Lewis Hamilton rues missed opportunity in Hungary

McLaren's Lewis Hamilton rued a missed opportunity after finishing fourth in the rain-affected Hungarian Grand Prix

The 2008 world champion, who led much of the race, pitted six times, including a drive-through penalty.

"I was struggling a lot with the graining on my left front tyres," said Hamilton. "I don't know whether that was my fault, pushing too much.

"We would have liked a one-two. I let the team down a little bit but we will be back."

Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel made a clean getaway from pole to stay ahead of Hamilton, however, the McLaren driver was clearly the faster of the two in changeable conditions.

Hamilton passed Vettel on lap five after the German ran wide at Turn Two and began to build a lead at the front.

But his decision to pit for more option tyres on lap 41, when his rivals - including team-mate and eventual race winner Jenson Button - chose the primes, proved to be the wrong one as he would have to stop again.

When the rain came, Hamilton decided to switch to intermediates, but the wet weather didn't last and he was forced to make a fifth stop for the primes.

"We were having radio issues," added Hamilton. "I could hear my engineers but they couldn't hear me.

"I heard them say it was going to rain and it was already spitting so we opted to go for the wet tyres. It wasn't necessarily the best call, but that's motor racing."

A drive-through penalty, for forcing Paul di Resta's Force India off track after a spin, dropped him further back, but his fresher tyres helped him to pass Red Bull's Mark Webber for fourth.

"My left front tyre was pretty worn so I went a bit wide, came out of the chicane and spun which is very, very rare for me. I think it's one of the first times I've spun," said Hamilton.

Reflecting on the Button's win, Hamilton added: "Jenson was pushing me hard the whole race and the better man won today.

"For us to have been the most competitive cars this weekend means we go into the break in good spirits."

Source: BBC Sport

A missed opportunity for Hamilton

By Martin Brundle BBC - F1 analyst

Should Lewis Hamilton have won the Korean Grand Prix?

He may well have done had he not braked a little too late into Turn One at the final safety car restart and run wide.

That gave Fernando Alonso back the second place he had lost because of a slow pit stop for intermediate tyres and meant the Ferrari driver, not Hamilton, took the lead when the Renault engine in Sebastian Vettel's Red Bull broke on lap 44.

It's true that Alonso was faster than Hamilton at the end of the race, when the McLaren's tyres were more heavily worn, but until then Hamilton had largely matched Vettel and Alonso for pace, and McLaren had the better strategy having pitted Hamilton a lap earlier than his main rivals.

Had Hamilton won, that would have meant a net 14-point turnaround for him against Alonso and he would have been right in the heart of the championship battle, instead of 21 points adrift as he is now. This left McLaren slightly flat despite Hamilton's strong second place.

Given that, judging by his radio messages, Hamilton had been the driver most keen to get the race under way, it was ironic that he was passed by Mercedes' Nico Rosberg the first time racing got under way.

As it happens, that turned out to be a stroke of luck - otherwise, Hamilton may have been the one who was taken out by Mark Webber's spinning Red Bull on the next lap.

The Australian's crash came as a result of one of those awful slow motion spins all racing drivers have experienced.

Webber ran wide in the adverse-camber Turn 12, a corner where he had spun in practice, but for all the world it looked as if he had saved the car.

On-board footage suggests Webber pick up a little too much throttle on the soggy artificial grass just beyond the kerbing, and round he went into the opposite wall. As he rebounded, he sadly took out the impressive Rosberg.

Webber seems to prefer to be the hunter rather than the hunted, and he normally rebounds with a vengeance, as we have seen on other occasions these past two seasons. He needs to now that Alonso is 11 points ahead. If Webber loses this championship, that spin will haunt him.

Vettel did everything right - apart from mystifyingly choosing to race in the fading light with a medium-smoke visor. No wonder he was complaining about the light while leading a dozen laps from the end. Why didn't they change it during the red-flag period?

The German's engine failure was a cruel twist of fate and his championship chances now look to be in nearly as many pieces as his pistons were on the main straight.

Red Bull had locked out the front row for the eighth time this season. A safety car start suited them perfectly and Vettel positively took off every time it pulled in, which was three times in total.

It was the first double non-finish for Red Bull this season and the seventh time Vettel has not converted pole position into a victory.

The team must crystallise their undoubted speed in the most convincing manner in Brazil and Abu Dhabi if they want to win one or both of the titles.

Vettel was immense, although Alonso increasingly had him covered. And for all the laps Vettel led, the Spaniard was the class act of the day.

Alonso stayed out of trouble, kept the car on the black bits, and nursed his long-serving intermediate tyres far better than anyone else.

It was a champion's drive from the man who back in July, when 47 points adrift, declared he was confident he could still win the championship.

This was Alonso's third victory in four races, and his sixth podium in the last seven races. He is on a major roll and will now take some stopping.

For the fifth title contender, though, it is all but over.

Jenson Button had one of his off days, despite it being his kind of race. Some new parts on the car compromised his braking, and his pit stop under racing conditions just before a safety car put him into a lot of traffic.

One of the cars Button found himself racing was Force India's Adrian Sutil, who used Button, among several others, as target practice.

Button would finish 12th, ahead only of a Lotus and two Hispanias. He was a very sad man after a race which recorded his first non-points finish of the season.

Mercedes seemed to be the most proactive in changing their cars to a more wet set-up during the red-flag period after just three laps.

Once the race had officially started, the cars were out of parc ferme restrictions and changes were permitted. Michael Schumacher took advantage to drive an impressive and committed race into fourth place for the third time this season.

