page_title: 2012 Formula One World Championship
section_title: Round 10 – Germany
hierarchical_section_title: 2012 Formula One World Championship / Race summaries / Round 10 – Germany
caption_attribution_description: P7229546
context_page_description: The 2012 FIA Formula One World Championship was the 66th season of FIA Formula One motor racing. It featured the 63rd FIA Formula One World Championship, a motor racing series for Formula One cars, recognised by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile – the governing body of motorsport – as the highest class of competition for open-wheel racing cars. The championship was contested over twenty rounds, which started in Australia on 18 March and ended in Brazil on 25 November. The 2012 season saw the return of the United States Grand Prix, which was held at the Circuit of the Americas, a purpose-built circuit in Austin, Texas. After being cancelled in 2011 due to civil protests, the Bahrain Grand Prix also returned to the calendar.
  The early season was tumultuous, with seven different drivers winning the first seven races of the championship; a record for the series. It was not until the European Grand Prix in June that a driver, Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, won his second race of the year, and with it, emerged as a championship contender.
context_section_description: Limited running in practice and a wet qualifying session meant that teams had to improvise their strategies at the Hockenheimring. Fernando Alonso controlled much of the race from pole position, only relinquishing the lead when he pitted, and he went on to take his third victory of the season. Lewis Hamilton's one hundredth Grand Prix started with a disaster when he picked up a puncture on the third lap and spent most of the race at the tail end of the field before retiring on lap 56 with a suspension problem. Confusion briefly reigned when Hamilton, in seventeenth place at the time, began lapping faster than the leaders and sought to unlap himself. Sebastian Vettel later claimed that this was a ploy by McLaren to force both him and Alonso to drive defensively against Hamilton, slowing them down enough to allow team-mate Jenson Button to leap-frog them at the second round of stops; Vettel lost a position to Button, but Alonso was unaffected, as Ferrari pitted him before Hamilton could interfere with his race. Button briefly looked as if he had the pace to pass Alonso for the race lead, but the race was deadlocked in the final twenty laps, and Button began to fade in the final five laps of the race. The race was marked by another technical dispute regarding Red Bull Racing, who were referred to the stewards by FIA Technical Delegate Jo Bauer for what he felt was an illegal engine map in use on the Red Bull RB8. The stewards elected to take no action against Red Bull, stating that the team had not violated any of the technical regulations, but noted that they did not accept all of the arguments presented by the team when asked to explain. The stewards were less forgiving of Vettel, who ran wide at the hairpin while trying to pass Button and could only complete the pass outside the limits of the circuit. Vettel had twenty seconds added to his race time as a penalty, demoting him to fifth overall. With Button promoted to second, Kimi Räikkönen inherited third place and Kamui Kobayashi was classified a career-best fourth.
caption: Reigning World Constructors' Champion Red Bull was involved in several technical disputes that challenged the legality of its car.[216][241][242][243]
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