The other two retirements of the day were Vettel and Force's Adrian Sutil who developed a brake problem very early on in the race. This issue made it extremely difficult for the young German to drive his car leading to various off track excursions. On one of the replays of these on the television, ITV F1 commentator James Allen commented, "Not an uncommon sight: Sutil off the road".

Adrian described his race in depth, "My start was normal, I was on the outside going into turn one but then I had to go a little bit wide and dropped back a place. Then the problems started on the third lap when my brakes started to overheat, particularly the rear ones, and I had to move my brake balance forward.

"From that point on I had problems, with lots of locking on the front and understeer and it was difficult to handle the car. Considering this, my race pace was not bad in the first stint, but then in the second stint I was held up by the group in front when I was quite light and lost some time there.

"In the final stint I had a puncture on the front right under braking and then the brakes gave up and my race was over. Overall, I am disappointed because we've worked hard for the whole weekend and then after three laps we have a problem so I couldn't show the performance I wanted to."

Giancarlo seemed fairly upbeat with his race pace despite the team now clearly falling behind some of the other teams that looked closer at the beginning of the season.

"It was a tough race as we were fighting quite a lot. We were quite heavy at the beginning of the race but the pace really wasn't too bad and I could keep up with the others in front of me. In fact the two Williams were only two laps heavier than me when I was just behind them, but I was keeping the same pace.

"Even at the end of the race in the last few laps I could do a 1min 22.6, which is a good lap time. In terms of strategy we did well, that was the maximum we could get from this race, we just need a step forward for the next few races."

And a step forward he may well get. The seamless shift gearbox, of which Force India are the only team not to currently be running, will be introduced at the next GP in Valencia in three weeks time.

The race winner today was Heikki Kovalainen but surely the driver of the race has to be Felipe Massa who put in such a spirited drive starting with two excellent overtakes into the first corner - only for his win to be cruelly taken away from him in a cloud of blue smoke.

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