A return to the podium for Ferrari's Felipe Massa, Robert Kubica's solid fifth place for Renault, another double points finish for Williams and Sauber, and Vitantonio Liuzzi's strong sixth place for Force India, meant there were some happy drivers poking around in the post-race pitch black.

It was a thrilling race, for so many reasons. A new venue with an intriguing layout and heavy rain arriving only on race day was an explosive combination.

To help European television transmission times, the Asian races tend to start at 3pm local time, and darkness is never far away from the scheduled finish.

The combination of failing light and rain made for a busy afternoon for race director Charlie Whiting but the drivers have pretty much universally praised his decision to delay the start and then use the safety car to start the race.

I felt strongly that the race could have started earlier, as did Hamilton judging by his frequent radio calls.

Of course, there will always be spray when the track is wet; there always was. It's a case of driving accordingly in extreme conditions. I have raced in and commentated on much worse conditions than that.

Still, Korea threw up a unique set of circumstances.

The resin on top of the newly laid asphalt prevented water from soaking into the surface and running away.

Button said the whole circuit looked like a lake and the spray was the worst he had ever known, but Hamilton confirmed there was not actually any aquaplaning when the race eventually got under way.

By amazing coincidence, after two hours and 48 minutes on track including the red-flag period, the 55 laps and daylight ran out at exactly the same time.

Many drivers have commented that the gearshift lights on their steering wheels, which have to be bright to be seen in the regular sunshine, were dazzling and blinding them in the near darkness at the end.

It was very marginal and the race could reasonably have been finished three laps earlier.

There were incidents and crashes galore as several drivers misjudged their braking on the extremely slippery surface. Sutil and Toro Rosso's Sebastian Buemi will both take five-place grid drops in Brazil for making heavy contact.

It was a rather surreal weekend all said and done, and the inaugural South Korean GP was deemed a success.

Nevertheless, there are several aspects of the hurriedly constructed track and infrastructure which they need to address for next year.

Source: BBC Sports

Jenson Button Q&A: Battling on after Spa's missed opportunity

Last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix was a bittersweet affair for McLaren’s Jenson Button. Sweet because the MP4-25 was back in fine form for most of the weekend, but crushingly bitter because Button’s own hopes of a second-placed finish ended after Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel collided with him following a misjudged overtaking manoeuvre. Forced to watch team mate Lewis Hamilton clinch an outstanding victory and the standings lead as his own title hopes diminished didn’t help the Briton’s mood either. In an interview with his official website, Button reviews the Spa race and pledges to come back stronger at Monza…

Q: Let’s start with the inevitable - you’ve had several days to think about it, so what are your thoughts on the accident that took you out of the race?
Jenson Button: My thoughts haven’t really changed, to be honest. At the time, I was pretty confused by what Sebastian did. Now, I still think what he did was completely unnecessary - he didn’t need to pass me at that point, and I wasn’t making his life difficult, so his car shouldn’t have been on such a knife-edge when he hit me. What’s most frustrating is that I’ve lost out on a good handful of championship points at a time when neither Sebastian or Fernando (Alonso) were able to score. I know there are 150 points still up for grabs, but it doesn’t help to now be 35 points behind Lewis (Hamilton). On a more positive note, under the old points system, that would still only be about 15 points, so anything’s still possible. But at this point in the season, you’ve got to take every point you can - and the incident in Spa certainly didn’t help.

Q: Red Bull team principal Christian Horner claimed that you braked earlier than normal into the Bus Stop - is that right?
JB: No, absolutely not. Obviously, I’d lost the floor-plate of one of my front wing endplates - and that was affecting the car’s balance - but I didn’t brake any earlier for the Bus Stop on the lap of the crash. I’d had to crank more front wing in to help the handling, and that had made the back-end a bit more skittish, so I was just driving carefully. I knew I still had good straight-line speed, so I was concentrating on getting into the slower corners cleanly, so that I could maximise my traction at the exit and maintain the gap along the straights. But that’s just common sense when you’re racing. After the race, I actually checked the data with my race engineer, and it shows that I braked at exactly the same point on the lap before the collision. We even looked at the braking profile, and that also showed that, at the point of impact - about 1.5s after I’d started applying the brakes - I’d travelled exactly the same distance on both laps. So to suggest I’d braked earlier wouldn’t be accurate.

Q: If you’d been able to continue, the race was looking positive, wasn’t it?
JB: I was in second place. Okay, you could say it wasn’t a comfortable second because I had the slight issue with the endplate, which was slowing me down, but you look at the results and two cars that were running behind me before I retired both finished on the podium. So I think it’s realistic to say that I could have been on the podium on Sunday. And I knew I would have been strong in the closing laps of the race, too. We had a car that was working perfectly in the greasy conditions, and I think I would only have been stronger when the rain started to fall again. So it’s a missed opportunity.

Q: Nonetheless, the team’s performance at Spa must be encouraging for the future, surely?
JB: We were very pleased with our performance. We were on the pace for the whole weekend, and we had one of the fastest cars - probably the fastest car in mixed conditions, so that’s all very positive. While Spa wasn’t a personal highlight for me, I think Lewis’s win came at exactly the right time for the whole team - Hungary was probably the low point of our season, so to be able to bounce back so strongly will have given the team the assurance that we’re headed in the right direction for the rest of the championship. We know it won’t be easy, and that some circuits won’t favour our car as much as Spa, but we’re heading into the final six races in full-on battle mode. We know how to win and we want to keep winning.

Source: Formula1.com