Formula One’s championship fight got a lot tighter Sunday morning as Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull won the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, while points leader Fernando Alonso of Ferrari got wrecked in the first corner and retired.
Vettel’s win coupled with Alonso’s retirement cut the gap between the two to four. The Ferrari driver leads 194 to 190 with five races left in the season.
“When you are dreaming at night you dream about driving a car like that,” Vettel said in the post-race interview broadcast on Speed-TV. “The balance was fantastic—I think that’s why we had such a big gap.”
Vettel started from the pole, as he has in each of the four Japanese Grands Prix he has contested, and made a clean getaway. Behind him Sauber’s Kamui Kobayashi got past Red Bull’s Mark Webber, while Alonso, starting sixth, got nudged off the track by the Lotus of Kimi Raikkönen.
Romain Grosjean of Lotus then rammed Webber, sending the Red Bull driver spinning off and back onto the track where miraculously no one hit him. Nico Rosberg slowed his Mercedes to avoid Webber, and got punted by Bruno Senna’s Williams—all in the first corner.
The multiple crashes brought out a safety car before the race was a minute old.
The rest of the race was an anti-climactic Vettel runaway. The Red Bull driver opened a huge gap set repeated fast laps, and won by a margin of 20 seconds. It was his third win in four races in Japan, and Vettel was the first driver to win back-to-back Grands Prix this season.
Vettel led every lap of the race and set fastest lap repeatedly—the last one on lap 52 of 53. This was the sort of dominant performance which was the rule in 2011, when he won his second World Drivers’ Championship. Can anyone keep him from a third?
Felipe Massa, driving to continue his career with Ferrari, finished second, an excellent performance after a miserable qualifying effort left him tenth on the grid. Massa had nothing for Vettel, but he drove a fast, error-free race and even held fastest lap briefly.
Jenson Button generated some excitement in the closing lap, pushing hard to take the final podium position from Kobayashi, who was equally desperate to hold third in front of his home crowd. Button cut the gap from 4.4 seconds on lap 36 to a matter of feet at the finish line, but the Japanese driver managed to hang on for his fans. Kobayashi is the third Japanese driver to earn a podium finish in the history of Formula One.
McLaren, which had been the best cars on the track through the last four races, seemed no tot find the answer at Suzuka. Button and Hamilton had to settle for fourth and fifth. Both drivers needed to take advantage of Alonso’s absence. Hamilton started the race fifty-two points down; a win could have cut that to 27. Instead, Hamilton still trails by 42. Button, 63 points down, is out of the running for all practical purposes.
Kimi Raikkönen finished sixth. Luckily for the Lotus driver was not penalized for his part in the first-corner melee—Romain Grosjean and Bruno Senna both got drive-throughs. Raikkönen ended up scoring eight points, which leaves him 37 behind Alonso.
Formula One is back in action next weekend with the Korean Grand Prix Sunday, October 14. Tickets and travel packages are available through Formula1.com. The race will be broadcast on Speed-TV starting at 2 a.m. Eastern.
