Formula 1 Grande Premio Petrobras Do Brasil 2009
Mark Webber romped away to win the Brazilian Grand Prix – and in doing so helped Jenson Button to claim the drivers’ championship. While Webber displaced Rubens Barrichello from the lead, Button made his way up through the field to claim fifth place which was enough to make him champion – just as Lewis Hamilton did one year ago. Thus, the driver’s championship was again decided at Brazil. Home-hero Rubens Barichello won pole on a wet qualifying session on Saturday, and gave himself a great opportunity to mount a challenge for the championship at Abu Dhabi. Button was eliminated in Q2 and started 14th, two places ahead of Sebastian Vettel. Thus, it looked like things were going in favour of Rubens. However, right from the start of the race, Button benefited from carnage to jump up from his 14th grid place to ninth at the end of a dramatic first lap. There were a number of incidents on lap one, and at the end of it the two Finns, Kimi Raikkonen and Heikki Kovalainen had to head for the pits. Kovalainen did a ‘Massa’, and departed with his refuelling rig still attached and in the process spraying Raikkonen with fuel which promptly caught fire. The ‘iceman’ had to ride through a wall of fire, but luckily enough the fire was over in a flash.
Out came the safety car and it stayed on track till lap 6. As normalcy was restored and the racing resumed, Jenson
Button decided to show the racing world that he is the deserved champion of 2009. He picked off Kazuki Nakajima for eighth and then launched an attack on Franco-Swiss rookie Renault driver Romain Grosjean. They ran side by side and repassed one another a couple of times in some tense wheel-to-wheel racing, but it was the Brit who had the last laugh. Next on the list was Williams’ Kazuki Nakajima, whom he deposed on the seventh lap. Rookie Kamui Kobayashi proved tougher, but after one failed attempt in Turn One Button made is stick. Barrichello made his first pit stop from the lead, thus promoting Webber and Robert Kubica to first and second. Disastrously for him, he came out right in front of Vettel and quickly got passed by the Red Bull. When Webber and Kubica made their stops they easily stayed ahead of Barrichello, who was now looking at finishing no better than third place.
The biggest threat to Button were now Vettel and Hamilton – both of whom jumped past him with their late final pit stops. But Hamilton also proved a problem for Barrichello, who struggled on his super-soft tyres in the final stint. As Hamilton went past him for third with eight laps to go, the McLaren made slight contact with Barrichello’s left-rear tyre, giving him a slow puncture. This signalled the final blow for Barichello’s title hopes. Raikkonen brought his Ferrari home sixth after the team also changed his strategy early on when he needed that new front wing. Sebastien Buemi was in the hunt all afternoon for Toro Rosso and deserved his seventh place finish ahead of the deeply disappointed Barrichello. Kobayashi finished 10th after a great debut for Toyota, while Fisichella had another unobtrusive race to 11th in the second F60 ahead of Vitantonio Liuzzi in the surviving Force India, Grosjean and Jaime Alguersuari. This season still has one race to run at Abu Dhabi in two weeks’ time but once again Interlagos has decided the destiny of the championships with a race to remember. All through the slowing down lap, Button sang over the radio to his delighted team: “We are the champions my friends!”
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