Unfortunately this is a late post, due to my worshipping at the altar of VMware this week.

The race was on its way to being an utter procession. Webber didn’t get a great start and slotted behind Alonso. Wait for the pit-stops, five laps more lappery, into second, 18 points. Thank you very much.

Talking of starts, Button had a rare nightmare when the lights went green. The start was good enough, but the position was utterly horrible and he lost five places at the first corner. Usually his positional awareness is much better, and that just about summed up his weekend. Horrible. Even a perfectly timed pit-stop for the only safety car of the race didn’t yield much in the way of points on the bottom line.

Hamilton’s didn’t go much better – retirement after the first set of pit stops. And now second in the championship. Of course he should still be leading it. Fifteen points down the tubes here, 18 points when the rim failed earlier in the season is still a fair swag of points which would have been a handy buffer. However, at present you just can’t avoid feeling that McLaren are now too far behind technically to swing this championship back towards him.

So, that leaves us with two remaining talking points. Vettel throwing the race away, and Schumacher attempting to put Barrichello into the wall.

The first is relatively easy – Vettel has always given the impression of not being the finished article. Fast but flawed. Very flawed. And there’s no two ways about it, he was in a world of his own, hand already on the trophy and the twenty-five points and took his eye off the ball, and the car in front.  The offence is hardly a capital crime, but the rule is there for a reason – or Webber could have just swanned off 30 seconds up the road, whilst the rest of the field sat impotently behind Vettel, still snugly unpassable under safety car conditions. And thus the penalty exists to stop a team giving any sort of tangible advantage to another driver. And he didn’t even know about the rule to begin with, let alone momentarily forgetting about it. Case closed. A win thrown away due to a lack of focus.

The second is actually a little more vague. Schumacher was basically a thug on the track. He’d messed up the final corner, Barrichello had a tow, job done – right until he decided to shove Barrichello to the very extremis of the race track. So extreme that post-race photographs appear to show maybe a foot at absolute best between Barrichello’s front right wheel and the concrete of the pit wall. It was probably shorter than that, but let’s be genenerous. However, there was no crash and the move was made. Maybe a lesser driver would have been intimidated – Barrichello kept his foot down. That wasn’t a “lift or we crash” moment. That was a “do it if you dare” moment.

As such, I’m more towards the “hard but fair” than the “utter nutter” position on this incident.

So, Formula One now goes on it’s annual break. The championship gives the illusion of being finely poised, but it’s a three horse race now – Webber, Vettel and Alonso. And in reality only Webber or Vettel should be in a position to win the championship given the car advantage. Unlike Button last year, they haven’t maximised their advantage in the early part of the season. Crucially, also unlike Button, their car hasn’t been overhauled by two other teams leaving fifth place the best likely result of the weekend – if anything the Red Bull advantage has increased.