By Andrew Benson
BBC Sport at Nurburgring

Red Bull’s Mark Webber scored his maiden Formula 1 win with a brilliant performance at the German Grand Prix after a drive-through penalty.

Webber was punished for colliding with Brawn’s Rubens Barrichello at the start but was in a class of his own to dominate the race despite his handicap.

Sebastian Vettel made it a Red Bull one-two ahead of Felipe Massa.

Barrichello finished sixth behind Williams’s Nico Rosberg and Jenson Button while Lewis Hamilton was last.

Button remains in the world championship lead on 68 points, but Vettel and Webber have leap-frogged over Barrichello.

The German is 21 points behind Button with Webber just 1.5 points behind his team-mate and Webber the same margin ahead of Barrichello.

Starting from pole position, Webber was an odds-on favourite heading into the race but he made life difficult for himself from the moment the lights went out at the start.

"It’s an incredible day for me. I wanted to win so badly"

Mark Webber

He was slow off the line and in trying – and failing – to prevent Barrichello passing him he swerved at the Brawn and the two cars touched.

The stewards took a dim view of the manoeuvre and handed Webber a drive-through penalty, which meant he had to drive through the pits – where there is a 120km/h speed limit – before rejoining the race.

But crucially Red Bull left Webber as long as they could before bringing him in to serve the penalty on lap 14.

Because his team-mate Sebastian Vettel and Button had been held up after being passed by the slower McLaren of Heikki Kovalainen at the start, Webber was able to rejoin in the lead and set about re-building his advantage.

The race further fell into his lap because Barrichello, who made his first pit stop when Webber came in for his penalty, and he came out behind Felipe Massa’s Ferrari, which held him up until his first pit stop on lap 25.

So although Webber dropped to eighth after his first pit stop on lap 19, he was able to close the gap on Barrichello in second place.

And by the time all drivers had made their stops, Webber was back in the lead by just after half distance.

From there, he was able to cruise to a well-deserved first victory while the Brawns were left with deteriorating tyres to hold off the charging Fernando Alonso of Renault.

"It’s an incredible day for me," said Webber. "I wanted to win so badly.

"The only thing in the end I though was going to beat me, or test me even more, was the rain. But even that held off.

"It was a little bit testing. Obviously I lost Barrichello completely off the start. I thought he’d gone a little bit to the left so I went to the right and banged into him, and that’s not normally my style.

"I had to recover [from the drive-through penalty], my engineer kept me quite calm and I pushed as hard as I could."

Struggling to make their tyres work in the cool temperatures, Brawn chose a three-stop strategy, but they spent too long behind slower cars to make it work.

And Button, seeing the startling pace of the Red Bulls, will be relieved that his team have a major upgrade package to come for the next race in Hungary in two weeks’ time.

Hamilton had fancied his chances of scoring a podium finish after qualifying fifth – and a fuel-corrected third fastest.

But after benefiting from his Kers power-boost system to contest the lead with Webber and Barrichello going into the first corner, Hamilton missed his braking point and ran wide.

He got a puncture and rejoined last where for some reason the McLaren, which has a major aerodynamic upgrade this weekend, did not show the pace it had on Saturday.</p

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