Red Bull had a good weekend in Istanbul. Pole position on Saturday and a double podium finish lapping up 14 championship points on Sunday. Not bad at all considering that the Brawn of Jensen Button was a full second faster. Rubens Barrichello made life easier for Mark Webber at the start when his car hit anti-stall. Vettel defended his line and led Button into the first corner. But soon after, he hit the kerbs a little too hard, and bounced his car off track, giving Button the chance to get ahead. After that the race was Button’s to lose, and his pace was such that, even without his first lap mistake, Vettel had no chance of winning. 
Red Bull had fuelled him light in qualifying for a 3 stop strategy, and Vettel should have opened up a decent gap in the opening stint to make that strategy work. However, he found himself in second place behind an unbeatable Brawn, and he should have finished there, if not for a strategic call by RBR to keep him on the 3 stopper. A switch to a 2 stop strategy at that stage might have helped him salvage 2nd place, but instead, he lost out to team-mate Mark Webber to finish 3rd. In the closing stages of the race, Vettel caught up with Webber, and had a decent chance to try an overtaking maneuver. However, his race engineer came on the radio asking him to ‘slow down.’ Red Bull’s view is totally understandable, but they robbed us of what could have been a spectacular battle. All in all, a good race, but Brawn still seem to be unreachable in the championship.
McLaren’s race isn’t even worth discussing. Both their drivers spent the afternoon troubling the non-KERS cars in the lower midfield. Apart from pushing an already frustrated Rubens Barrichello over the edge, they had little else to do. Hamilton is continuing to embarrass the team with constant comments of self-pity. The defending champion simply wrote-off months and months of development costing hundreds of millions of dollars with one line: “That car belongs to a scrap yard”. His talent and long-time relationship with the team allow him to get away with things like these.
The team are said to be mulling over stopping the development of the ’09 car. But if they scrap the MP4-24, what else will they do? The 2010 regulations are far from decided, and if Hamilton’s advice is anything to go by, then this years’ car is not even worth improving. Seems like the perfect time for Ron to start building the successor to the legendary F1?
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