Alonso wins dramatic rain-hit Malaysian GP
From F1 Special Correspondent/ Scorp News
Sepang, 25 March 2012: A jubilant Fernando Alonso brought a surprise victory for Ferrari as he managed to keep at bay Sergio Perez of Sauber to win the Petronas Malaysian Grand Prix and lead the drivers’ championship of the 2012 Formula One World Championship at the Sepang International Circuit here on Sunday.
It was another disappointing race for McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton, who finished third for the second consecutive race after starting on pole but he feels it was the best result under the circumstances. Mark Webber, Kimi Raikkonen and Bruno Senna finished in that order before Paul di Resta in the 7th and Nico Hulkenberg in the 9th made it a double finish for Force India in points. J Vergne came 8th while Michael Schumacher took the last point for Mercedes AMG Petronas team.
When asked if it was a surprise, Fernando, who won the third title at Sepang with three different teams said: Definitely it was a big surprise to win today. We were competitive neither here nor in Australia. Our goal for this first race is to score as many points as possible. But today we did 25 so it’s an unbelievable result, so great job from the team. It’s a tough time for us at the moment but this Sunday we will remember.’’
Meanwhile the Sauber team was celebrating a great moment and when Sergio was pushing in the last few laps to go for a victory, the team advised him to not to lose any points. “We are very happy and the team is celebrating after the second place in a very difficult race. He has the potential and is the driver to watch,’’ said Monisha Kaltenborn, the Indian-origin CEO of Sauber team about Sergio, a Ferrari Academy product.
Sergio Perez said: “It is a great day for me. The team did a very good job and I feel very happy for them. It is a really nice feeling to have been on the podium here, but I think victory was also within reach. Twice in the race I was catching Fernando (Alonso). On the final stint, when I was on the hard tyre compound, my tyres had degraded quite a lot. It wasn’t easy and I went wide and touched a curb. I actually was lucky not to go off. Before that Fernando had just pitted on the perfect lap for dry tyres, just one lap before me, and I lost a bit of ground to him. It was very difficult to make the right calls today and I want to thank my team. They always called me in at the right time, the first stop after lap one was especially important and it was also good to take the hard compound in the end, as the medium compound was not working too well for us. It is only our second race in 2012 and I think we have a great season ahead of us. I knew we had potential to fight today, our car is not far away from the top cars and a good crew and a driver can also make a difference in such conditions.”
Lewis Hamilton of McLaren managed to hide his disappointment and congratulate the winner: “This was a tough but fascinating race. Firstly, I want to offer my congratulations to Fernando [Alonso] and Sergio [Perez]. They both drove great races and did a fantastic job,’’ said Hamilton.
“It was pretty eventful race: it was difficult trying to judge the best time to change from Extreme Wets to Intermediates, and we were probably a little late on that. Today wasn’t perfect – making the call for slicks is always a risk, and the others went a bit earlier than us. In general, we lost some time in the pitstops and I was pushed out of the fight somewhat. But, all in all, it’s been a positive weekend and I’m not too frustrated. My aim for this season was always to be consistent – I did it in 2007 so I’m trying to repeat that,’’ concluded Hamilton.
When queried about the incident with Narain, last week’s winner at Melbourne, Jenson Button said: “Today was a pretty difficult day; pretty much everything that could have gone wrong in the race did go wrong. A lot of my issues were brought on when I wiped my front wing off at the start: I locked up the rears, couldn’t slow the car down and hit Karthikeyan, which was a bit frustrating. So I had to pit for a new nose, and that was pretty much it.’’
Kobayashi of Sauber and Grosjean of Lotus F1 team failed to finish while Kimi Raikkonen did the fastest lap at 1:40.722. The next race will be at Shanghai, China on April 25.
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