying in vain to find a way back past. Alonso, Massa and Hamilton followed, with Nico Rosberg holding seventh off the line. He led team mate Michael Schumacher, who had made another strong start to make up for a naff qualifying effort and ran eighth, with Sutil and Senna completing the top ten. Both Toro Rossos made poor starts and Alguersuari and Buemi dropped to 11th and 12th.

Vettel then started making hay at the front of the order. With Button distracted by Webber meandering about inside the DRS zone on every one of the early laps and having to spend more time defending from behind than attacking at the front, the German serenely pulled away from the pack. By lap 5, the lead was out to 4.2 seconds, and already there was a sense that the double world champion was in a league above and beyond his rivals at the Buddh track. Any hope the neutral fan had of seeing Hamilton recover from his penalty to take the fight to Vettel vanished fairly quickly, as the McLaren man spent his first stint running a good 2-3 seconds behind the underwhelming force of Felipe Massa.

It was, in short, a processional start. The punch from the DRS wings wasn't really working for Webber in the squabble for second, and the lack of grip off line from the dusty surface was scaring everyone else away from any ideas of making an overtaking attempt. Aside from some backmarker-passing from the recovering trio of di Resta, Perez and Petrov, who had all pitted early on with minor damage from their own minor first lap prangs, or in di Resta's case on a tactical switch from the hard Pirellis, there was little of note going on. At a cost of some $215 million, the Jaypee Group appeared to have accidentally built a slightly more attractive-looking Hungaroring.

Later in the first stints, the Toro Rossos provided a glimmer of action, with Alguersuari and Buemi working as a pair of marauding stalking horses as they worked over and passed first Senna and then Sutil, moving back up to the 9th and 10th positions where they had started the race. The passes on Sutil were assisted by the Findia driver chewing up his first set of Pirelli softs ahead of schedule, and the German subsequently kicked off the first round of pit stops on lap 16 to try and rectify his sudden case of tyre-knack.

By that point, Button had sorted himself out in second place, having finally shaken Webber off as the RBR man dropped out of the one second DRS zone before falling further back as the stint went on, with Webber continuing to highlight his Pirelli tyre-based problem/excuse for the season. Now released from defensive duties, Button was pegging - and even slightly reducing - the gap to Vettel. Having grown as high as five seconds at one point, Vettel's advantage shrank to just three seconds after the duo made their stops, though the German stayed out longer than any of the frontrunners during the pit window to ensure that he didn't lose the lead of the race.

Seeing Button looming larger in his mirrors after the stops, Vettel then did the logical thing and set about patiently re-establishing his advantage. On lap 22, he led by some 3.6 seconds, with Webber now nearly six seconds behind the McLaren in third and Alonso 3.2 seconds off the Australian, who lost time in the stops when he emerged behind a late-running Schumacher and took a lap or more to get past him. Massa still ran ahead of Hamilton in the fight for fifth, with the 2008 champion not really looking like making any inroads any time soon.

That was until Massa kicked off a sensational ten-lap window of failure for himself by running wide into turn one on lap 23 under pressure from literally nothing and gifting Hamilton a free pass into his DRS zone. For a couple of laps, Hamilton tried and failed to get past the Ferrari, before on lap 25 he got a run through the second DRS zone and went up the inside of Massa into turn four. The result was a classic 'racing incident', as the pair came together with Hamilton not quite enough alongside to force Massa to cede the apex, and Massa not quite enough ahead to justify his decision to blithely claim the corner.

Both cars skittered wide, with Hamilton's front wing badly damaged, and for yet another time in their comedic double act throughout 2011, Massa and Hamilton had made contact. "It was just one of those things. I really didn't feel like I was at fault – it was a racing incident," Hamilton mused despondently afterwards. Not that Massa saw it that way. "I didn't do anything wrong," the Brazilian retorted, "When I saw that he put the car on my side, what am I doing? It was very dirty in his place, so I braked on the clean side, the grippy side, I brake later than him and I start to turn and he is behind me." Erm, ok then.

