Lewis Hamilton pulled back Sebastian Vettel’s runaway lead in the world championship to 21 points by winning the thrilling Chinese grand prix.<\/p>\n
McLaren’s Hamilton passed the previously-dominant RB7 in the closing stages in Shanghai, with Red Bull boss Christian Horner revealing Vettel had KERS problems.<\/p>\n
“At the end, Lewis was so much quicker it wasn’t worth fighting so hard,” he told the BBC.<\/p>\n
German Vettel also struggled with a two-stop strategy compared to Hamilton’s three, while Mark Webber in the sister Red Bull was smiling after a sensational run from 18th on the grid to finish third.<\/p>\n
“Maybe the best thing to do is not even take part in qualifying and go from there,” the Australian joked.<\/p>\n
Hamilton’s victory came less than two hours after his MP4-26 initially refused to start in the McLaren garage, and he came within seconds of having to start the race from the pitlane.<\/p>\n
“It was not the greatest way to start out the afternoon but once it did start it went well,” said boss Martin Whitmarsh.<\/p>\n
Jenson Button, ultimately fourth at the flag, featured early but lost ground, also when he accidentally drove into the Red Bull pit area for a new set of tyres.<\/p>\n
“I was looking down and when I looked back up I could see I was in the wrong place,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It was one of those races where there was a lot of overtaking and action, but I wasn’t quick enough.”<\/p>\n
Hamilton’s victory ended a four-race winning streak for Vettel.<\/p>\n
“I think we tried too hard staying on two stops,” said the German.\u00a0 “We did a couple of mistakes but still finished second so I’m very happy with that.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lewis Hamilton pulled back Sebastian Vettel’s runaway lead in the world championship to 21 points by winning the thrilling Chinese grand prix. McLaren’s Hamilton passed the previously-dominant RB7 in the closing stages in Shanghai, with Red Bull boss Christian Horner revealing Vettel had KERS problems. “At the end, Lewis was so much quicker it wasn’t …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[2120,3],"tags":[1221,5262,5340,154,165,5284,164],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11946,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11945\/revisions\/11946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}