For the Milton Keynes team, it was a case of adding reliability to pace. And just how much pace there is, is quite staggering when you realise that they ought to have won the last six Grands Prix straight. For the first time in 2010, Vettel’s RB6 hung together, the young German master made an awesome start (one of his weakest links from 2009), he mugged his team-mate going into turn one, and the race was his. He just had to control his pace, engine wear and tyre degradation from there.

As much as the 1-2 result takes the pressure off the team though, this was no clinical weekend and there are still key issues to be addressed by Christian Horner’s men. Mark Webber had an engine failure in free practice 2. The team made the same mistake with him in Q1 as McLaren and Ferrari did; it’s just that Mark survived. The gamble on intermediates in Q3 paid off brilliantly thanks to a sensational last two laps, but it could also have gone hopelessly wrong and left the Australian stranded in 10th.

It was Mark’s fault that he did not go defensive enough into turn one, and the delay on the front-right wheel at his pit stop ended any chance he had. At any rate, he was pitting second for fresh tyres, giving Vettel first use of new rubber anyway, so was he ever on a winning strategy? Presumably the counter-argument is that if Webber had pitted any earlier, he may have been stuck in traffic behind Lewis Hamilton. In the end though, the point is that Webber is starting this year on the back foot as Vettel’s clear number 2.

It was a good result for Nico Rosberg on Petronas’ home soil to finish on the podium after a lonely race once Vettel had easily beaten him off the line. The telling aspect of his weekend was his continued dominance over Michael Schumacher at a track where Schumi has previously been very strong. And, most impressively, Nico had the edge in the wet, which was always Michael’s forte and not Rosberg’s strong suit. He is continuing his unspectacular consistency from last season, but there is some notable speed too.

Schumacher’s DNF meant that he now languishes in the points, on only 9 compared to Rosberg’s 35. The retirement was unusual enough, since we have become accustomed to Michael getting the best. But to see him stuck in this virtual back-up driver role is starting the get the feel of watching a horror freak show; it just doesn’t feel right. He’s still in something of a period of grace, but there is only a certain length of time that that can last. The pressure is on to out-qualify or out-race Nico at some stage fairly soon.

McLaren may have had the pace to challenge Red Bull in the dry; that was the indication from free practice at least. But it never came to pass after the dreadful Q1 error by McLaren and Ferrari. Much has already been said about this but it’s really quite simple - technology is no substitute for common sense. A wet track will only get wetter with any more rain until the rain stops. A banker lap was therefore imperative right at the start of the session, because the circuit was only going to get wetter before it started to dry.

It would have been fairly safe to assume that the new teams, struggling for downforce as they were, would probably still be at the bottom in wet conditions if everyone had set a banker lap. Even if the track did start to dry, the top teams would have the luxury of seeing if any of the new teams started to threaten before determining if they needed to go out again. To compound McLaren and Ferrari’s misery, Webber went out even later and still made it on his first lap, so the drivers weren’t up to scratch, either.

But the fact that McLaren and Ferrari had to burn from the stern did make things interesting, and two pleasing aspects emerged on Sunday. One was that, if the corner combinations are designed well, overtaking is possible even in the dry. The other was that the teams are prepared to take a chance with different tyre strategies. Jenson Button went for the advantage of fresh tyres early, pitting on lap nine. Felipe Massa and Hamilton split the race into two, stopping on laps 26 and 30 respectively.

Fernando Alonso, on the other hand, waited until lap 36 to save his new tyres for a late charge. This was actually a strategy with tremendous potential, had Fernando not been hamstrung by an ailing car. He had given himself the longest window in which to make up track position, especially when others stopped, and to make his one and only tyre stop when the expected rain came. If rain had arrived any time after lap 30, he would have made one fewer stop than everyone else and looking good for 5th place.

In the end, Hamilton and Button could only climb so high, and they ended up not that far apart on relative terms despite their different strategies. They even almost collided when Hamilton came out from his side alongside Button. The major talking point of the McLarens’ early charge through the field, however, was Hamilton’s antics down the front straight during his spirited battle with Vitaly Petrov, in which on the previous lap he had already passed the Russian but the Renault had managed to get him back.

Whether Lewis’ weaving down the front straight was acceptable came down to a definition of the informal one-move rule. In this writer’s view, Hamilton’s behaviour was appalling and he was fortunate to escape with only a bad sportsmanship warning. The one move idea is all about the driver in front making a choice as to which line he wants to defend, and sticking to that decision. The driver behind then knows clearly what kind of passing move he will need to make if he wants to get past.

