F1: Korea shines despite rain

Rivers of mud, lakes on straights, concrete areas less than 24 hours old to reduce the dust carried onto the track, a safety car going so slowly it looked like it was parked, fears that the safety car would run out of fuel during its extra-long stint leading the procession of not-racing cars around the track, cars slithering as they tried to get some - any - heat into their tyres but going so slowly that their downforce didn't work and their extreme wets could not clear the water from beneath them, spectators lined up in the road for several kilometres - buses and cars - trying to get into the circuit an hour after the official start time....

The race had started ten minutes late behind the safety car. After three laps, the race was halted. Because the timing beam is before the place where the front cars line up on the grid, officially four laps were completed. that left 51. If 42 laps (75%) could be run then full points would be awarded. The race having started (albeit artificially) if less than 75% was run, it would be half-points.

As the cars sat in the pouring rain, the fastest vehicles on the track were Hyundai street sweepers, brushing some of the water and mud to hopefully go to the outside of the kerbs.

This was the reality of the Korean Grand Prix at 16:30 local time - an hour and a half after the official start time and therefore at about the time that the race should have been coming to a thrilling climax.

Instead, the drivers that would benefit from the race being called off were sending messages back to their pit - monitored by Charlie Whiting of the FIA and the man responsible, ultimately, for deciding if conditions were too dangerous to race - saying that conditions were awful. Those who needed to get points - in particular Lewis Hamilton - was saying that it was fine and that it was almost dry enough for intermediate tyres.

Eventually, the race got started. For the first time this year, we saw a flash of the old Michael Schumacher (or, rather, the brilliant rather than the bad MS). He had used the laps behind the safety car to test the limits of adhesion at specific overtaking points. He had slipped off but within controlled limits. And as the race proper started, he was the only driver who knew exactly where to place his car to make up places.

Soon after the restart, Mark Webber - who somehow ended up without a flight home and travelled to Kuala Lumpur with Lotus on an AirAsia plane, staying overnight before picking up an onward flight - ran onto a kerb, straightened the car, pressed the throttle very gently - and spun. With no grip, the car hit the wall, bounced across the track and collected Nico Rosberg who, despite taking to the grass to try to avoid Webber, watched bits knocked off his car and slithered into retirement.

If Rosberg was unlucky, Hamilton was lucky: Rosberg had passed him shortly before. Hamilton had slipped back a little out of the spray. Had he still been in front of Rosberg, it's likely he would have been in the middle of Webber's accident.

Button's tyres wore very quickly. All weekend he complained that the handling of the car was poor. Even under the safety car, he could not get the car to go where he pointed it: "every time I braked for a corner, I went straight on because I couldn’t stop the car." As speeds picked up, his extreme wets simply shredded as the car moved around. Hamilton, usually the harder on his tyres, had no such problems. Eventually, with his tyres almost treadless, Button pitted - only to come out behind the midfield runners who, due to attrition, were now running at the back. He was unable to overtake them. He got mugged by Sutil (who mugged several others until running into Kobayashi and later admitting that his daredevil drive was in part due to the fact that the brakes were not working properly and he couldn't slow down even if he wanted to. That cost him a five place penalty in Brazil.)

Button's race can best be summed up by his placing: 12th and just over a second ahead of the Lotus of Kovalainen. That, however, was after Kovalainen had suffered a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane. If not for that, the lotus would have been about 14 seconds ahead of the McLaren. For Button, the day will have felt like deja vu for the dark days at Honda.

So, all go for Vettel? Nope. His engine let go in a spectacular fashion: by now i's a bag of bits if Red Bull have been able to find all the bits. In the rain and the spray, Vettel's dash for an extinguisher and blowing foam all over the not-so-shiny bits at the back of the car went almost un-noticed.

That left Alonso leading, Hamilton tracking him and Massa to inherit the final podium position.

Effectively, the result puts paid to Button's chances of retaining his championship. To say that it has rained on his parade is no understatement. Now he needs to win the final two races and his competitors need one or, in some cases, two DNFs (or nil point finishes) for him to win. " To win this championship, I’ll now have to rely on the cars in front of me failing," he said after the race.

The final race finish time was just a few minutes under the two hour maximum: it transpired that those who read the rules to say that the time limit is two hours racing (including safety car periods) were correct. By that time, it was almost dark. By the time the podium celebrations were over, the main straight was in total darkness except for the lights in the grandstands.

The radio traffic towards the end of the race was all about the light: some thought it was too dark; Hamilton argued that it was "fine." After the race, he changed his tune: "It was pitch black, I couldn’t see much."

Massa summed up the scale of the problems: it was so dark outside the car that he was dazzled by the lights on the steering wheel display so he found it difficult to see down the front of the car.

Memo to the designers of the world's most expensive cars: install a dimmer switch on the dashboard lights. Even Tata's Nano has one of those!

So, did the first Korean Grands Prix live up to expectations? Well, it was certainly interesting; there were some exciting moments. But it's interest largely related to the impact on the title race not as an event in itself.

And there were some edge-of-the-seat moments. Perhaps a replay of the actual racing part of the four-hour marathon that was the entire race will provide more excitement when not starting from a position of total boredom and frustration first at the delay and then at the long safety car period.

For sure, simply getting the race to the end was a huge achievement and the organisers should be proud of that.

But the event was spoiled not by the rain - which was for almost the whole time not monsoon-style heavy - but because the track surface did not drain away the water that landed. Off the racing line, pools of water still stood at the end of the race.

That's in part because the surface is so new. But it's also because the track is too flat. That's something that it will be difficult to do anything about without major reconstruction and so it looks as if the Korean race will be subject to the whims of the weather for the next seven years unless someone is prepared to inject a substantial amount of remedial-works money. F1 has often run in conditions of similar - and even worse - rain. But it can't run in a swimming pool.