By now the Brawn GP car of Jenson Button was a few seconds up the road. His victory was safe enough. The battle for second though was still going strong. German Sebastien Vettel for the Red Bull Racing team was trying to defend from Poland’s Robert Kubica of BMW Sauber. With both drivers having scored their maiden wins last year, they each wanted to get their championship campaign off to a good start. Kubica was significantly faster. When Vettel made a small mistake, Kubica lunged up the outside. Vettel couldn’t stop in time and the cars collided, taking both drivers out of the race with just two laps to go. Brawn’s Rubens Barrichello duly came through to claim second and give the team a 1-2 finish in its first race. But why had Vettel been travelling so slowly at the end of the race?

It all came down to tyres. In the 2009 season there are two basic tyre compounds, soft and hard. Each team must use each compound at least once during the race. The problem was that the soft tyre wasn’t warming up enough and giving drivers the grip they needed. This issue was magnified during the race when the sun started going down and the track began to cool. Track temperatures at some races can reach almost 70 degrees Celcius, but in Melbourne it was struggling to hit 40 at times. Drivers stuck using the soft compound (including Vettel) towards the end of the race were lapping seconds slower than those on the harder compound tyres.

Robert Kubica had managed to get his soft tyre stint out of the way early on in the race. In fact, the Pole started on the soft tyres. This is why he ended up catching Vettel so quickly towards the end of the race. Why was the soft tyre going off so quickly though?

Bridgestone, the official tyre supplier to Formula 1, creates different compounds for each race, depending on the track and environment. The soft compound used in Australia won’t be exactly the same as the soft compound used in next weekend’s race in Malaysia. That said, Bridgestone obviously got something a bit wrong and the soft tyre just didn’t work for many of the teams. It’s a problem that has happened in the past as well, when one tyre is hopeless in certain conditions. At the very least, it spices up the racing!

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

JOIN THE POPSCI AU FACEBOOK GROUP