Sometimes the driver in front goes defensive early if he feels he is under threat. That’s his one move made; he is committed to the inside line. The driver behind knows he must go around the outside. A variant is that the driver in front makes his one move as a block after the driver behind has gone on the attack. If the block happens too late, it can cause a collision. By way of two examples on the same piece of track, think Webber on Kimi Raikkonen or Kamui Kobayashi on Kazuki Nakajima in Brazil last year.

But even in the latter form of the one move, at least the driver behind then knows the score and knows he must now go to the other side to pass. This in itself can be an art form, and could be an intentional ploy by the driver behind - throw a dummy, provoke a one move defence, then go around the other side, as Nigel Mansell did to Nelson Piquet at Silverstone in 1987. It’s all about establishing, after one move by the car in front, the rules of engagement.

By weaving from side to side along the front straight, at no time did Hamilton afford Petrov the opportunity to make a clear decision about which side he would try to overtake the McLaren. Of course, one could make the argument that this was Lewis simply trying to break the slipstream, but that is a difficult argument. That could easily mandate every car swerving along every straight simply to ensure the car behind never got in the tow. That is not only dangerous, but detrimental to good racing.

Ferrari’s tyre strategies meant that neither Massa and Alonso were going to shoot up the field, especially when neither got as good a start as Hamilton did. But Massa was particularly subdued once he got behind the Toro Rossos of Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari, which would have been to Alonso’s frustration as he could not downshift properly and so he could not afford to risk a move against his team-mate. Massa now leads the championship, but he has not impressed in the last two races.

In the circumstances, Alonso’s drive was actually quite good. He adapted his driving style to get around the downshift problem, managed to lap competitively when others would have faded badly, caught up to Massa and Button after his tyre stop, and almost successfully overtook the McLaren. That’s the sign of great drivers, being able to drive around problems and remain in the hunt. However the poor reliability of Ferrari’s engines in this race, after changes in Bahrain already, must be causing some major headaches.

Another exceptionally good all-round weekend from Robert Kubica sees him 7th in the championship after finishing a fine 4th, only 9 points behind Massa. If we were still operating under last year’s points system, there would be seven drivers split by only four points! Renault team boss Eric Boullier says that the Pole is driving the team forward with his performances, and you can see why. His one-lap speed in all conditions has been superb, his starts opportunistic, and his race pace consistently fast.

Petrov in the other Renault shows flashes of promise - at one stage he was top of the timesheets in Q2 before slipping to 11th, and his battle with Hamilton was entertaining - but he evens it out at the moment with somewhat amateur over-driving which may contribute to his R30 being less reliable. If he can find a more stable level of performance, Renault as a whole could establish themselves as the top of the midfield teams and run too close to the top four teams for their comfort.

Coming home 5th, Adrian Sutil delivered his first points finish for the year, continuing Force India’s run of points. The VJM03 is not far off the Renaults, and coupled with Sutil’s prowess in the wet which put him 4th on the grid, a strong result was always on the cards. But the most impressive thing about Sutil’s race was not his pace, but the way he withstood massive pressure from Hamilton. This was not about applying pressure, like at Monza last year, but it was about making no mistakes to keep a faster rival behind.

Not long ago, Sutil would have been a good bet to make some kind of error that would have allowed Hamilton to sneak through, but such is his increasing confidence that also comes with having a solidly competitive car that he knows he can afford to remain steady. And it was not a bad performance by Vitantonio Liuzzi either, also making it through to Q3 in the tricky conditions and also keeping Hamilton behind in the early stages of the race before retiring, although his ultimate pace is still a few tenths off Sutil.

There was a nice little interplay between Kubica and the Force Indias during Q3, when the Renault driver queue-jumped to get out first when the session first began, and then the Force Indias lined up side-by-side to make sure Robert couldn’t pull the same trick again when the session restarted. There is nothing in the rules to say that cars must line up in an orderly queue when exiting the pits, and the quick thinking of Kubica and his crew is exactly the kind of thing that will help them punch above their weight.

Having said that, and without wishing for a moment to legislate out all forms of ingenuity, the stewards would probably want to keep a close eye on any similar antics in the future to ensure that it doesn’t get out of hand. If there is another wet qualifying session and cars are scrambling to get onto the track first, but the pit lane and exit are narrower, and drivers are unwilling to give an inch, you can foresee that there could be some chaos. The pit lane and exit is not really a place for drag races.