Massa, perhaps buoyed by that sense of self-righteousness, appeared to have escaped relatively unscathed. While Hamilton pitted for repairs and dropped down the order, the Ferrari man continued in fifth place, so far behind was new sixth placed man Rosberg by this point. But the news quickly came through that the stewards were investigating the crash, and perhaps for no reason other than to mix up the apportioning of penalties between the two drivers during their string of racing incidents, it was a fuming Massa who picked up a drive through. "He touched my rear wheel. So, to be honest I don't understand why I have the penalty. It is not really understandable," Massa understandably added after the race.

That penalty, which Massa served on lap 30, was then followed by another trip to the pits for a new nose section and fresh set of tyres, which dropped him all the way down to 12th place. Then, in his haste to begin his recovery drive, his race of failure came to a terminal end when he repeated his qualifying mistake, cutting too much of a corner, walloping the kerbing with his left-front suspension and snapping it immediately. His race ended in ignominy, and that moment of glory in FP2 must have felt a very long time ago indeed.

But while things were going wrong for some of the frontrunners, it was still looking like a lazy Sunday drive for Vettel. He maintained a five second lead over Button by lap 34, who remained in a comfortable but lonely second place. Webber was coming under increasing pressure from Alonso for the final podium spot, while the Hamilton/Massa clash had allowed Rosberg and Schumacher up into fifth and sixth. Hamilton ran seventh, having quickly passed Alguersuari following his enforced pit stop, with the Toro Rosso man, Sutil and Perez completing the top ten. Algie was now on his own leading the STR challenge, after Buemi succumbed to a rare engine failure on lap 26. 

The drivers then cycled through their final round of stops, with most of the field having to take their single final stint on the harder Pirellis. And after a race in which the order had barely changed at all, there was at least some changes in the standings thanks to some old-style pit strategy. In the fight for the final podium spot, Alonso managed to leapfrog Webber after the Red Bull man was forced into an early stop for the hard tyres thanks to his ongoing degradation issues, allowing the Spaniard to stay out longer on the quicker soft tyres and meaning that he emerged from his own stop in a comfortable third place.

Meanwhile, the race-long squabble between the German Mercedes drivers was also resolved with pit strategy. Rosberg took an early stop for hards, the team looking to cover off Hamilton as the McLaren man fought back from his problems. But the extra laps on the hards, coupled with a tardy bit of pit work from the Mercedes team, allowed Schumacher to eke out more pace on his own final set of softs, and grab fifth place decisively from his younger team mate.

At the front, Button once again managed to reel Vettel in slightly during the stops, trimming the lead from around the six second advantage that the German had enjoyed towards the end of the middle stint down to 2.8 seconds immediately after Vettel emerged back onto the track, despite the British driver pitting before Vettel for the harder tyres. But having lost more time to his rival, Vettel was then able to competently recover it back on fresh rubber, easing away to ensure that he would lead every single lap of the race. 

The only remaining target standing between Vettel and the record for the youngest-ever Grand Chelem winner was the fastest lap. And even though Webber popped in the fastest race lap to that point with two tours to go, and the team had ordered him to back off and take it easy over the final laps, Vettel's childish side shone through for a brief moment during this mature season of his, as he hammered in two consecutive new fastest laps in the final two tours to the flag, to secure himself his first-ever Grand Chelem, and the most dominant-possible win at India's first Formula One race.

Vettel took the flag 8.4 seconds clear of Button, who had a lonely afternoon in second place pretty much from start to finish but returned to the podium after his disappointing Korean GP to extend his advantage in the almost-important fight for second in the championship to 13 points over Alonso, who also got back onto the podium after a race away with third place. Webber took a disappointing fourth, dropping him 19 points behind second in the championship with just 50 (or perhaps more realistically given his team mate's current form, 36) points to play for.

Schumacher took a fine fifth place after his final stop tactical job on his team mate, ending 1.4 seconds ahead of Rosberg to close the gap in their own fight for Mercedes dominance in the standings to just five points. Hamilton, apparently suffering further damage from his contact with Massa, was pace-less throughout his final stint, and came home in a miserable seventh place, all-but guaranteeing that for the first time in his career, he will finish behind his team mate in the final championship pecking order. 

