It will be a hot race around the 14-turn, 2.7-mile Hungaroring, a slow layout that should suit Jenson Button’s Brawn. They say improvements to the car will be worth three-tenths of a second per lap but free practice and qualifying suggest this hasn’t translated to the track. Rubens Barrichello failed to make the top 10 and Button starts eighth after car problems restricted him to one final qualifying attempt.
Button has to turn the tables on Red Bull here. He said that if he finished third to them for the rest of the year his points lead would not be enough to secure the drivers’ championship. That indicates he is looking over his shoulder despite a 21-point lead, with 80 points remaining to be won. He needs to stop the rot, with the Red Bull drivers his only title rivals. He’s 24 points clear of teammate Barrichello and 46 ahead of Ferrari’s Felipe Massa, who is fifth in the title hunt.
Lewis Hamilton could yet play a big role in Button’s challenge. He showed in Germany that the revised McLaren was competitive. If he can begin winning races in the second half of the season, that would play perfectly for Button because it would stop the Red Bulls scoring maximum points.
But if the Red Bull remains the form car, Hamilton’s new-found speed can only hurt Button, by dropping in the gap and distancing Button from his main rivals. Hamilton would surely have done so at the Nurburgring without his puncture.
Button starts today behind the Red Bulls, a Renault, a Williams, a Ferrari and two McLarens. The psychology of Hamilton helping or hindering Button’s world title dream is fascinating. This is Button’s big chance after all those years of sub-standard cars and he cannot rely again on having the level of technical and speed advantage married to impeccable reliability he has enjoyed in the first half of the season.
Button will take heart from the fact that Red Bull have repeatedly said their drivers are free to race, which means they will continue to take points off each other. That’s an interesting scenario given there are only 1.5 points between Vettel and Webber.
When you have teammates competing with each other for the championship it alters the dynamics and politics of the team. If you are in a super- fast car and your main rival on the other side of the garage is standing between you and a world title, the only way you can beat him is by playing smarter. That means withholding tactics and information you would normally share. The two “halves” of the garage contain many of the same people in terms of logistics, pit crew and technical support, so it’s purely a direct competition between the two drivers and their respective engineers and mechanics.
The team are presented with problems when trying to manage qualifying and race strategies, fuel and tyre choices, because essentially you are playing chess against yourself. They may also favour one of their drivers for commercial or other reasons.
In the history of Formula One, any time when two drivers in the same team were fighting for a championship it has led to acrimony; think Lewis Hamilton/Fernando Alonso at McLaren in 2007, and Ayrton Senna/Alain Prost, Niki Lauda/Prost and Nigel Mansell/Nelson Piquet.
Watching the Red Bull team struggle unfold will be fascinating until one of the drivers has a shunt or a reliability issue and falls behind. As Vettel said, every race counts now. The scenario is complicated because Button is the team and championship leader but Barrichello is fast enough to beat him, as he did at Silverstone. There’s a frustration about Barrichello after his post-race outburst against the team in Germany and although that was smoothed over, it will have caused bad feeling.
I understand Barrichello’s frustration after years as Michael Schumacher’s teammate at Ferrari. Brawn don’t want to replace him because they need him at his best to take points off the Red Bulls and support Button.
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