grumpyf1

The GP weekend didn't start too well for Vettel. Apart from the fact that somebody had stolen a lot of his hair to make a fetching haystack, he binned his motor pretty comprehensively in the wet 1st practice session on Friday. Missing all of P2 whilst the team sent out for extra rolls of gaffer tape and a dozen catering-size bottles of superglue, he made P3, then promptly made everyone else look like complete idiots in quali. Again. Fastest by 0.4 seconds from his team-mate, Rosberg was ahead of Hamilton, Alonso and Button, and the weekend was already slipping rapidly away from his rivals. So confident were Red Bull that Seb and Webb(er) only did 1 lap each in Q3 and then put their feet up and had a cuppa whilst the others tried pathetically to beat their time. Dominant, no? Unfortunately for the smiley ninja Kobayashi, his car packed up in Q1 before he's even set a time, so back of the grid beckoned him for race day. Kamui and 23 cars to try and get past? That explains my...

It all looked really rather spiffing on Saturday. Webber claimed his 3rd pole-position in a row, and in the process continued Red Bull's impressive record of scoring every pole so far this season. Whilst the McLaren's were clearly fast, Ferrari were nowhere, with Alonso not even making the top ten in the marque's 800th GP. Martin Brundle describing him as a "miserable little so-and-so to interview" probably didn't help his mood much either. With the race underway, Webber got a great start and Vettel managed to jump Hamilton, if only for a couple of laps. Whilst the Red Bull's and McLaren's then pulled away from the rest of the field (but rarely had a gap bigger than a few seconds between them) it started to look like a fairly unspectacular race. By lap 10, the top 9 drivers were exactly where they started on the grid. Just at the attention span started to dwindle, the ominous cloud in the background suddenly became ominous and fabulous at the same time...