Results:
Qualifying:
Race:
Championships:
Full Report:
At the start, Button maintained his lead as Barrichello passed Räikkönen on the approach to the first corner. Both Brawn cars and Sebastian Vettel started the race on the super-soft tyres;[11] the Ferraris and Williams started on the soft compound. This provided an advantage, as the super-soft tyres – which had proven to be the better of the two all weekend – started to lose grip exponentially after twelve laps as championship contender Sebastian Vettel proved when he started losing up to four seconds per lap on leader Button, because of the difficulty in overtaking at Monaco, this greatly helped the Brawn GP drivers and Kimi Räikkönen (the only three drivers ahead of Vettel when his tyres started to lose grip), because for several minutes all cars behind him found themselves unable to overtake, opening a huge gap between third and fourth, even for several laps after Vettel had been overtaken..
Sébastien Buemi had an accident running into Nelson Piquet Jr. on lap 10 during a passing attempt at Sainte Devote,[12] while Vettel slid into the barriers under brakes at the same spot several laps later. Button maintained a fifteen-second lead over team-mate Barrichello for most of the race, who had a smaller gap over the Ferraris of Kimi Räikkönen and Felipe Massa; Massa raised the ire of the stewards after crossing the chicane at the Swimming Pool Complex twice, though no penalty was awarded as both occasions were due to driver error.
In the late stages of the race, Heikki Kovalainen crashed out at the Swimming Pool, spinning and colliding with the barriers. Kazuki Nakajima also crashed out on the last lap of the race at Mirabeau. Robert Kubica was the only other retirement, his race ending with brake problems. In the final phase of the race, the Ferraris pitted for the super-soft tyres, discovering the same graining problem as everyone else over longer stints. The distance between Button and Barrichello halved over the final few laps, though Button was deliberately slowing to avoid encountering backmarkers who were fighting for position. He won by seven-and-a-half seconds from Barrichello, with the Ferraris of Räikkönen and Massa third and fourth.
After the end of the race, Button mistakenly parked his car in parc fermé in the pit lane as is normal for other Grands Prix, rather than on the main straight with the other two podium finishers as is the norm for Monaco. As a result he had to run down the start/finish straight to the podium.
With his win, Button scored the third-best start to a season in Formula One history, with five victories and one third place. Only Nigel Mansell in 1992 and Michael Schumacher in 1994 recorded better starts, with each taking five victories and one second place in the first six rounds. Also, his victory in the Brawn-Mercedes marked the first time in modern F1 history that a single engine has won three races in a row[13] – engines in the 1950s lasted most of a season, sometimes more than one season. It was also the first time since 2006 that a driver had won three races in succession. Michael Schumacher was the last to do so, as he won the United States, French and German Grands Prix.
The Fast Castor
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