Martin Brundle on Jenson Button's fine win in Hungary
Page last updated at 13:25 GMT, Monday, 1 August 2011 14:25 UK
By Martin Brundle
BBC F1 commentator
The 106-minute 70-lap Hungarian Grand Prix was one of the most challenging races I have had to commentate on.
With frantic action all through the field from start to finish, differing tyre strategies among the front runners, a rain shower in the latter stages ensuring a further departure in strategy as Lewis Hamilton and Mark Webber elected for intermediate tyres, a record 88 pit stops, and countless overtakes, it was certainly full on.
At one point, every time I called one McLaren driver in the lead, the next camera shot showed the other leading. Somehow they never made contact.
But it was a walk in the park for the boy David Coulthard and me in the commentary box compared to trying to keep a Formula 1 car on the asphalt and pointing in the right direction on what was clearly a treacherously slippery surface.
They all started on a damp track on intermediate tyres and there were spectacular power slides and numerous off-track excursions as the drivers attempted to apply 750bhp to the glassy surface and frequently failed.
From the start the Red Bull cars did not appear to have the grip of the McLarens. Ferrari looked strong despite ordinary starts and an overly cautious first few corners. The fast-starting Mercedes were soon demoted, and the fun began.
There was constant side by side action and supreme skills in wheel-to-wheel combat.
Once in the lead Hamilton quickly built a margin to Sebastian Vettel's Red Bull but soon enough the Englishman's 'super-soft' tyres were complaining at the pace. Still, all seemed fine when pitting for a brand new fresh set.
At Hamilton's third stop on lap 40, Hamilton's car was again fitted with a third set of 'super-softs'. This was the first and most powerful of three factors which would lose him the race and demote him to an eventual fourth place.
The second error was that, having spun when the rain shower arrived, he simply flicked the car round to continue in front of Paul di Resta, the driver managed by Hamilton's father Anthony, forcing the Scot off the road briefly.
The stewards decided this warranted a drive-through penalty, a tough decision but on reflection and after watching it again a couple of times, the right call.
Before taking the penalty, Hamilton elected, like Webber, to go back onto intermediate tyres to cope with the light rain. Almost immediately it started to dry and he was left to fight with and eventually beat the Australian.
For Jenson Button on the other hand, everything played out beautifully.
A much better qualifying had put him in the hunt at the front. On the third stop the team had fitted the harder 'soft' tyre intending to run to the end, primarily to cover Webber and Vettel who had done the same thing. Even he initially thought that might be wrong.
With the constant change of position with his team-mate, and when running behind him in the rain shower, Button was instructed to pit behind Hamilton and queue for intermediates.
He elected not to and it won him the race when the track dried. Indeed, those few damp laps would help ensure his tyres were fine until the end of the race to secure his 11th career victory at the track where he won his first in similar conditions five years ago.
Button said in the news conference that he appears to like those track conditions but he has no idea why. It was a record 10th victory for McLaren at this venue.
Fernando Alonso once again doggedly brought the Ferrari home in third despite going off the track a few times. But in the midst of all the McLaren action, almost unnoticed, Vettel leapfrogged to second place.
On the back of two non-finishes for Button, from a championship perspective, if anybody was to beat Vettel then Button would be his favourite person to do that.
Vettel now has an 85-point lead with a maximum of 200 on the table in the remaining eight races.
Webber finished fifth, and was big enough to say that he made some ultimately bad decisions, or 'rolled the dice' in his words, and it didn't pay off. He's having that kind of season.
A great drive from Di Resta to a career-best seventh place meant that for the second consecutive Sunday a Force India had beaten Nico Rosberg's Mercedes fair and square.
Indeed on this occasion so did Sebastien Buemi's Toro Rosso. For the fifth consecutive race a driver who failed to make it out of 'qualifying one' has scored points.
The scariest thing all day was Nick Heidfeld's Renault engine blowing up after a 6.5-second pit stop which also finished off the front exit exhaust system on the left hand side.
The car caught fire and was parked on the pit exit road. The compressed air bottle which feeds the valve system exploded and a marshal's leg took a fair whack. Then they towed it backwards into the pit lane.
I often say there's too much health and safety applied to decisions, and everything turned out sort of fine, but I think I would have bottled it and sent the safety car into action.
The fastest lap of the race was set by sixth-placed man Felipe Massa despite having damaged a rear wing end-fence against the barriers early on. His race engineer Rob Smedley suggested that maybe Massa had not extracted the maximum out of his car at other points of the race.
The summer holiday curfew means that teams must choose two of the next three weeks to close down all activity for a well earned break before the Belgian Grand Prix in a month's time.
Credit: BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)
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