Alguersuari came home eighth, securing more precious points for Toro Rosso in their own championship fight with Force India and Sauber, though both of those teams also scored some points as Sutil and Perez completed the top ten at the flag. Renault endured an ultimately frustrating afternoon, with Petrov and Senna ending 11th and 12th. The latter had been running ninth in the final laps, but was on a bafflingly contrary strategy, and pitted for his mandatory stint on the Pirelli hards with just three laps to go, dropping him out of the points.

Paul di Resta couldn't manage points in his Force India at their home race. His strategy gamble of starting on the hard tyres and pitting almost immediately for softs failed to pay off, as he spent his afternoon struggling to pass slower traffic and was forced to make an extra stop which dropped him to 13th. Heikki Kovalainen took a fine 14th for Team Lotus, having spent much of the race inside the top 12 and running with a comparable lap time to the rest of the midfield. He beat Barrichello to the flag, the Williams man finishing 15th after his first lap mess-up.

At the back came the remaining newbie team cars, with Virgin's Jerome d'Ambrosio a virtually invisible 16th, and home favourite Narain Karthkeyan 17th, beating team mate Ricciardo to the chequered flag after the Australian was forced to make an extra stop midway through the race. Trulli, the man Ricciardo tapped into a spin on lap one, was the last man home in 19th place, some five laps behind by the end. Joining lap one victims Glock and Kobayashi in retirement were the suspension-less Massa and the engine-less Buemi, while Pastor Maldonado also failed to finish, having retired early on with gearbox failure to end another pointless outing for the increasingly desperate-looking Williams squad.

The Indian Grand Prix did not quite provide the thrills and spills that the track may have promised and the sport may have hoped for to impress their latest captive audience, but the inaugural weekend served as another chance for Vettel to add a further underline beneath his 2011 title in the record books. And it was a chance that he took with both hands.

Two more wins in the remaining races in 2011 would ensure that the 24-year old equals Schumacher's record for thirteen wins in a single season. The odds on that happening must be getting very short indeed. 

Driver of the Race

Sebastian Vettel - This probably should be an award for Michael Schumacher, who recovered from 11th to 5th. Or Fernando Alonso, who took yet another podium in a car that realistically had no right to be there, beating a RB7 to the flag in a straight race to boot. Or Sergio Perez, who moved from 20th to 10th for Sauber. Or even Heikki Kovalainen, who enjoyed as competitive a race as Team Lotus has ever had, running well within the midfield all race long on genuine pace.

But this was Vettel's most perfect weekend of 2011 to date. His run to pole position was as comfortable as any of his thirteen top spots in qualifying this year, and he then proceeded to break the record for the youngest-ever Grand Chelem holder by almost a full year, wresting the record that had been held by Ayrton Senna from the 1985 Portuguese GP. While some of the fans in the grandstands may have been new to F1, Vettel ensured that nobody left the Buddh circuit on Sunday evening under any illusion as to who 2011's top dog has been.

Moment of the Race

Lap 25 - Yes. That. Truth be told, there wasn't a great deal else to talk about in India, which managed to come across all Valencia-esque despite the obviously impressive track layout. And with so few incidents, the Massa/Hamilton collision has been blown up above and beyond all proportion by both media and the drivers themselves. What it really amounted to was a daft racing incident, but given the history of the two drivers and the way it became the only talking point of the race, it will probably be remembered for being much more than that.

Quote of the Race

"No, he didn't try. He didn't try to do anything. When I tried to speak to him he passed through. He did not look to my face, so no. Not here. Here after the one minute silence he was at my side and then he just said, 'have a good race'. So this is trying to what? Have a good race? Is that not part of talking, or whatever?" - A mildly-deranged Felipe Massa argues that Hamilton giving him a hug and a good luck message is most definitely not enough to end their war of silent pouting at each other. Why you mad though?

Patronise F1's Indian GP Coverage

Race Preview - Indian Grand Prix

Minute-by-minute reports:
Free Practice 1
Free Practice 2
Free Practice 3
Indian GP Qualifying
Indian GP Race

Session reports:
FP1 - Hamilton ahead in first Indian GP practice
FP2 - Massa tops second practice in India
FP3 - Vettel resumes normal service in FP3
Qualifying - Red hot Vettel scorches to India pole
Race - Super Vettel dominates in first Indian GP

Post-race coverage:
Five talking points from the Indian GP
Fifth Column - India

The Results

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