Sebastian Vettel crushes opposition to victory in Abu Dhabi

World Champion Sebastian Vettel truly gave a world champion´s drive from the start to steal the lead from team mate Mark Webber with an amazing start into C1 and flying away with the race totally unchallenged, grabbing his 7th consective victory of the season equalling Schumacher´s record and 11th of the season.

Mark Webber who started on pole lost places to Vettel and Rosberg with a mediocre start managed to finish 2nd ahead of Rosberg in third and claiming the 100th podium for team Red Bull racing.

Rosberg was relieved to be in the podium ahead of a charging Grosjean and extending Mercedes´s runner up constructor´s points gap over Ferrari while Grosjean tried hard to close in on the Mercedes driver ending up just 1.2secs behind.

Fernando Alonso on the Ferrari who started 10th on the grid, managed to finish 5th after a super fast last stint on the softs. Alonso faced an post race investigation with the stewards for the incident with J E Vergne, going off track limits while rejoining the track after the final pit stop which was cleared with no further action.

Paul Di Resta on the Force India managed a gutsy drive with just a single tyre stop strategy to hold on to 6th ahead of Lewis Hamilton on the Mercedes who was struggling with the grip right from the start. Massa who was once ahead of Hamilton lost out on the pit stops and managed to finish behind the Mercedes driver.

Sergio Perez on the McLaren finished 9th just ahead of Force India´s Adrian Sutil who too was on a single stop strategy to complete the top10.

Kimi Raikkonen's weekend went from bad to worse as he got hit by a Caterham driver going into C1 at the start breaking his front right wheel resulting in an instant retirement.

ABU DHABI GRAND PRIX – 2013