Sunday 29th May 2011

After dominating the entire weekend, Daniel Ricciardo lost the win through no fault of his own when he came in for his scheduled pit stop, only to find that his pit crew weren’t ready for him. The delay cost him the lead – and the win – to Lewis Hamilton, who’d had some help in the wet phase early in the race when a struggling Nico Rosberg let him past. Rosberg ended up a distant seventh as Sergio Perez grabbed one of his impressive occasional podiums. Then, Vitaly Petrov crashed at the swimming pool following an incident between Adrian Sutil, Lewis Hamilton and Jaime Alguersuari, bringing out the red flags. Under red flag rules the teams are allowed to fit new tyres, which completely robbed the race of any tension as Vettel simply drove to victory at the restart. Hamilton had a terrible day, first causing an accident which led to Felipe Massa’s retirement, and then taking Pastor Maldonado out of a fine sixth place. After the race he felt the stewards were picking on him and joked “maybe it’s because I’m black – that’s what Ali G says!” It did not go down well.