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Newly-crowned world champion Sebastian Vettel has won his 10th grand prix of
the season, after claiming the lead on the opening lap from his grid
position of second place and using the correct pit stop strategy to maintain
his advantage. He now has the
chance to equal Michael Schumacher’s record of 13 wins in one season. With
Vettel’s team mate Mark Webber finishing third, Red Bull Racing has sealed
the manufacturers’ championship for the second year in a row – taking its
25th win at the same time.
The Korean Grand Prix weekend got off to a wet start on Friday, meaning that
the teams only had one hour of dry running on Saturday morning to assess the
performance of the Pirelli P Zero slick tyres on different fuel loads before
qualifying and the race. This meant that the teams still had many unanswered
questions as they lined up on the grid for the very first start in Korea
under dry conditions: the inaugural race last year started behind the safety
car.
The Red Bull Racing duo of Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber adopted an
unusual strategy during qualifying by running exclusively on the P Zero Red
supersoft tyres in order to save the P Zero Yellow soft tyres for the race.
By contrast, McLaren and Ferrari opted to save as many sets of the P Zero
Red supersoft tyres as possible. All the drivers who finished the race
stopped twice, with the exception of the Sauber duo of Kamui Kobayashi and
Sergio Perez, as well as HRT’s Vitantonio Liuzzi, who all stopped three
times.
Vettel however used the supersoft tyre for his first two stints before
taking the soft tyre for the final stint, meaning that he did not need to
use his full allocation of tyres to win the race by 12.0s. Webber finished
third after a race-long battle with McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton, who qualified
on pole for the first time this year and finished second: his first podium
since winning the German Grand Prix this year. Positions two to five in
Korea were covered by just four seconds at the end, with Toro Rosso’s Jaime
Alguersuari equalling his best career result of seventh place. The Spaniard
used two stints on the supersoft tyre and a final longer stint on the softs:
a similar strategy to Vettel.
Pirelli’s motorsport director Paul Hembery commented: “Although we
deliberately opted for a bold tyre choice at this race, and the teams had
little data to go on due to the weather on Friday, we immediately saw the
supersoft tyre lasting for more than 10 laps at the beginning of the race on
full fuel and the soft tyre for more than 20 laps. It was clear that the
track had evolved a lot in a short space of time, and we knew straight from
the first round of stops that we were now looking at a two-stop strategy,
which was certainly at the lower end of our expectations. There were a
number of different tyre strategies at work, but in the end the drivers kept
up a very good pace on both compounds – with Vettel setting the fastest lap
of the race on the final lap with the soft tyres – despite some people
predicting four stops or more and significant degradation before the grand
prix started. Finally, I’d like to congratulate Red Bull Racing for taking
the constructors’ championship once more in what has been a remarkable
season for them.”
The Korean Grand Prix marked the final appearance for Pirelli’s P Zero Red
supersoft tyres this year, having also been used in Monaco, Canada, Hungary
and Singapore. The remaining three races will all use a combination of the
soft and medium P Zero compounds. |
