Lewis Hamilton more than made up for his last-lap crash at Monza two weeks ago with a flawless performance under the lights in the Singapore Grand Prix that secured his and McLaren’s second win of the season.
Meanwhile Jenson Button moved a step closer to realising his world title dreams, overcoming a disastrous qualifying session to beat his Brawn GP team-mate and title rival Rubens Barrichello to fifth place and thereby extending his championship lead by one point.
While Hamilton led for almost the entire 61-lap race distance, his path to victory was eased by pit lane indiscretions by Nico Rosberg and Sebastian Vettel that earned each a drive-through penalty.
An impressive Timo Glock took full advantage to move up to second place and claim Toyota’s first podium since the Bahrain Grand Prix in April, equalling his career-best Formula 1 result in the process.
And following a hugely turbulent fortnight in which its whole Formula 1 future was on the line and the race-fixing scandal led to the departure of the team’s top brass, Renault finally made some positive headlines as Fernando Alonso hustled the R29 to the podium for the first time in 2009.
Vettel salvaged fourth to keep his personal title ambitions mathematically alive, but with Button finishing right on his tail in fifth the RBR driver is a near insurmountable 25 points adrift with just 30 left up for grabs.
Barrichello, who also lost time during a slightly slow second stop, had to settle for sixth, while Kovalainen increased his points-scoring streak to six races in seventh.
Hamilton made a perfect getaway from pole position, but fellow front-row starter Vettel was once again slow away and Rosberg snatched second place into the first complex of corners.
A thrusting Alonso beat Mark Webber off the line and tried to go the long way around Vettel, but succeeded only in sapping momentum onto the back straight.
Webber and Glock both pounced, but Webber would later be instructed to cede both positions for taking to the Tarmac apron on the outside of turn seven to pass Alonso, relegating the Australian to sixth.
Leader Hamilton quickly established a small cushion before Rosberg stabilised the gap around the two-second mark, with Vettel a similar margin behind in third and Glock and Alonso losing touch in fourth and fifth respectively.
Hamilton had a minor scare when the team radioed him to say that his Kinetic Energy Recovery System was malfunctioning, but the boffins in the McLaren garage toggled a few switches and soon solved the problem.
The first major development at the front came at the first round of pit stops, when Rosberg was a little too eager on the pit lane exit and strayed over the white ‘blend’ line.
He tried to make amends by ducking back inside the line, but the stewards applied the letter of the law and promptly issued a drive-through penalty.
Before Rosberg could respond, however, the safety car was deployed following a collision between Adrian Sutil and Nick Heidfeld.
Sutil had spent many laps fruitlessly looking for a way past a struggling Jaime Alguersuari’s Toro Rosso before finally losing patience and making a half-hearted bid into turn five.
He backed out of it and threw the Force India into a spin to avoid hitting Alguersuari, but then lit up the rear tyres to spin the car through 360 degrees – and collected an unsuspecting Heidfeld on the apex of the corner.
Hamilton, Alonso and Barrichello all made it into the pits before the field queued up behind the safety car, but the full-course yellow was unwelcome for Button, who had been hoping to use a long first stint to leapfrog some of the cars in front of him but now had to pit in sequence with the leaders.
It was even worse news for Rosberg, who would fall to the back of the field as the cars concertinaed behind the pace car.
At the restart on lap 25 Hamilton led from Rosberg, Vettel, Glock, Alonso and Barrichello, with Button running eighth behind Heikki Kovalainen.
Rosberg served his drive-through penalty two laps later and plummeted to 14th, giving Vettel a clear shot at Hamilton.
The Red Bull had taken on less fuel than the McLaren and Vettel seized his chance to latch onto Hamilton’s tail, harrying him all the way until his second pit stop on lap 39.
Then, in his haste to lose as little time as possible, Vettel – like Rosberg earlier – made a costly blunder, exceeding the pit lane speed limit and incurring a drive-through penalty.
He compounded his woes by bouncing over a high kerb and damaging his car’s diffuser, robbing it of vital downforce and giving him a handful in the cockpit for the remainder of the race.
As Hamilton continued his serene progress to victory, Vettel’s penalty promoted Glock and Alonso to second and third respectively.
Alonso enjoyed a brief spell in the lead courtesy of a long middle stint, but the extra low-fuel laps were not enough to overhaul Glock and Timo comfortably kept the Renault at bay to take second on a weekend that had initially looked inauspicious for Toyota.
The main excitement in the closing stages of what had been a largely processional race involved the Brawn team-mates and championship rivals.
The turning point came when a brake failure sent Mark Webber spinning into the barriers at turn one with 15 laps to go.
Anticipating another safety car intervention, most of those yet to make their second stops dived into the pits – including Barrichello and Heikki Kovalainen, who had been lying fifth and sixth ahead of seventh-placed Button.
The marshals quickly cleared Webber’s car from the scene, however, so the safety car was not required.
Button had held his nerve and now had five low-fuel laps with which to make time up on Barrichello and Kovalainen.
Having struggled for pace for most of the weekend, Button hit a purple patch just at the right moment and reeled off a succession of quick laps – faster, in fact, than anyone else on the circuit at that stage.
As a result he emerged from his final stop in fifth place, comfortably in front of Barrichello and hard on the heels of Vettel, who hadn’t suffered as badly as Rosberg from his penalty since there had been no safety car to compress the field.
Button briefly entertained thoughts of challenging Vettel, but soon had to back off to nurse drastically fading brakes, an affliction that had already claimed not only Webber but also Alguersuari’s Toro Rosso.
Barrichello began to close on his team-mate but he too was in trouble with brake wear and ran out of laps to mount a challenge.
Kovalainen finished a rather anonymous seventh in a race that his team-mate had won so convincingly, although that did extend his points-scoring streak to six races.
Robert Kubica lost ground as the safety car phase clashed with his planned first stop, but nevertheless took the final point following a positive debut weekend for BMW’s heavily upgraded F1.09.
Singapore Grand Prix result (61 laps)
1. HAMILTON McLaren
2. GLOCK Toyota +9.6s
3. ALONSO Renault +16.6s
4. VETTEL Red Bull +20.2s
5. BUTTON Brawn +30.0s
6. BARRICHELLO Brawn +31.8s
7. KOVALAINEN McLaren +36.1s
8. KUBICA BMW +55.0s
9. NAKAJIMA Williams +56.0s
10. RAIKKONEN Ferrari +58.8s
11. ROSBERG Williams +59.7s
12. TRULLI Toyota +73.0s
13. FISICHELLA Ferrari +79.8s
14. LIUZZI Force India +93.5s
R. ALGUERSUARI Toro Rosso +14 laps
R. BUEMI Toro Rosso +14 laps
R. WEBBER Red Bull +16 laps
R. SUTIL Force India +38 laps
R. HEIDFELD BMW +42 laps
R. GROSJEAN Renault +58 laps
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