Webber revels in red letter day as Hamilton is left to rue his misfortune

Unless you were one of the drivers left trailing in his wake for 66 laps, you needed all the Red Bull you could drink here yesterday to stay alert as Mark Webber went walkabout. The Australian left his rivals to find their own way home from the outback as he led from start to finish here.

All the rain dances from optimistic rivals went unacknowledged by the weather gods, and thus their only hope was that Red Bull might bring about their own downfall. With only one previous victory from four races, that was a possibility. But not, it turned out, for Webber, who finished ahead of Fernando Alonso and team-mate Sebastian Vettel. Lewis Hamilton was on course for second until forced out in the closing stages.

Webber won the drag race to the first corner – “a crucial part because there were a lot of very quick cars behind us with better top speed, and it all gets a bit tight down there,” he said – and after that all he had to do was control the race on a day when Hamilton again staked a claim to being the spiritual heir to the magnificent devil-may-care legacy of the late Gilles Villeneuve, and Vettel struggled with a car that ran nothing like as perfectly as his team-mate’s.

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