Vettel leads Red Bull 1-2 in Turkey

Sebastian Vettel signals who is #1

Defending World Champion Sebastian Vettel led flag-to-flag Sunday in Istanbul to win the Turkish Grand Prix F1 race over his Red Bull Renault teammate Mark Webber by 8.8 seconds.

Fernando Alonso was third for Ferrari just 2 seconds behind Webber and Lewis Hamilton 4th for McLaren.

For Vettel it was his 13th F1 win and third of the season after crashing heavily on Friday and almost writing off the car.

Alonso drove to a strong 3rd place for Ferrari

For Alonso and Ferrari it was a victory of sorts, coming close to matching Red Bull on pace after being so far off the pace in the first three races. Using DRS Alonso passed Webber and ran 2nd for much of the race but on the last stint Webber had a fresher set of tires and was able to get Alonso back and finish second.

“I think we had a good weekend overall, the car performed a bit better than the first three races of the championship," Alonso explained in the post-race press conference. “So finally we enjoy racing again and fighting for the podium positions.

“As Mark (Webber) said we lost a little bit of time behind Rosberg at the beginning of the race, so we felt (that we didn’t have) the possibility to fight with Sebastian (Vettel) for P1, and we concentrated in P2. I had a little bit of an advantage in terms of tire degradation at that part of the race compared to Mark.

“As Mark said we used the DRS and I was able to overtake him, then in the last part of the race it was more or less the opposite and we had maybe a little bit of a disadvantage with tire age so we lost the position again. It was ok I think, fighting with a Red Bull in these days is quite difficult and we were close so hopefully next time we’ll try again.

"Finally we enjoy racing again," said the Spaniard.

Read a report at Ferrari's official website: "This is a reward for all the hard work the team has carried out, which gives hope for the next round in Spain."

Before the start Timo Glock lost fifth gear on the way to the grid, and returned to the garage where the Virgin mechanics frantically worked to repair the car – he was unable to start.

Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton believes he would have been in the fight for second place at the Turkish Grand Prix had he not lost out at the start to Mark Webber in turn three.

Hamilton made a reasonable start from the dirty side of the grid and attempted to pass Webber ahead of him out of the first sequence of corners. However, he got stuck on the outside of the Red Bull and lost traction, putting him behind Fernando Alonso and team-mate Jenson Button.

"I had a good start and probably should have been up to third at the start of the race," he told the BBC. "I could have been battling for second in this race but we came out in fourth in the end."

His tires then started to degrade more quickly than the cars around him as he tried to fight back past his teammate Jenson Button, setting up one of the closest battles of the race.

"I had such great pace and in actual fact I had too much front wing on the car to start off with and that was one of the reasons I struggled to look after the rear tires, because it's better to drive a car with a bit of understeer and I had too much front end," he said. "Obviously when I was trying to get past Jenson I had so much pace, but by the time I did get past I had nothing left in my tires and that pushed me into a four stopper. But considering we had a bad pit stop as well we did well to get back up to fourth place. But the battle was good and Jenson was fair all the way through it – we look forward to the next race."

Vettel extended his championship lead from 21 to 34 points as his closest competitor Lewis Hamilton raced only to fourth place at Istanbul Park.

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