F1: Ferrari's fair win awakens championship

Going into the race, the last European leg of the championship for this year, the drivers' championship looked pretty much settled: in recent weeks, challengers had fallen away as Webber and Hamilton seemingly took out leases on the two top spots.

But Alonso took pole position on Saturday. And that really put the cat amongst the pigeons.

What also took everyone by surprise was that, alongside Alonso - and only 0.008 of a second behind him - was Jenson Button. Knowing that the Ferrari had more power, Button gambled on a super-low downforce setting so he could keep up with the Ferraris on the straights. The gamble was that Button, who likes his car planted in the corners and is often criticised for insisting on railway-like handling (compared with Hamilton's preferred "loose" set up which makes the car skittish) had to have a car that would be way too light for his taste in the corners.

But at Monza, several of the corners are high-speed. So long as Button could prevent his car taking a tangential line at, for example, Tamborelo, he'd be competitive.

Massa was more than two tenths behind.

But it was the pace, or lack of it, of the Red Bulls that was interesting: we've become used to seeing at least one Red Bull on pole position. Webber was 1.5 seconds away and Vettel, behind Hamilton, was a further 1.5 tenths behind. High in the surprise stakes - and destined to take a pivotal role in Sundays' race, was Hulkenberg in 8th. Schumacher, on a track that was for so long his home circuit during the Ferrari days (and even in the Benetton days, it was a local track for him) was a dismal 12th in qualifying, whipped - again - by Rosberg who qualified 7th.

Amongst the new teams, Lotus was the only one to make it into Q2 and both of their cars beat Liuzzi's Force India to secure those places. Yamamoto might be bringing more money to HRT than Chandok, and so securing a drive, but he was so far behind the rest of the field - almost six seconds of the pole time - that his continued inclusion is a mystery in terms of ability.

Come Sunday and Alonso flew away from pole as if jet propelled. Unfortunately for him, Button appeared to be rocket-driven and by the end of the first series of corners, Button had settled into a solid first place. Now Button's objective was to stay far enough ahead of Alonso so he could not get a tow down the straights and use the combination of slip-stream and extra power to take the lead. And that meant Button driving his car around corners in exactly the way he doesn't like doing - sideways, banging across the kerbs and generally being utterly aggressive.

Hamilton's the aggressive one in the McLaren team - and it showed. Going into T1, Hamilton edged his front wheels alongside Massa's rear wheels. Massa - fully entitled to do so, held his line: later he said he didn't even know Hamilton was there until the bump - and as Hamilton turned in, Massa drifted out. The hard bang on Hamilton's front right wheel seemed to have done nothing much except create a vibration. But on the next corner, as the right front loaded, the steering arm broke, leaving the wheel flapping about and the car making a bee-line over the gravel trap towards the barrier which, thankfully, it didn't quite hit. Furious with himself, Hamilton stomped into his motorhome and refused to come out until well after the race. When he did, still angry, Hamilton said " It was somehow my own mistake, as I wanted to position the car in a certain way and got too close to Massa, which led to our cars touching and my front wheel got damaged." A mea culpa from an F1 driver? Excellent. Well done, Lewis.

No apology from Hulkenberg who got in front of Webber - and then went just fast enough to prevent the repass. Webber tried to get the stewards to investigate a cross-kerb infraction but got the news from his pit that Hulkenberg was not going to let him pass. Webber spent the last half of the race in the younger driver's slipstream until finally muscling his way past in a spectacular and daring move at the chicane: vintage racing that looked desperate from outside the cockpit but was probably carefully considered and set up long before - certainly the execution suggested it was so.

The soft tyres were rather too good and none of the front runners wanted to change them. As the midfield and back-end changed, the hard tyres proved quicker - but only relative to the soft tyres on the same cars: the change did not increase the chances of any of the others to catch the Alonso, Button and Massa who were off on their own. Vettel wasn't far behind them with one lap to go - but only because he had not made his compulsory pit stop: when he did so, with one lap to go, he fell off to 28 seconds behind Alonso. The first three finished within 4.2 seconds of each other.

Seemingly Button's near-certain win was wasted by a poor pit-lane decision. Unless there is a problem with the car, it's really not the done thing to bring the leader in first: it's his job to react to the second-place car and to use at least the next lap after his rival pits to bang in fastest times. By bringing Button in first, that allowed Alonso to do a storming lap, make up the tiny margin that he was behind Button and, when Button came out of the pits, to be half-a-car length ahead. Although Button attacked from the moment he left the pit lane, he had cold front tyres, a car set up he didn't like (but can clearly drive fantastically well if he has to) and a very wide Ferrari driven by a very determined Alonso in front of him. That determined the final race order. After harassing Alonso for several laps, Button paced himself equally between Alonso and Massa. Being in the Ferrari's slipstream made the already nervous McLaren positively neurotic in corners and second's a lot better than parked in the gravel.

Schumacher pulled himself up to ninth: Rosberg was fifth.

The end result of Hamilton's exit, Webber's poor sowing and Button and Alonso storming to the front is that the Driver's championship is, once more, a five-way fight. A single win v a DNF is enough to put any one of the top five to the top of the table. Webber makes it back to the top with Hamilton five points behind him - they have 187 and 182 points respectively. But with Alonso, Button and Vettel on 166, 165 and 163, nothing is certain except even greater competition.

In the constructors' championship, Hamilton's DNF has put Red Bull on top with 350 points to McLaren's 347.

An interesting footnote: Rosberg now has 112 points. His team leader Schumacher has 46 - and Rosberg has out-qualified him on more than half this season's starts.

The race certainly showed up the difference between the front runners and the back of the pack with all the new teams finishing two laps down.