Here is the Barcelona thingie

Barcelona in the book and Vettel has made it four wins out of five this season, a dominance reminiscent of Schumacher at is best. Today he did not have it all his own way and worked hard to fight off a great effort by Lewis Hamilton.

Clearly the Red Bull is the class of the field, but McLaren can be encouraged by their showing and for a time Hamilton did something I don’t think anyone else has done this season and took the battle to Vettel. The Red Bull driver did what the greats do and responded with faster and faster laps in what turned out to be a great duel in an entertaining race.

The Red Bull car was at it’s best on the fast, sweeping parts of the track and able to pull out enough of a lead in the final corners of that Hamilton had no chance under braking into the first turn. It would seem that once we get past the lottery of Monaco the following two races in Montreal and Valencia could suit the Red Bulls very well.

Barcelona is not a track renown for it’s overtaking, and after the record number of on-track position changes in Turkey it was going to be interesting to see what the Drag-Reduction-System (DRS) did here.

DRS is complex, but essentially if the second driver is a second behind the leading driver at a certain point on the track (Activation Line) they are allowed to open up a rear flap, reduce their drag along a designated straight and gain a little speed to challenge for the corner.

In the second half of the race Hamilton was almost always within a second as they crossed the DRS activation line, by the time they went through the big sweeper onto the start-finish straight the gap was always too large for Hamilton to have a run on Vettel into the first corner.

While DRS was not as big a deal as it had been, the new Pirelli tyres were the dominant story and this led to a number of 3/4/5 pit stop strategies. As always this made for a very interesting race.

This is home turf for Fernando Alonso in the Ferrari. He was fourth on the grid and made a lightning start. Overtaking Hamilton with ease and taking a run down the inside at the two Red Bulls into the first turn. He gave absolutely everything on the start and it was fun to watch Alonso have a go at the Red Bull’s over the first 8 or 10 laps.

Alonso could not keep that sort of pace up for long and did not have a spare set of the faster soft Pirellis after being forced to use an extra set in qualifying. His tires were done by lap 10, the first of his four stops.

Button on the other hand did a great job with preserving his tires and stopped only three times. After a bad start Button was 10^th at the end of the first lap. His fight to get back to 3^rd was a great drive and his run at Alonso down the outside of turn ten to take third was just superb. Today a three-stop strategy looked like the right call, but such was the speed of the Red Bulls and McLarens that they were the only four cars not to be lapped.

In the standings Vettel has a 41-point lead over Hamilton, that’s a big lead, but there is a lot of racing still to go this year.

And as good as Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Buttons drives were (and they really were) I think the best performance came from Nick Heidfeld in the Renault. He had a big fire early on Saturday and never completed a flying lap in qualifying so was last on the grid. He finished a superb eighth, behind the two Mercedes’s drivers.

It was a fascinating race, next weekend is the race everyone should visit once, Monaco. It’s a special place and a total lottery. It seems the McLarens are good on the slow, more technical sections, could it be their turn? It’s a place that occasionally throws form out the window and as ever it will be fascinating and qualifying could be an exceptional battle around the streets of the principality as everyone looks for a clear track.