Hamilton's greatest win keeps title race wide open

Lewis Hamilton won a hugely tense and thrilling first race at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas, to set up a last round title showdown between Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso in Brazil.

Scoring his first win in six races, Lewis Hamilton perhaps has never driven such a great race as he hunted down Vettel and moved in for the kill. The entire weekend had been Vettel’s fastest by far in the opening three practice sessions, the Red Bull driver then followed that up with pole position.

But Saturday showed us this wasn’t going to just be a Red Bull victory party as Hamilton was only just over a tenth of second behind. It was going to be close and so it proved.

This new specially built track had been fairly grip-less all weekend, especially as Pirelli brought too conservative tyre options which took an age to heat up, but nowhere was as slippery as the even numbered side of the grid. Many race engineers predicted cars starting from there could lose up to two positions from the start.

Fortunately for Lewis, he lost just one to Mark Webber as Vettel shot away in the lead, but in recent times when the Red Bull’s have got out in front no one has seen them again for the rest of the day, not this time though.

Hamilton was soon back ahead of Webber on lap 4 and immediately cut the gap to Vettel, then steadily tracked him down. Webber duly retired 13 laps later with Red Bull’s nemesis, Renault alternator failures.

Lewis looked threatening and closed him down even getting into DRS zone; it was great to see Vettel being challenged, and it was only Lewis who could, no one else who get even close to these two. However, Vettel resisted and after a brief lock up from the McLaren he began to pull away again.

Lewis made his pit stop on lap 20, Vettel following a lap later, and suddenly Lewis heated up the attacks again. He quickly surged passed the yet to stop Kimi Raikkonen and tore after Vettel.

The DRS zone was the main attack point, but each and every time he got close through the first sectors high speed sweeps, the Red Bull traction out of the slow hairpin into the DRS straight was able to keep Vettel just out of reach, the McLaren bouncing off the rev limiter.

Lewis dropped back for a while, let everything calm down and then he launched again. He brought the gap down over a few laps then lap 41 he gets close, not quite enough though. Lap 42, he must be able to see his opportunity ahead of him.

Vettel comes into the series of fast sweeping bends, quickly approaching the HRT of Narain Karthikeyan who can’t quite get out of the way in time momentarily blocking him, the McLaren of Hamilton looms into Vettel’s mirrors, he hasn’t been this close yet, it’s the break he needed.

Into the DRS zone, Hamilton activates, Vettel immediately knows Lewis is closer than ever and pulls to the left hand side of the track to defend the inside line. Hamilton follows him across being pulled by the slip stream ever close.

Finally he darts out from behind the Red Bull rear wing and shoots past, slicing ahead of the Red Bull to hold the inside line into turn 12. He was through and he wasn’t going to lose this now.

To demonstrate just how close it was between the pair of them, Vettel didn’t just fall away, in fact he was never more than 1.5 seconds away for the remaining 14 laps. But he didn’t get an opportunity, and Lewis managed to hold a gap of more than a second to keep Vettel away from the DRS zone and win his fourth race of the year.

Hamilton drove brilliantly and he truly deserved another win for McLaren before his move to Mercedes; they failed to score a point again despite Michael Schumacher qualifying fifth, but they had no race pace and dropped back. Hamilton must hope they’ve been working on the 2013 car for a long time now.

Anyway more than that McLaren owed him a car that could challenge after the catalogue of dropped points from issues that have left Hamilton out of contention for this years title.

Vettel will rue that incident with the HRT, a win today would have put one hand on the championship trophy, he’d have been 20 points ahead heading into the final round, as it is he’s still 13 ahead, but yet again Alonso saved a result by getting on the podium.

However, Red Bull did win the constructors championship today, their third in a row which is a fantastic achievement.

Ferrari

Ferrari worked the rules today. Felipe Massa and Alonso could only qualify 6^th and 8^th respectively after Romain Grosjean took a grid penalty to drop him from 4^th to 9^th. This meant they lined up on the dirty side of the grid with supposedly less grip. There was almost a sense of paranoia about that side of the track.

They felt it was so bad, that they broke the seal on Massa’s healthy gearbox to drop him to 11^th and promote Alonso to 7^th and thereby giving him the preferred side of the grid as well as moving him up a position.

Whether it’s in the spirit of the rules or not is neither here nor there, as it was a great bit of team tactics and there is nothing that says you can’t do it. And it worked too. Alonso made another great start and was fourth out of the first corner, once Webber dropped out he was third and from then on, there he stayed.

Without that switch he might well have lost a place and found himself in the pack, but having said that Ferrari had a good enough pace to see them through as demonstrated by Massa’s superb charge through the field to fourth place.

He made a number of good overtakes and often was setting fastest laps. If anything Massa had the pace to beat Alonso today, in fact he was quicker all weekend, but he played the team game and if Alonso ends up world champion, Massa will have played a small, but vital part in the game. Ferrari played the game today and played it well.

Overtake of the race

Kimi Raikkonen didn’t have the speed to participate at the front this weekend like he did a fortnight ago but he still pulled off a fantastic move on Nico Hulkenberg. As he exited turn 1 he switched back to pull alongside the Force India, and then hung on round the outside of the fast turn 2 to claim the inside of the next corner. It was breath taking.

Kimi ended up 6^th after a great move by Jenson Button at the end of the DRS zone to go round the outside of turn 12 and hold off the Lotus.

Rest of the top 10

Jenson Button was 5^th after qualifying only 12^th due to technical problems. He actually dropped down to 16^th on the opening lap but fought his way through the pack with some decent scrapping and decisive as well as opportunistic overtakes. He had good speed, so it was disappointing he wasn’t able to show it most of the time.

Still he wasn’t in Lewis’ class this weekend, and surely that is a slightly concern for McLaren’s 2013 title push.

Romain Grosjean suffered a spin on lap 7 which dropped him down the order from well inside the top 10. However he still ended up right on the back of Kimi to end up 7^th. If only he could stop making mistakes as he’s actually a really good race driver.

Nico Hulkenberg for Force India, Pastor Maldonado and Bruno Senna for Williams seemed to be constantly involved in some fantastic action as they finished 8^th, 9^th and 10^th. The Williams’ were often in fairly close proximity.

But the entire field put on a show for their new American audience (albeit with a large quantity of Mexican’s in the audience). It won’t have helped that the NASCAR decider was on this weekend too, so the impact will have been lessened, but what they needed was a good race to demonstrate the product.

And that they got, there were battles all the way down the field, all the teams participating as mostly they fought to get past Schumacher, but after that the action continued. It was just the start Formula 1 needed in their new American home.

The title decider

So to Brazil next weekend, where apparently there’s a 40% chance of rain, Alonso does quite well when theirs a bit of precipitation. Against all the odds he’s kept himself in this title battle, is there one final card to play in the decider?

Vettel may have the advantage and the best car, but Alonso has a bullet proof car and knows Red Bull have fears about their reliability. This is still very much open; it’s all to play for in Sao Paulo. 

all photo's from autosport.com