2009 F1 Review: Top 5 drives of the season

Dec. 27 (YF1) Daniel Chalmers gives his opinions on who produced the top 5 drives in a Grand prix during the 2009 season.

1. Giancarlo Fisichella – 2^nd place Belgium GP
At Spa the Force India VJM02 worked superbly, and was the strongest it had been all year. As Spa is a high speed circuit thus all the teams brought low downforce spec aero packages. Force India’s low downforce package was one of the best.

However that wasn’t the only reason why Fisichella finished 2^nd in this race.

Fisichella simply drove out of his skin all weekend long making the most of a track where drivers can still make a big difference. The Force India wasn’t actually the fastest car. Red Bull, Brawn GP, BMW, and Toyota were all quicker, but Fisichella made better use of his machinery.

Giancarlo’s team mate Adrian Sutil demonstrated this by having an average weekend in comparison qualifying 11^th, and not making any further progress in the race. Fisichella was 0.5 seconds faster than him throughout the weekend with the same car.

If it wasn’t for Kimi Raikkonen’s KERS, Fisichella would have won as he was around three tenths quicker than Kimi. Fisi was exposed to Kimi’s KERS in the run from La Source to Les Combes after the safety car period. Despite hounding Kimi thereafter there was simply no way past.

Nevertheless it was a great giant killing drive from Fisichella.

Just a shame that Fisichella decided to move to Ferrari, and produce drives that could have competed for the top 5 worst drives of the season.

2. Sebastien Vettel – 1^st in Chinese GP
Sebastien Vettel demonstrated again why he is one of F1’s star drivers. In a race that took place in torrential rain, along with standing water on the track, he crushed the opposition without putting a single foot wrong.

He had already done extremely well to get pole position in a challenging session for him. Due to a technical problem Vettel had to run as few laps as possible. This limited him to just one run in each segment of qualifying.

This put the young German under immense pressure but he still topped Q2 before ultimately taking pole position.

In the race itself his pace was just incredible. In the six laps that followed the opening period behind the safety car Vettel built up an incredible 11.2 second gap over team mate Mark Webber driving the same car. He was nearly 2.0 seconds quicker than anybody else in this period of the race.

After his final pit stop Button was just ahead of him but was yet to make his last visit to the pits. Vettel  quickly caught up with him, and despite being much heavier at this point he overtook him with ease. This just furthur demonstrated how incredible a drive this was.

By the end of the race only two drivers managed to finish within a minute of Vettel.

Vettel was just in a complete league of his own. This was a much better performance than his 2008 Monza victory with Toro Rosso. That victory had a lot to do Toro Rosso’s setup gamble that it would rain in the race.

3. Jenson Button – 1^st in Bahrain GP
Brawn had been easily the quickest car in Australia and Malaysia. However by the fourth race in Bahrain the others were already starting to close the gap quickly and Brawn’s advantage was disappearing fast.

The Brawn was also struggling with overheating due to the desert heat. The only way Button could push the car was if he was in clean air. If he was in the hot turbulent air of another car there would have no option but to back off, or risk an engine failure.

Jenson Button qualified 4th in amongst KERs cars, and up against the two Toyotas and Red Bull of Vettel who looked in much better shape.  Red Bull and Toyota were slightly quicker at this race. However Button got a decent start passing Vettel, and avoided being leapfrogged by the two KERs powered Ferrari cars.

Going into the second lap Button produced an extremely brave late braking move on Lewis Hamilton going into turn 1. That was his only chance to pass him and he took it. This put Button into clean air, and allowed him to keep in touch with the two Toyotas. Once the Toyotas made an early pit stop, and made a conservative tyre choice this allowed Jenson to take control of the race. Meanwhile Vettel couldn’t get past Hamilton. These two factors allowed Button to open up a comfortable cushion.

He was then able to maintain that gap ensuring that he didn’t need to push too hard bearing in mind the overheating issue.

Button crossed the line to brilliantly win a race he shouldn’t have been allowed to win. His win was set up by his brave overtaking move on Lewis Hamilton. Had he been stuck behind Hamilton as Vettel was he would have struggled to even make the podium.

4. Lewis Hamilton – 4^th in Australian GP (then disqualified due to lie-gate)
For arguably the first time in Hamilton’s career he turned up to a race track knowing he had next to no chance of winning. Even taking any points away looked unlikely. The weekend got off to a bad start after a reliability issue left him 15^th on the grid.

However despite a car with a severe lack of downforce, and terrible handling he drove with great spirit.

He executed a series of overtaking moves on cars which were quicker than his Mclaren. The cars he overtook included a Toro Rosso, Renault, Williams, and Toyota. The latter 3 were comfortably quicker than the Mclaren in that race. The Mclaren was between 1.5-2.0 seconds off the pace of the Brawns in Melbourne.

Hamilton did brilliantly to somehow drive a dog of a car into the top 4. It’s such a shame that Mclaren and Hamilton got themselves into such a mess afterwards in what became known as “lie-gate”.

Because of that, this exceptional drive will probably never be remembered. In the eyes of onlookers Australia will be remembered for “lie-gate”.

Thats a big shame as this performance was even better than those Hamilton delivered later in 2009 when the car became less of a dog.

5. Kamui Kobayashi – 6^th in Abu Dhabi GP
This was only Kobayashi’s second F1 race of his career, and it is safe to say that he was the star of the inaugural Abu Dhabi GP.

He drove as if he had been driving in the sport all his life. He was quick, aggressive, consistent and brave. He looked very assured and didn’t make any mistakes.

He had qualified 12^th and was set to stop only once in the race. He comfortably beat all the other one stopping drivers (which included Kimi Raikkonen). He even overtook the world champion. There were just centimetres between them down the long back straight, but Kobayashi completed the move very cleanly

Furthermore he also beat his much more experienced team mate of 216 races in Jarno Trulli.

During his first long stint he was even on target for a finish of as high as third. However he had to use the soft tyres in the 2^nd stint so it wasn’t possible. However 6^th was still a great result, and was within touching distance of Nick Heidfeld and Rubens Barrichello up the road.

His performance is even more remarkable due to the fact that the in-season ban on testing has been very damaging to other young drivers.

Kobayashi proved no matter what the rules are you can still succeed if you have the talent.

* Please note that these are Daniel Chalmer’s opinions and not necessarily the views of YallaF1.com

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