McLaren’s Jenson Button took an outstanding victory in Melbourne this evening after an inspiring early switch to slick tyres following a wet start to the race. Showers around the start of today’s twilight event resulted in a thrilling and action-packed race, but Button nevertheless had more reliability problems on Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull to thank for claiming his maiden McLaren victory.

With light rain falling just before the start of the race, all drivers were forced to start on intermediate tyres, with polesitter Sebastian Vettel making a clean getaway at lights-out to lead on the opening lap. Directly behind him on the grid, a poor start by Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso resulted in disaster as he hit eventual winner Button at the first corner, putting the Spaniard to the very back of the field.

Once drivers had settled into a rythm, with Vettel leading from Massa, Webber, Kubica and Alonso, it didn’t take long for a dry line to appear. First to make the risky switch to dry weather tyres was Button, but after a scrappy first sector getting his tyres up to temperature, he quickly posted fastest sector times, prompting almost all other drivers into the pitlane for the switch. After delaying his stop for another lap, leader Vettel re-emerged just ahead of Button on lap 10.

With a gap of a second, Vettel soon got back up to speed and extended his lead up to five seconds before brake problems began hampering his performance. Then, near the end of lap 26 while holding a four-second advantage, the left-front brake disk failed on his Red Bull, sending him spinning into the gravel at turn 13 when victory looked to be within his grasp, just like Bahrain.

The retirement handed Button a three-second lead over second-placed Robert Kubica, but on lap 29 the Briton immediately upped his pace, and by ten laps later he had quadrupled his advantage to some 12 seconds. Not needing to stop again for fresh tyres, Button simply cruised to the finish, opening a gap of 18.5 seconds at its maximum to win by 12 seconds.

Renault’s Kubica hung onto second place for a superb result despite being hounded by Ferrari’s Felipe Massa for the final half of the race. The Brazilian scored his second podium of the season with third, while team-mate Fernando Alonso had to make do with fourth after pressurising Felipe for almost the entire race distance. Nico Rosberg took fifth for Mercedes, while McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton dropped to sixth in the closing stages after being hit by Mark Webber.

Vitantonio Liuzzi scored more points for Force India in seventh, closely followed by Williams’ Rubens Barrichello doing likewise in eighth, with Webber endured a torrid home race to come ninth. Michael Schumacher picked up the final point in tenth.

Here are the full results;