Vettel takes record breaking 9th consecutive win at Brazil

F1 Grand Prix, GP Brazil, Autódromo José Carlos Pace, Interlagos

Sebastian Vettel took his record breaking 9th consecutive victory at the Brazilian Grand Prix as Mark Webber ends his career with a second place finish and the fastest lap. Fernando Alonso finished third, ahead of Button who made an impressive comeback race.

At the start of the race, the track is entirely dry, an interesting change after seeing nothing but wet weather running so far in practice and qualifying.

As the lights go out, Rosberg makes the best launch off the grid and takes P1, ahead of Vettel. Third is Hamilton, benefiting from Alonso's failed attempt to get past Vettel through the outside into turn 1. Alonso therefore slotted in to fourth, ahead of Webber and Massa who moved up from 9th to 6th.

At the first pass on the straight, without DRS, Vettel takes back first place from Rosberg while Alonso passes Hamilton as well through turn 1. In turn 5 Hamilton loses another place as Webber bravely and through the inside of turn 4 and managed to stay ahead through the right hander.

On lap 3, Grosjean's race already came to an end as his Renault engine started to blow white smoke out of the exhausts.

Alonso meanwhile also moved up into second while Vettel already pulled a gap of 5 seconds.

On lap 6, Webber moves up a spot as well as Rosberg has been moving backward since the first lap.

On lap 11 Vergne makes the first stop of the race, taking on another set of medium tyres.

Webber has meanwhile closed up behind Alonso but had a tough nut to crack as the Ferrari has great top end speed. A few laps of inspection however are enough for the Red Bull driver to make a perfect exit out of turn 12 and use all KERS available to get ahead by the time they both end up at turn 1.

In the midifeld, both McLarens are making great progress following a difficult qualifying session. Perez on the medium tyre is 9th by lap 15 while Button moved up to 7th while running on the hard tyres.

In the same lap Massa gets past Rosberg after the latter had also been passed by his teammate a few laps earlier.

From lap 18 many drivers make their stops, with Massa being one of the first and managing to get ahead of Hamilton after the latter made his stop. Alonso changed to hards and jumped Webber as the Red Bull guys performed a stop in 5.1 seconds, easily several seconds slower than Ferrari's.

Button also moved up a place as Rosberg continues to go backwards. Behind Rosberg is Perez, followed by Hulkenberg, Riciardo, Sutil, Di Resta, kovalainen, Bottas, Gutierrez, Vergne, Maldonado, Pic, Chilton, Van der Garde and Bianchi.

On lap 30 Massa is then handed a drive through penalty for crossing the pit entry line a bit too far. Massa was running well in 4th, just ahead of Hamilton and was extremely angry at the action taken by the stewards, and perhaps rightly so. He was asked by Smedly to serve the penalty on lap 32 but the Brazilian angrily chose not to. When he eventually completed it, he waved his anger at the stewards while passing through, likely to have a further discussion after the race as well. Massa rejoined the race in 8th, 3 seconds behind Perez and 5 ahead of Hulkenberg.

On lap 47 Bottas is out of the track in turn 4 after getting somewhat surprised by Hamilton who moved to the right slightly, exactly where the Williams driver was. It's the end of the race for Bottas while a flat rear tyre for Hamilton required a pitstop for Mercedes. He rejoined in 8th, 10 seconds behind Massa.

Meanwhile Vettel had an extremely slow pitstop of 13s, also holding up Webber's stop as he also pitted on that same lap. Alonso pitted at the same time as well. All positions remained the same between the three, but Vettel's advantage got cut down to 5.5 seconds while Webber only had 1.1 seconds on Alonso anymore.

Hamilton got drive through for that incident with Bottas and was genuinely surprised by that. He rejoined the race in 10th place, 3 seconds behind Ricciardo and 4 seconds ahead of Di Resta. Van der Garde is at the same time also given a drive-through penalty for ignoring blue flags.

5 laps from the end, Maldonado gets himself in the spotlight as he cut across Vergne in turn 1, getting himself to spin. As he recovered his car and sped up, he also held up Button who was lapping him, but the Venezuelan did only back off by turn 4, making for a few anxious moments for Button.

Despite the continuous threat of rain, it wasn't really much apart from a few drops at several moments in the race. Vettel took his 9th consecutive race victory here, ahead of Webber who says goodbye to F1 with a fastest lap.

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Vettel celebrated his victory once again with a few donuts on the pit straight, just ahead of the pitlane entry. Felipe Massa followed suit to thank his fans. Mark Webber had another idea as he took off his helmet halfway through his victory lap to feel the air blowing through his hair on his final lap in a Formula One car.