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Red 'Royal' Bull
By recording pole, fastest lap and finshing one-two, Red Bull posted a "Royal Flush" for the first time. Brawn has also achieve such a feat this year in Spain. In both cases, the dominant cars were also able to set the fastest laps in the race.
Red Bull's domination went further still however as the team also spent the entire race in the lead. If Mark Webber had qualified second (and he missed that only by 0.012s...) the team would have recorded an extraordinary achievement, putting both cars out front in qualifying, race, fastest laps and spending the entire race in the lead.
There are only 34 occurrences of such a domination in Formula 1 history, the last one being the 2008 French Grand Prix by Ferrari.
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Jenson Button struggles on the opening lap of the British Grand Prix © LAT |
Not exactly home sweet home
The British Grand Prix marked the first performance slump of the year for championship leader Jenson Button. It was his:
• Worst starting position of the season with sixth - his previous lowest was the fifth place in China.
• First time this season that Jenson didn't climb on the podium nor complete at least one lap in the lead. The seven-race podium streak recorded since Australia is Jenson's personal best.
• It was also the first time this season that the Brawn BGP 001 didn't lead the race.
Time goes by for Nick
The British Grand Prix saw Nick Heidfeld match Martin Brundle's tally of race presences without a win - 158. Andrea de Cesaris leads the winless chart with 208 starts without a victory.
Great Britain qualifying notes
• Sebastian Vettel scored his fourth career pole, the third for Red Bull. With Mark Webber in third, Red Bull repeated the positions they obtained in the Chinese Grand Prix, thus equaling the best result ever for the team.
• Both Red Bulls dipped under the previous best lap recorded in Silverstone: Sebastian Vettel now holds the record with 1n18.119s, his team-mate posted 1m18.209s. The previous best was recorded by Kimi Raikkonen in a McLaren during the second qualifying session of the 2004 event with 1m18.233s.
• Rubens Barrichello recorded his 32nd front row start. He hadn't hit the front since the opening race in Melbourne.
• Kazuki Nakajima celebrated his best qualifying performance in F1 with fifth on the grid. The Japanese was able to beat his team-mate Nico Rosberg in qualifying for the first time this year.
• The McLarens were not present on the top-10 grid spots in the British Grand Prix for the first time since 1983, when Niki Lauda was 15th and John Watson 24th. Heikki Kovalainen was thirteenth and Lewis Hamilton nineteenth.
Riccardo Patrese (Williams FW14) won the 1991 Grand Prix of Portugal at Estoril from pole © LAT |
Great Britain race notes
• Sebastian Vettel broke the race distance record at Silverstone, winning at in average speed of 232.773 km/h. The previous record was set in 2007 by Kimi Raikkonen at 222.629 km/h.That year the race featured only 59 laps due to a double formation lap. This year's classification taken at the 59th lap shows that Vettel improved Raikkonen's time by twenty seconds (1h21m23.941s vs 1h21m43.074s).
• Mark Webber equalled his best result - a second place - for the third time in his career.
• For the sixth time out of eight races the win was achieved from pole position, if the trend remains the same, there is a chance of this becoming an all-time season record. Now the percentage of races won from pole is at 75%, exactly the same recorded in 1991, when at the end of the year the poles turned into wins were twelve out of sixteen.
• Fernando Alonso finished the race a lapped runner for the first time this season. Jenson Button is now the only driver who has completed all the laps so far.
• It was the fourth straight race without points for McLaren. This hasn't happened since the last race of the 1980 season and the first three races in 1981. A fifth pointless race would move the search bar back two more years to 1978, when McLaren didn't score from the Brazilian to the Belgian Grand Prix. That is the second-worst sequence for the British team, their worst one was recorded in 1971 - six straight races outside the points from Netherlands to Italy (1966 and 1967 are not considered because McLaren didn't take part in all the races).
