HoldingWater

With pole position a good second ahead of the pack, you would have been pretty safe in assuming that, with the performance of Red Bull, and in particular Sebastian Vettel, the result would be pretty much a foregone conclusion and the race would be fairly processional.

How wrong were we?

I’m not going to even hazard a guess at the number of overtaking manoeuvres that happened into days race. The varying pitstop strategies thrown up by the performance of the Pirelli tyres, combined with DRS and Kerrs seemed to come together perfectly for this track. The continually mixing up of the pack delivered non stop action from start to finish.

Hamilton raced hard today and deserved the win however Webber was my driver of the day – delivereing one of the drives of his life – taking 15 places to finish on the podium was a sterling effort.

So on to the engine manufacturers table – with 4 cars in the top 10 Mercedes have clawed back 16 points on Renault this weekend. Assuming no FIA changes to the results post race the results are as follows:

Renault – 137
Mercedes – 102
Ferrari – 64
Cosworth – 0

Per car the results are Renault – 34.25, Mercedes – 17, Ferrari – 10.17 and Cosworth yet to get of the mark…

Only 2nd race in and already posting this a day late!

Fortunately it seems, as both Alonzo and Hamiltionrecieved  20 second “drive through” penalties after the chequered flag – Hamiltion for making more than one change in direction  whilst defending against Alonzo and Alonzo for causing a collision with Hamilton.

Pretty tough on both of them though Alonzo managed to stay in the same position whilst Hamiltion slipped a couple of places down the results table.

So how did the results in Malaysia affect the leaderboard?

Renault – 102
Mercedes – 51
Ferrari – 49
Cosworth – 0

And on a per car basis as before (with Virgin, Lotus and HRT excluded):

Renault – 25.5
Mercedes – 8.5
Ferrari – 8.2
Cosworth – 0

Renault already leaping ahead on both counts –  roll on China