1Less than three hours after the start of the Australian Grand Prix, Kimi Raikkonen, a black beanie clamped to his head, was waving goodbye to the Lotus team and walking quickly away from the Albert Park paddock.
Typical Kimi; it was hard to believe he had just won the opening race of the season. Not for him basking in adulation despite the fact that this result had been something of a surprise. Not for Kimi the over-enthusiastic celebration and hyperbole about how difficult this race had been. Quite the opposite, in fact.
As Raikkonen had climbed the steps to the podium, he casually said to Martin Brundle (about to interview the first three finishers): ‘That was easy’. And, typical Kimi, he meant it. Not that such an apparent cruise had been on the cards from the moment Raikkonen had qualified seventh.
Down in the paddock, Eric Boullier was sensibly applying some realism to events on the track. ‘This is the first race of the season. And it’s been a bizarre weekend,’ said the Lotus boss. ‘We expected Red Bull to dominate.’
Raikkonen’s wooly-hatted protection against the cold gave a clue to this ‘bizarre weekend’; Sebastian Vettel, finishing third despite starting from pole, said everything about the 58-lap race being divorced from practice and a qualifying session turned on its head by rain. The weather had been so bad on Saturday afternoon that qualifying had to be completed on race morning, thereby adding even more unknowns for the teams as they tried to work out just how long the latest Pirelli tyres would last.
The only certainty was that the Supersoft was worth, at best, about eight laps, which was the downside to this tyre being one second a lap faster than the Medium. The question for the race was just how long would the harder tyre last? Would it be possible to get away with two stops rather than three? No one knew.
The leading cars had shed their Supersofts, as predicted, within the first 10 laps, although Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg stretched theirs to laps 13 and 14 respectively in the false hope of going for just one more stop. In the end, Rosberg continued the worrying unreliability seen in practice by stopping on track with an electrical problem and Hamilton considered himself fortunate to eventually finish fifth. Rosberg, for his part, took away encouragement from having been consistently on the pace throughout the dry and wet practice sessions.
Ferrari were the same – except the 2012 championship runners-up came away with an excellent result as Fernando Alonso finished second and an on-form Felipe Massa would have been higher than fourth had he not chosen to run a slightly different pit stop tactic (Massa having qualified and comfortably run ahead of his team-mate until that delayed second stop).
Like Vettel, Alonso had stopped three times but any hopes that the two-stopping Lotus would be hobbled by its tyres in the closing laps were dashed by Kimi setting fastest lap with two to go. Basically, Red Bull and Ferrari had been conservative while Lotus had been confident enough to take the two-stop risk.
On the other hand, Adrian Sutil was struggling with tyres, having adopted the opposite tactic by starting his Force India on the Mediums, leading the race twice but then dropping back dramatically when the final stint on the Supersoft gave him two quick laps and not much else. He finished seventh behind Mark Webber, hampered right from the start by clutch and KERS problems with his front-row Red Bull.
But the disaster of the weekend belonged to McLaren as they talked about a fundamental error with a 2013 car which, unlike the opposition, is revolutionary rather than evolutionary. A downbeat Button said he was lucky to come away with ninth place and Sergio Perez took no consolation from being 0.6 seconds away from a point for tenth place.
With only a week until the next round in Malaysia, there was no hope of McLaren finding a fix any time soon even though the heat of Sepang is likely to throw up a totally different set of problems after Boullier’s bizarre weekend.
