Red Bull’s Sebestian Vettel registered his second successive triumph in this year’s Formula One at the Bahrain Grand Prix with a dominant drive to the flag set up during the opening two laps of an awe-inspiring race.
Mark Webber, in the meantime, completed his two-hundredth grand prix in seventh position after narrowly missing out on fifth because of vanishing tires during the concluding laps.
Commencing from second, Vettel was trapped into turn one by 3rd on the network Fernando Alonso. Vettel didn’t take the loss lying down.
The next goal was pole champion and race head Nico Rosberg. The duo contended via the next round however again Sebestian squeezed past the Mercedes driver down the inside on the exit of turn four. After that, it was all about ramping up a gap and handling the race. By the end of his second spell, the defending champ had established an adequate pad to stop on lap 25 and appear in the front by an easy margin.
Lotus’ Kimi Raikkonen, functioning a two-stop approach, temporarily helpless during the last third of the contest however Sebestian was always up to pace and handled the gap in the closing phases to end 9.111 seconds clear of the Finn. Raikkonen’s Lotus teammate Romain Grosjean ended 3rd.
“It was really fun at the start with some very tight wheel to wheel racing,” said Sebastian afterwards. “At the start you don’t know if you will be fast or not, as everybody is a bit all over the place, comprising yourself! It’s significant to get to the lead; we witnessed at the final race that if you get stuck behind someone then it does have an impact on tire wear and at present it was significant to take advantage of the tires we had saved from qualifying yesterday.
“I love to be in clean air, so I was pushing hard to gain entry in the lead and, with the pace we had mid-race, it was pretty easy today,” he added. “Well done to the whole group, to everybody here, to the factory in the backdrop and particularly to those who were figuring out on the strategy at the moment; it functioned just as we anticipated, so we obviously got the numbers right.”