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Only Brawn and Button
After a second consecutive back-to-back victory - the third of the season - Brawn is running at a pace that is only matched in recent times by Ferrari's dominant 2004 season.
Ferrari scored 88 points in the first six races of the year. Brawn now has 86, but without the half-points Malaysian GP it would be ahead.
This table compares each team's season six races in:
|
|
Ferrari 2004 |
Brawn 2009 |
|
Wins |
5 |
5 |
|
Second places |
3 |
3 |
|
Third places |
1 |
1 |
|
Poles |
4 |
4 |
|
Fastest laps |
5 |
3 |
|
Doubles |
3 |
3 |
Jenson Button has now won five of the first six races of the season, a feat achieved only six times prior to 2009 (Jim Clark in 1965, Jackie Stewart in 1969, Nigel Mansell in 1992 and Michael Schumacher in 1994, 2002 and 2004). Each of them went on to win the championship in those seasons.
Button has now scored 51 points and no driver has ever scored 50 or more points in the first six races and not gone on to win the title. (Mansell, 56 in 1992, Schumacher, 56 in 1994 and Fernando Alonso, 54 in 2006).
Button is also the first driver to score three consecutive victories since Schumacher in 2006 (US to German GPs). He is only the second driver on the current grid to have won three straight races in his career, the other being Alonso who first achieved the feat in 2005 (Malaysia to San Marino) and then won four in a row in 2006 (Spain to Canada).
Qualifying notes
• At Barcelona two weeks ago there was the smallest margin of the year between the top 10 cars in Q2, 0.555s. In Monaco it was the opposite, with Kimi Raikkonen's time 1.065s quicker than Sebastien Buemi's, despite Monte Carlo being the shortest circuit on the calendar.
• Raikkonen was back on the front row for the first time since the 2008 Chinese Grand Prix. It was also Ferrari's first front row start since Felipe Massa's pole for last year's Brazilian GP.
• Heikki Kovalainen qualified in the top 10 for the first time this season.
• Kazuki Nakajima equalled his best ever grid slot of 10th, previously achieved in Singapore last season.
• Jarno Trulli failed to reach Q3 for the first time this year, posting his worst qualifying performance since the 2006 US GP (when he was 20th after a suspension problem).
• Giancarlo Fisichella made it through to Q2 for the first time this year, while Force India team-mate Adrian Sutil did the same for the first time in his career.
• Monaco was Nick Heidfeld's worst qualifying since the 2005 Spanish GP (when he was 17th). He has now failed to make the top 10 in four straight races, for the first time since 2005 (Canada to Great Britain).
• It was also Timo Glock's career worst qualifying session, the previous ones being in 2004 when he was 17th in Japan and Brazil for Jordan.
Race notes
• Ferrari posted the fastest lap of the race for the first time in 2009. It was the 219th for the team and the 12th for Massa.
• Fisichella finished in the top 10 for the first time since the 2007 Japanese GP (when he was 5th).
• Raikkonen scored his first podium of the year and took his career points total to 540, passing David Coulthard (535) for seventh place on the all-time list.
• Sebastian Vettel retired his Red Bull for the first time this year. The only team to get both cars home in every race so far is Brawn, which has finished on the podium in all six races.
• McLaren failed to score points in back-to-back races for the first time since the Spanish to European GPs of 2004.
