Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

Kimi Räikkönen & Sebastian Vettel

sunnuntai 8. toukokuuta 2011

Turkish GP: Vettel completely untouchable!

There was a lot of very close wheel-to-wheel battle at Istanbul Park today but no real battle for P1 at any stage of the race! The super fast German Red Bull driver was totally out of reach for everybody else already from the start! I´m not sure if the word dominant describes well enough the driving of Sebastian Vettel today... I mean he was totally in the class of his own!

However we saw a thrilling race today. Nico did an excellent job by overtaking Webber at the start but the pace of Mercedes GP just wasn´t good enough so that Nico would have been able to fight for the podium finish... What I found slightly surprising was the pace of the Ferraris or actually meaning Alonso... Alonso´s performance was excellent today! It seemed like Ferrari would have been on another planet today if compared to yesterday´s qualifying... Very impressive driving from Alonso and no mistakes.

Overtaking in Turkey seemed almost too easy due to the DRS! It seemed to be more like a rule than an exception that you could overtake the driver ahead of you when coming to the DRS zone. But in my opinion it made the race very eventful and in addition to that, the circumstances were the same for everybody. The battle between the McLaren team-mates or between Alonso and Webber was extremely intense and fun to watch!

Webber did an outstanding job by confirming the one-two finish for Red Bull by taking the 2nd place! I´m sure Hamilton would have been there to fight for the podium, too without the problems at the pit stop... Strategy issues played a role today aswell. Button pitted only three times while the other top drivers had a four-stop strategy. Red Bull didn´t repeat the mistake they did in China but Vettel also drove to the pits after Alonso had made his fourth stop. Excellent job from the Red Bull team!

Vettel has now extended his lead to 34 points which is undoubtedly impressive indeed. The gap to his contenders seems huge if we think about the previous season when the biggest gap between the leader and the 2nd guy was only 14 points! But like Vettel himself says, there has been only 4 races this far and 15 to go so things can change very rapidly... But for now I want to forget about all the upcoming races and enjoy the momentum =)

Enjoying Vettel´s victorious start to the season I just can´t help thinking, which are the key factors that make Vettel so untouchable at the moment. Obviously the man has learnt from his mistakes and matured despite his young age. His team-mate Webber is also a very experienced driver and still there are tenths separating the men at qualifying... Where do those tenths come from? Vettel has extremely strong self-confidence at the moment but I´d imagine that it would be easy to start taking the victories for granted... If happening so things can change very rapidly. Vettel seems to be a guy who has his feet firmly on the ground and I certainly hope that he won´t lose that touch during the season!

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