There are those who don’t rate Jenson Button amongst the greats, despite his winning the world championship last year. They cite the fact that he was driving the best car and that his performances dropped off in the second half of the year compared to those of his team-mate Rubens Barrichello.
The same people raised their eyebrows when the Englishman left the championship-winning Brawn team at the end of the year to join McLaren, a team moulded around its star driver Lewis Hamilton. They spoke of how they fully expected Button to be blown away by his more talented team-mate and that he would rue the day he joined.
In actual fact, it’s proving otherwise. It’s Hamilton, whom everyone expected to be at ease in ‘his’ team, who seems to have become rattled. He is quicker than Button on sheer pace, yet has been making mistakes and challenging the team’s decision-making process.
Button meanwhile, has remained composed and relaxed and won two of the four races held so far this year, including last weekend’s slightly chaotic Chinese Grand Prix.
Once again it was the weather which proved to be the joker in the pack. The Red Bulls of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber had annexed the front row of the grid and it looked as if, barring problems with reliability, they would walk away with the race. And well they might have, had it not rained lightly, causing tyre choice to be something of a lottery.
But Button seems to be the master of this. It was an early stop to change to slicks which won him the race in Australia and this time it was the decision to stay out on slicks while others went for intermediates that won him the race again.
Fernando Alonso compromised his own race by managing to jump the start and having to serve a drive-through penalty in his Ferrari, and a first corner pile-up involving Tonio Liuzzi, Sebastien Buemi and Kamui Kobayashi brought out the safety car. At this point most of the front-runners chose to dive into the pits to change to intermediate tyres as the rain came down, the exceptions being Nico Rosberg in the Mercedes, who now led from Button’s McLaren and the two Renaults of Robert Kubica and Vitaly Petrov.
For a short while it looked as if they’d made the wrong decision, but then with the rain easing, the intermediates began to go off and lose grip within a few laps – cue another rush to the pits to go back onto slicks.
With the field shuffled up it produced some brilliant racing and we finally got to see Hamilton going wheel-to-wheel with seven-times world champion Michael Schumacher, as the McLaren driver worked his way up through the field. The wily German held him at bay for a couple of laps until Hamilton managed to slipstream past. A short while later Vettel made short work of passing Schumacher as he too charged back up the order.
At the front, Rosberg lost the lead to Button when he slid wide as the rain returned, and everyone was soon in for intermediates. The order down the field changed again as Schumacher pitted early and got back past Webber, Hamilton and Vettel during the stops. Cue more good racing. Button’s lead was wiped out with the emergence of the safety car again due to debris on the track.
The man really on the move was Hamilton who eventually got past second-placed Rosberg after a good dice between the two. He began to close on his team-mate but as both were sliding wildly with their tyres offering little grip in the last few laps, he had to be content with second.
So an English one-two and that hasn’t happened for a while. Rosberg took a well-deserved third ahead of Alonso, Kubica, Vettel, Petrov, Webber, Felipe Massa and Schumacher. The real losers were the two Red Bull drivers though and had it been dry, they may well have taken a one-two themselves.
As it was, it turned into a thoroughly entertaining and absorbing race and, just like Chinese food, it left you wanting more.