Aside from Kubica and Sutil, the other unsung hero of the race and arguably one of the best drivers on the track on Sunday was young Alguersuari in the Toro Rosso. Not only did he make a fantastic start to leap from 14th to 11th, he comfortably held off his team-mate Buemi and the two Ferraris, and was only overtaken by the two red cars on strategy. More to the point were his two stunning passing moves around the outside of Petrov and Nico Hulkenberg going into turn 5, which required as much courage as skill.

Bear in mind that the two people he passed were the men who came 1st and 2nd in the GP2 championship last year - not bad scalps at all. Under the new points system, Jaime collected his first points for 9th, and it was tremendously well deserved. Perhaps in the future this will be the race where we can say that Alguersuari came of age. He certainly had the better of Buemi, who has been somewhat subdued in the first three rounds this year and was again fairly anonymous apart from fending off the Ferraris early.

From 5th and 7th on the grid, Williams must be terribly disappointed to have Hulkenberg only finish 10th, after an early tyre stop cost him track position for little advantage afterwards. Rubens Barrichello was not only out-qualified by his team-mate in the wet, but clutch problems ruined his start. Here there were shades of Turkey and Belgium last year, when the same kind of thing happened in his Brawn, but now he is in a different team. Perhaps it’s a driving issue in the way he launches the car off the line.

Dropping back to almost last place, the Brazilian made his first tyre change on lap 7, and was forced to make a second stop on lap 44. All in all, the Williams just did not have the pace to make much headway, and Rubens wound up a lapped 12th. The final results in Malaysia is symbolic of where Williams are and why they are no longer a force. Their stodgy, consistent level of midfield performance and character is just not enough when up against a bit of X-factor like a Kubica, a Sutil or an Alguersuari.

The increasing reliability of the new teams was encouraging. A Virgin made the finish for the first time in the hands of Lucas di Grassi, proving that the VR01’s current fuel tank is big enough if engine performance is leaned out sufficiently. Over a single lap the Virgin may just be the fastest car of the new teams, but it is also the most fragile and, as we discussed in the last review, when it needs to be redesigned to accommodate a larger tank, that may allow Lotus and HRT to get the jump on them.

Both di Grassi and Timo Glock had feisty battles with the Lotuses of Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen, Glock taking himself out early after colliding with his ex-Toyota team-mate, and di Grassi puncturing Kovalainen’s rear right tyre when the Finn tried to pass. The Lotuses continue to have the most steady level of performance of the new teams, and have the fewest niggling problems which means that they can generally launch into longer runs than their rivals.

However, they are still no guarantee of making it to the flag and if they do, a lot of the time they are stumbling to the line. That was the case again here, which was unfortunate given the publicity surrounding the team at their home race. Kovalainen was delayed by a long stop mid-race and ended up not being classified, while just like in Bahrain Trulli limped to the finish lapping miles off the pace in a car which, if he were driving for an established team, would have been parked long ago.

Not only did that lead to the novel sight of Trulli being overtaken for position by both HRTs, but it also created a tricky moment on the last lap when Vettel bore down on the Lotus in the yellow flag zone for Alonso’s stricken Ferrari. Trulli waved the Red Bull by - what else could he do when he was going so slowly? - and Sebastian rightly hesitated. Thankfully common sense prevailed and the race winner was not penalised. But frankly there should be a limit to how much ailing cars are allowed to trail around.

Both Hispanias made the flag in what was a very heartening weekend for the team, despite their own consultant Geoff Willis’ rather unflattering comments about the Dallara chassis. On pace it is the slowest of the new teams, but now that the reliability issues appear to have been sorted, they can start bridging the one second or so to Lotus and Virgin. Interestingly, Karun Chandhok had the upper hand over the more-fancied Bruno Senna all weekend, and overall has impressed in his three F1 outings so far.

Which leaves the only team that failed to get either car to the finish. Quite simply, Sauber continue to disappoint. Yes, Kobayashi made Q3 in the wet, but Pedro de la Rosa was a full second slower in Q2. And yes, the double-DNF, with de la Rosa stalling at the end of pit lane and then breaking down almost as soon as he got going on his way to the grid, and with Kobayashi retiring early in the race, was this time an issue with the Ferrari engines rather than the chassis itself.

But that’s six starts for one finish so far this season, and different problems each time - hydraulic maladies in Bahrain, front wing dramas for Kobayashi in Australia, and now engine trouble in Malaysia. This from the team that many thought would be the dark horse this season based on pre-season testing, due to its performance and gentle tyre wear. On current form, not only is the speed not there, but the C29s aren’t going long enough to gain a tyre advantage, and it’s ‘Reject of the Race’ for them this time around.