Alonso Wins Malaysian Grand Prix

After a rather disappointing qualifying session, Fernando Alonso has managed to win the 2012 Malaysian Grand Prix. It was a victory that not even the most passionate Ferrari fans believed in, since we all know that the Italian team hasn’t got a very good car this year, but even so the Spaniard managed to grab the victory today, keeping Sergio Perez from Sauber behind him.

Perez was undoubtedly the biggest surprise of the race, finishing in second place behind Alonso. He could have won at Sepang today but he made a minor error in the last part of the race when he was only at a second distance from Alonso. Up until then he had a great race, working his way up to the second place and getting closer and closer to Alonso. He had to settle for the second place although he was so close to win the race, a win that Sauber really needed since the last time they won was back in 2008 when Robert Kubica was the first to cross the finish line at the Canadian GP.

This second place obtained by Perez was a real surprise, a result obtained with a Sauber car that is powered by a Ferrari engine. Most likely, thanks to this result Perez will probably become a Ferrari driver next year, replacing Massa who has an awful start of the season, not managing to grab at least one point. Rumors are saying that he will leave Ferrari at the end of the season and most likely Perez will replace him.

Anyway, getting back to the race, there was a lot of rain at the beginning of it which lead to many changes. All cars started the race with intermediate tires but only after a few laps they switched to rain tires. After this, the safety car was deployed due to the reason that the rain got even more intense, leading to the interruption of the race for about an hour.

The two pilots who benefited the most from this were none other than Alonso and Perez who grabbed the first and second place of the race. They managed to do this after McLaren had some bad luck as Hamilton lost precious time when changing the tires, while his teammate Button had an incident with the HRT car driven by Karthikeyan. Button had to do a pit stop in order to change the nose of his car, losing lots of positions on the grid.

Hamilton managed to secure the third place, just like he did last week at the Australian GP. The drivers behind him were Vettel, Raikkonen and Webber, but Lewis had no problems maintaining his position. At the end of the race, on fourth came Webber, while in fifth place finished Raikkonen. Behind him came Bruno Senna from Williams while his teammate Maldonado was extremely close to finish in 10^th place but in the last lap he had an engine failure and he abandoned the race.

The current world champion Sebastian Vettel did not win any points today after he had a flat tire, while Force India had a very good race, grabbing the 7^th and 9^th position with Di Resta and Hulkenberg. Between them finished Vergne from Torro Rosso, while on the 10^th place came seven times world champion and veteran Michael Schumacher from Mercedes AMG. Schumi was again unlucky because in the first lap he had a collision with Romain Grosjean. He lost a lot of positions, ending up on the 15^th spot but later on he managed to grab the 10^th place at the end of the race.

These are the full results of the 2012 Malaysian GP:

POS	DRIVER	NATIONALITY	ENTRANT	LAPS	TIME/RETIRE
1.	Fernando Alonso	Spain	Ferrari	56	2h44m51.812
2.	Sergio Perez	Mexico	Sauber-Ferrari	56	2.263
3.	Lewis Hamilton	Britain	McLaren-Mercedes	56	14.591
4.	Mark Webber	Australia	Red Bull-Renault	56	17.688
5.	Kimi Raikkonen	Finland	Lotus-Renault	56	29.456
6.	Bruno Senna	Brazil	Williams-Renault	56	37.667
7.	Paul di Resta	Britain	Force India-Mercedes	56	44.412
8.	Jean-Eric Vergne	France	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	56	46.985
9.	Nico Hulkenberg	Germany	Force India-Mercedes	56	47.892
10.	Michael Schumacher	Germany	Mercedes GP	56	49.996
11.	Sebastian Vettel	Germany	Red Bull-Renault	56	1m15.527
12.	Daniel Ricciardo	Australia	Toro Rosso-Ferrari	56	1m16.828
13.	Nico Rosberg	Germany	Mercedes GP	56	1m18.593
14.	Jenson Button	Britain	McLaren-Mercedes	56	1m19.719
15.	Felipe Massa	Brazil	Ferrari	56	1m37.319
16.	Vitaly Petrov	Russia	Caterham-Renault	55	1 Lap
17.	Timo Glock	Germany	Marussia-Cosworth	55	1 Lap
18.	Heikki Kovalainen	Finland	Caterham-Renault	55	1 Lap
19.	Pastor Moldonado	Venezuela	Williams-Renault	54	Engine
20.	Charles Pic	France	Marussia-Cosworth	54	2 Laps
21.	Narain Karthikeyan	India	HRT-Cosworth	54	2 Laps
22.	Pedro de la Rosa	Spain	HRT-Cosworth	54	2 Laps
R	Kamui Kobayashi	Japan	Sauber-Ferrari	46
R	Romain Grosjean	France	Lotus-Renault	3	Spin

And here are the drivers’ standings after two races so far:

In the constructors’ championship, the standings are:

The third race of the season will be on April 15th when F1 will go to China for the 2012 UBS Chinese Grand Prix.

Post tags: Tags: alonso, f1, fernando alonso, Ferrari, formula-1, sepang