iSport F1 Pitstop: Mclaren lead both the championship tables post-Spain, but will they manage to hold on to their 3 point lead? iSporter Sahil Gore tells us more.
Jenson Button: 5th Lewis Hamilton: 14th
McLaren leave Spain leading both world championships, but they have little else to take away from here. With Jenson Button barely managing to keep his lead in the Driver’s championship, and a late tyre puncture preventing Hamilton from scoring, it was pretty much a race to forget.
Button started in 5th place, and kept it until the first round of pit stops. Michael Schumacher who started in 6th, pitted earlier and made the most of his in and out laps. Jenson rejoined the track side-by-side to him after his stop and Michael aggressively forced him to stay behind. Button spent the remaining laps following Schumacher around the track, desperately looking for an opening. Catalunya is known to be a hard track to overtake on, and Michael Schumacher is certainly not a very accommodating racer.
Hamilton started in 3rd place, and maintained it till his first stop. As he came out of the pitlane, he was forced to avoid a back-maker and ran directly into the path of 2nd place Vettel. As Vettel took avoiding action, he briefly went off-track which allowed Hamilton to slot into 2nd. Brake problems for Vettel later in the race prevented him from catching up, and Lewis was pretty much on his own, with the gap to race leader Mark Webber looking impossible to close.
A lap away from the finish, Hamilton’s front left tyre exploded and he rammed into the tyre wall. It cost him 18 points and second place in the world championship. A stone stuck between the wheel rim and the tyre has been identified as a likely cause for the puncture.
McLaren are leading both championships, but only because the Red Bulls took away points from Alonso and Merc GP’s Nico Rosberg had a lousy race. A 3-point lead in 2010 is negligible given the new points system, and with 4 teams looking equally competitive, one bad race can ruin your chances of staying in the championship fight.
Monaco will be an absolute lottery, and although qualifying is very important there, we can expect the race to be chaotic with crashes and back-markers. The new teams are 6 seconds a lap slower than the leaders, and on a track like Monaco this will become all the more important. Button was clearly outclassed by Hamilton in Spain, and Fernando Alonso is spicing things up with claims of a rift between the McLaren drivers. Here’s to Monte Carlo!
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