pasta_maldonado wrote:Felipe Massa for being surprisingly competitive. Would have nominated the finger but it was half expected for that jammy sod to get a decent result.
It was certainly expected given that Vettel was openly taking about his strategy before the race by stopping as late as possible, so it was hardly improbable in that sense.
I'd have to agree with nominating Massa for first choice - before this race, quite a few people were questioning whether he could make his way into the points, but he was harrying Alonso quite hard in qualifying and the early stages of the race and putting Hamilton under considerable pressure too. To finish six seconds off the lead at a venue that rewards driver skill, and five behind Alonso, when you've been facing barrages of criticism looks like a pretty handy riposte to your critics.
For the second nomination, I guess that Heikki would be worth nominating - he did kind of spoil it towards the end there by banging his nose (he might have had a chance to get Vergne without that), but to hold on for so long on merit was impressive (in the opening stages of the race when everybody was on high fuel, Heikki was actually fairly competitive against the Toro Rosso drivers - it just seems to be on lower fuel that they struggle more).
For honourable mentions, I guess that the two Force India drivers did a pretty respectable job (particularly Di Resta managing to work his way past Hulkenberg, whilst the latter did manage a nice opportunistic pass on Kimi when he was held up briefly by Perez). They might not have the same points haul as either Sauber or Williams, but Force India are still picking up a fairly steady trickle of points (to the extent that, if they manage to keep this up over the year, they might yet claw their way ahead of Sauber and Williams).
Vergne, too, was putting in a quite respectable performance, right up until the team switched him over to inters (a nice idea, but they should have known that the track wasn't wet enough from what happened on Thursday, where the intermediate tyres were torn to shreds pretty quickly in those sorts of conditions).
The pace of the Caterham was genuine and Button can't pass for shite. As soon as Button was out of the way, Perez muscled past in ONE LAP compared to the 70-odd it couldn't take Button. 
