F1: Sebastian Vettel takes victory in Italy while Lewis Hamilton leaves disappointed

Hamilton was expecting to stop just once in Italy, and would have been expecting to stop later than the cars that started ahead of him on the grid given he was starting on the prime tyre, while all the cars ahead of him, with the exception of Raikkonen, started on options. As things turned out, Hamilton was in the pits on lap 13 after the team detected a slow puncture. This forced the Mercedes driver onto a two stop strategy.

If this wasn’t bad enough, Hamilton also had to contend with a broken radio throughout the race. Indeed, Hamilton would have stopped even earlier if he’d heard his team calling him into the pits on lap 11. Hamilton said that the absence of his team radio was “almost like driving blind”, going on to elaborate by saying “you just don’t know where people are, when to pit, when you’ve got to push, when you’ve got to save tyres… you’ve just got to manage it yourself and hope for the best”.

Despite this handicap, though, he drove a brilliant race, pulling off a number of outstanding passes, including a couple of brilliant passes through Curva Grande, including one on Raikkonen to take 11^th place on lap 49.

Another couple of laps and he might have been able to negotiate his way ahead of the second Lotus of Romain Grosjean and the Toro Rosso of Daniel Ricciardo, who finished just 0.4 and 1.2 seconds ahead of the Englishman respectively.

Had it not been for Hamilton’s exciting charge back from around 17^th place after his first pit stop, we would probably have had a dull and disappointing race. The rain that threatened ahead of the start never materialised and neither did any sort of challenge to Vettel who, despite some concerns about his gearbox and that of his team-mate Mark Webber, took a customarily dominant victory.

Alonso drove a solid race to take second place, providing some excitement himself along the way with a brilliant pass on Webber on lap three, but he was never in a position to challenge Vettel. Unless there’s a big change-a-round in fortunes, it’s looking like it could be a similar story in the hunt for the world drivers’ championship. Vettel’s position seems to strengthen by the race and while Alonso does all he can to challenge the Ferrari just doesn’t look to be able to compete with the Red Bull as things currently stand.

Ferrari can though, take comfort in the fact that they have reclaimed second place in the world constructors’ championship from Mercedes with Alonso’s second place being complimented by a fourth place finish for his Brazilian team-mate Felipe Massa, while Mercedes could only manage sixth for Nico Rosberg and Hamilton’s ninth place finish.

This will be scant consolation for Alonso, though. With seven races to go the championship it’s looking like we’re likely to see the Prancing Horse beaten by the rampaging Red Bull yet again.