Alonso Wins in Bahrain

The eagerly anticipated season opener started with optimism as Fernando Alonso drove a superbly judged race to follow what only Nigel Mansell and Kimi Raikkonen have only achievedwinning debut race for Ferrari. Alonso piped Felipe Massa at the first corner of the race to get into 2^nd position after qualifing 3^rd on the race grid. Sebastian Vettel who got the pole position for the race started off very well, he had a perfect start and opened up a reasonable gap between the 1^st and the 2nd place. More than two thirds of the race distance was led by him and at one stage it looked that it would be an easy victory. But the red bull driver really struggled when he made a pit stop to get the hard compound tires on. On the hard compound tires the red bull driver was not able to match the pace of the two Ferrari’s, Alonso overtook him on lap 34 and then after a few laps Massa did the same thing. Later it was identified that their was a spark plug failure in Vettle’s car. Massa came home in second place his race was hampered by a bad start and engine temperature problems. Lewis Hamilton also overtook vettle to get the final podium place as Vettle settled for 4^th place. Nico rosberg came sixth. Michael Schumacher’s long awaited comeback saw him in 6^th place he finished 4 seconds behind his team mate which is a very nice performance keeping in mind that he came after 3 years and still managed to match the pace of the frontrunners, his pace will improve as he’ll cover more and more miles. The defending champion Jenson Button finished the race in 7^th place. Mark Webber, Vitantonio Liuzzi and Rubens Barrichello finished the proceeding in 8th, 9th and 10^th places respectively.

The result gives Ferrari the perfect start to the world championship with 43 points, ahead of McLaren on 21, Mercedes GP on 18 and Red Bull on 16. Alonso leads the title chase with 25 points from Massa on 18, Hamilton on 15, Vettel on 12, Rosberg on 10 and Schumacher on 8.