Rubens Barrichello, Williams-Cosworth

Rubens Barrichello was delighted with his best finish of the season, fourth place at the European Grand Prix in Valencia. a result which the AT&T Williams team retained after post-race investigation of Safety Car transgressions resulted in a 5s penalty for nine cars, which had no bearing on the first seven places in the race.

Having achieved its best combined qualifying performance of the season in dry conditions, when both Barrichello and Nico Hulkenberg logged identical qualifying times to the last thousandth of a second, the team got a strong start with Rubens and Nico completing the first lap in seventh and eighth places, one slot better off than front row starter Mark Webber’s Red Bull!

Webber, unable to pass the Williams pair after his bad start, elected to stop as early as lap 7 to go onto the Bridgestone medium compound and hopefully run in clear air. His subsequent accident, which prompted the Safety Car and widespread rush into the pits, was a good break for Barrichello, but not for Hulkenberg, who was stacked behind Rubens.

“It wasn’t good timing for me because I’d called a flat spot on my tyre half a lap earlier and wanted to pit, but it was too late. Combined with having to stack, I really lost all my places there,” Hulkenberg said.

Barrichello though, jumped Robert Kubica, who reacted to the Safety Car at the last minute and got into the pits, only to find team mate Vitaly Petrov already there, the Russian, like Webber, having also stopped for tyres early after a bad start. When the order settled down therefore, Rubens was in fifth place and managed to run within a few seconds of Button’s McLaren for the rest of the race, while keeping the delayed Kubica at bay. That improved to fourth when Kamui Kobayashi stopped for tyres with four laps to go, having elected not to pit at the Safety Car and run a superlong stint on the harder Bridgestone tyre from his 18th grid slot.

“It was great fun out there today and the car behaved well all the way through,” Barrichello said. “We really seem to be heading in the right direction with the development of the car and I hope that the improved performance continues for the rest of the season.” An exhaust failure unfortunately ended a disgruntled Hulkenberg’s run with seven laps to go, and he was told to pull off close to a fire extinguisher post.

Ferrari, who lost out badly with both cars behind the Safety Car, believed that the penalties imposed on cars which had broken the time delta while pitting during the Safety Car period, were too lenient. The FIA, however, said that most cars were so close to the timing line when the Safety Car was deployed, that the speeding transgressions were defensible and that little advantage had been gained, hence 5s penalties rather than a stiffer punishment.