Webber wins Monaco Grand Prix

In the end, it was a typical Monaco Grand Prix procession: The man on pole finished first, the man who started second finished second, and none of many potential surprises came to be. Mark Webber in his Red Bull car led the race almost from start to finish — except during the pit stop period — to take his eighth career victory and his second victory in Monaco, where he won two years ago. He did, however, provide the series an unprecedented sixth different winner in the first six races. “I think we got the maximum out of this weekend, and were fortunate to get pole,” Webber said. “It was a very interesting race, reasonably straightforward at the start, getting the gap with Nico, and we both got away, and then it was a question of maintaining the gap.” Still, the procession was tight, with the top four finishers within 1.3 seconds of each other. Webber finished only 0.6 seconds from Nico Rosberg in a Mercedes and 0.9 seconds ahead of Fernando Alonso in a Ferrari. Had it not been for a penalty that he received for causing an accident at the previous race in Spain two weeks ago, Michael Schumacher would most likely have won his sixth Monaco Grand Prix, and written history yet again. Instead, after the 43-year-old German scored his fourth pole position in the principality on Saturday, 18 years after his first pole here, he was bumped back to sixth position to start at a race where leading from the beginning usually means finishing in the lead as well. For a brief time, then, it looked as if the Monaco Grand Prix, the 70th in this city-state, would be a historic edition — although it already was, with Schumacher’s extraordinary exploit. Then, Sunday, before the start of the race, all the ingredients were there on the grid for another glitzy, glamorous affair, with the attending stars and V.I.P.’s including Eric Clapton, Antonio Banderas and Ron Howard. But once the race began, and Webber had inherited the pole position, there was little more excitement and the script went as it often does, with the pole man leading from start to finish, with the exception of the disorder that followed the pit stop period near the halfway point of the 78-lap race. There was a moment where it looked as if Webber’s teammate, Sebastian Vettel, who won the race last year, might pull off a feat as he started ninth and managed to run for 45 laps on the same set of tires, delaying his pit stop longer than any of the other drivers. But he could never build up enough distance to return from the pits in the lead again, and instead, he slotted his car into fourth, just behind those of Webber, Rosberg and Alonso. “He was doing some pretty quick lap times, and it was hard for us to keep going,” Webber said of his teammate. “Once Seb pitted, I could put my concentration back to Nico.” For much of the race, rain was predicted and the skies were overcast, and the spectators and also the drivers lower down the pack hoped that the rain would come and change the order as drivers made pit stops for rain tires or skidded off a wet track. It was never to be. Webber drove an impeccable race on the series’ most difficult track, where overtaking is virtually impossible and where a driver must have nerves of steel to not make an error and end up running into the barriers along the side of the track. When a light rain began to fall from the edge of a deluge just a few kilometers away, Webber simply slowed down and held the others behind him. “At other tracks you don’t need to back off like that,” Webber said of his reaction to the light rain. “But it required me to really control the race.” The only real excitement of the race was during the crazy start, when Schumacher tried to squeeze his car past the Lotus of Romain Grosjean to move up the pack from his sixth place. At the same time Grosjean and Alonso touched, and Grosjean failed to see Schumacher. The rear wheel of the Lotus struck the German’s Mercedes and Grosjean spun around, causing chaos that knocked out two other cars. Much of the rest of the pack took a shortcut through the first corner to avoid the mess, and Schumacher dropped down to eighth. Despite having an impeccable race, he retired with a fuel pressure problem with 14 laps left. “It was simply a pity to end the race in this way,” Schumacher said. “In any case, the fuel pressure problem had nothing to do with the incident at the start. But it made it doubly disappointing because I had secretly been hoping for a podium finish today.” Alonso leads the series with 76 points, Vettel and Webber are second and third with 73 points each, and Lewis Hamilton is fourth with 63 points. “This one was harder,” Webber said of his second victory in Monaco. “I knew from the start of the race it was going to be different than the 2010 victory, if I was going to try to win here.”