VETTEL GRABS A WIN
There's one thing you can garuntee at Monza. Red Ferrari flags. This is tifosi territory and in theory the Scuderia should do the business here. However that doesn't garuntee good results for the red cars - it's McLaren that had the recent form here. However you certainly can expect good racing at the Italian Grand Prix, it's probably the fastest track on the F1 calender and definately one of the easiest to overtake on. Once again it's the last European race of the season. However, the show came to town with the result in Belgium still up in the air. Still, Lewis was still the championship leader and it was up to the Ferrari's to do something about it.
In qualifying, well the rain came down for the first time in ages during a Grand Prix weekend at Monza and in Q1 Jenson was one of the first victims of it, a poor showing forcing him to start P19. The even bigger surprise was in Q2 when an awful tyre choice from Lewis left him starting P15 with DC getting what could be one last race as the best starting Brit but even he couldn't make Q3, he'd start P13. So, no Brits would start in the top ten of a Grand Prix for the first time in ages. Kovalainen was the first one to set the pace but then Vettel beat him and somehow held on to claim the first pole position of his career, Toro Rosso's first pole in their history(even going back to their Minardi days) and the first pole by a German driver since Michael Schumacher in the '06 French Grand Prix!
DC again had a poor start and was never really in the race. OK so he benefitted from a non-start by Bourdais but Red Bull didn't really seem to be taking the Scotsman's race particularly seriously - seemingly using him as the ginea pig so as to get Webber as good a result as possible. As a result he soon wound up at the back of the field and one of Red Bull's last gamble's was to try DC out on intermediates. That stunt didn't come off either and the Scot wound up finishing 16th. The greatest British driver in my memory to have never won the world championship is fading away with a whimper. To be fair though, I suppose Red Bull have to look more to the future.
Jenson wound up starting from the pitlane with Honda deciding to overhaul his car pre-race. He was another to benefit from Bourdais's non-start and fllowed that up with a consistant performance behind the safety car. That was followed up with some strong work mid race with Jenson making it up as far as 11th before coming in for his second stop where he stayed on wet tyres, unlike Barrichello who went to dry tyres and got himself leapfrogged by his British teammate. Jenson eventually finished 15th, which wasn't so bad given that he started at the back of the grid. Still, it was yet another anonymous race for the Honda driver and not his idea of a good weekend.
Lewis benefitted from the Bourdais blunder by going up to 14th but after that, once the Safety car released the pack, nothing was happening for him. Raikonen kept him at bay for the first chunk of the race. When he finally did get moving though, Martin Brundle said it was like an imposter had been in the car at the start of the race! Lewis surged his way up to 2nd but running low on fuel he found himself knocked back into the pack in 10th. However he still had time to make an impact and he did, getting himself back in the points due to others pitting before taking Webber for 7th. Massa proved to be a bridge too far second time around but he only finished 6th.
The thing we were all waiting for though was for someone to catch Vettel. Lewis probably came closest but even he wasn't able to cut it. Somehow, Sebastien Vettel managed to smoothlylead from start to finish at a wet Monza to pick up his first win in a career that only started with what was to be a one-off appearance at the '07 US Grand Prix for BMW! It was the first win by a German since Michael Schumacher won the '06 Chinese Grand Prix! And he did it for Torro Rosso, the team that used to be Minardi! I think we'll call that this year's miracle! Behind him Kovalainen finished 2nd, Kubica 3rd, Alonso 4th and Heidfeld 5th. That's certainly shaken things up.
There was still some unfinished business to clear up from Belgium though. Unfortunately it didn't end as expected. Lewis's 25 second penalty didn't get removed by the FIA - the main technicality involved before that it was apparantly meant to be a drive through penalty and drive throughs can't be appealed against. Uh, hello, Lewis never took a drive through...the stewards didn't see anything wrong with the incident until after the race! And again, everyone acts like McLaren was supposed to know that Lewis couldn't have overtaken for the next two corners after the original incident. Well the FIA themselves appeared not to know when McLaren checked with them. F1 legal decisions can be very strange sometimes.
Either way, Lewis is till top of the drivers table with 78 points but his lead has been cut to only one point. Four races to go and one of the is in Brazil - Massa's home turf. Further down, DC remains at 16th with 6 points. Even further down, Jenson remains at 17th with 3 points.
And now, we're going nightracing.
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