And then there were four.
Jenson Button claimed victory at Catalunya, his fourth out of five race this season, in a rather unconventional Spanish Grand Prix. The last eight pole sitters goes to win the race, but in a straight start-line-to-the-finish fashion. That did not happened to Button.
When the red lights went out, Button lost the lead to Barichello as Massa goes third and held Vattel and Webber behind him. A big crash at the back of the field saw Sutil, Buemi, Bourdais and Trulli got out of the race. Hamilton got off the track for a while but being a very lucky person, he got away from the third corner accident.
It all happened when Trulli, pushed out by Nico Rosberg hurriedly turn back onto the track and caused Sutil to hit him. That alone saw huge debris flying all over the third corner. Then comes Buemi, who, being a rookie and probably never before circumnavigate a big crash in a blink of an eye, virtually stopped on the track. And that caused his teammate to crashed behind him big time.
And being a defending world champion, Hamilton slows down and managed to not only avoid the collision but at the same time circumnavigate the debris on the track.
The Brawns opted for a three-stop strategy at first, since three-stop is the fastest way, but they changed it for Button in the first round of pit stop because they managed to conserve fuel during the six laps of safety car period. And that seal the win for Button instead for Barichello. He must be furious.
Massa defended third position like a true champion would, even after a wheel rim cover spun out of his left tyre. And even after the first pit stop where he and Vettel went in together and go out together in the same position.
In the process of holding Vettel behind him, Christian Horner deviced a different way to diffuse the bottleneck situation for Mark Webber. Webber was fuelled longer so that he will have extra laps when the second pit stop comes. And it worked. Webber stole third position after the second pit stop.
When we all believed that the race will be concluded as they were, something interesting happened. Massa's race engineer contacted him on the radio with an alarming situation - he don't have enough fuel to make it to the chequered flag! It happened to be in the second pit stop the pump didn't deliver enough fuel to his F60. And now the situation where we should be praising Ferrari for a leap of performance turned into a situation where we will be condemning them to the lack of scrutinity.
It's not the lacked of pace that hampered both Raikkonen and Massa. The former was due to electrical failure that shuts down his hydraulic on lap 18. Could be the engineers fault, could be yet another McLaren sabotage through its standardised ECU. The latter meanwhile was due to pure human mistake. In this case, you can sum up both cases as the lack of quality control.
Steve Slater, being a proud British mentioned that this would never happened under Ross Brawn's watch, and dare he say it - when Nigel Stepney was around. There's an air of truth in his view. Before the hoard of British came into Ferrari, even the genius of Jean Todt cannot turn it into a world championship winning team.
It was something imprinted into the Italian work culture. I'm not being racist, but I have the view that each nation and race are gifted with certain skills while the others are not. In the big picture, the key to the future is held by the united people of earth, to cancelled each other's weaknesses.
We need a British or two inside the Ferrari organization.
And these small things caused Massa precious points. He was forced to slow down his pace to conserve fuel, in the process have to let Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso passed him by. Vettel did it on lap 54 and then comes Alonso a few laps from home. A straight to the point solution. It could be even worse if the engineer did not detect it. It could be a catastrophy if Massa end up not having any points at all. He was forced to satisfy with three points, the same as Raikkonen. On the way back to the pit, he was stranded beside the track.
Heidfeld shows where BMW are in relative performance. He score two points, just ahead of Nico Rosberg. Kubica meanwhile finished eleventh, still searching for that few tenths that saw him fighting for the win in Australia earlier in the season.
Hamilton finishes outside of the points, sealing the fact that in the first round of upgrades McLaren are already fallen behind. I'm going to say this again - we could see the worst attempt at defending a World Championship yet.
Timo Glock, the last Toyota in contention did not finished in points either. One third of the diffuser gang, the TF1.09 clearly lack the pace in high speed corners of Catalunya. Trulli, lost the race in the third corner, means that Toyota came out of the Spanish Grand Prix empty-handed.
The next round will be the tight corners around Monte Carlo, Monaco - where aerodynamic and car balance is nothing and fuel load doesn't mean anything. The further up you are, the better you'll perform. Unless there's safety car period. Or rain. Or a big red Ferrari crash in your behind.
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