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Vettel wins in Hungary as Ferrari finishes first and second

Sebastian Vettel won a tense Hungarian Grand Prix on Sunday in a Ferrari one-two that stretched his championship lead to 14 points after Mercedes rival Lewis Hamilton sportingly surrendered third place to his team mate. The German, savoring his fourth win of the season and 46th of his Formula One career, took the chequered flag 0.9 seconds ahead of team mate Kimi Raikkonen. The Finn had looked faster than Vettel for most of the afternoon. "I'm over the moon, that was a really difficult race," said the winner, who had to wrestle with a skewed steering wheel on a sweltering afternoon at the Hungaroring and had no room for error. Hamilton finished fourth after slowing down on the last lap and allowing Finnish team mate Valtteri Bottas to go past, despite the loss of vital points to the Briton's championship challenge. Bottas had let Hamilton through on the 45th of the 70 laps, on the assurance that his team mate would hand back the place if he could not overtake the Ferraris, and the triple champion duly kept his word. "Really thanks to Lewis for keeping the promise in the end and letting me by," said Bottas. "I don't think every team mate would have swapped back." Hamilton, whose radio was malfunctioning for some of the race and would have had more of a chance had he got past Bottas earlier, said he had done what he had to do. "It's tough in the championship but I'm a man of my word," he said. "I did say that if I can't overtake them I would let him back through." On a circuit where overtaking is notoriously hard, the top five all finished in their starting order with Max Verstappen fifth for Red Bull. The Dutch teenager was handed a 10-second stop and go penalty for colliding with his Australian team mate Daniel Ricciardo on the opening lap. The impact ended Ricciardo's race, with the car stranded on the track and fluid leaking from the broken radiator, and brought out the safety car. "It's not on. It was amateur to say the least. It's not like he was trying to pass – there was no room to pass," said an angry Ricciardo. "I don't think he likes it when a team mate gets in front. You've got the whole race to try and repair the mistake but the pass was never on. It wasn't even a pass, it was a very poor mistake." Fernando Alonso, who celebrated his 36th birthday on Saturday, gave struggling McLaren their best finish of the season so far by taking sixth place and also setting the fastest lap of the race.

Ferrari names Edwin Fenech head of North American office

Ferrari North America has been sailing without a captain for the past several months since its previous chief executive, Marco Mattiacci, was called home to Italy to run the Scuderia. But now the Italian automaker has announced a new capo to run the office in New Jersey, and his name is Edwin Fenech.
Not to be confused with the French-Italian actress Edwige Fenech (who obviously showed up in our research before the Ferrari exec did), Edwin Fenech has a long history of running regional offices for the Prancing Horse marque. Prior to making the jump to the North American division, Fenech ran the company's operations in the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and China, and previously served as sales and marketing director for France and sales manager for all of Europe.
Now in charge of Ferrari's largest market, Fenech will be responsible for expanding the company's presence not only in the United States - in which Ferrari has been present now for sixty years - but also in Canada as well as Central and South America.

World Car of the Year finalists announced

To say the 2014 Geneva Motor Show was packed full of news is an understatement as big as the show's home at the Palexpo convention center. Despite everything that we were able to cover during this year's show, there's still more coming out of Switzerland, including the announcement of the finalists for the 2014 World Car of the Year Awards.
We reported on the original list of finalists over three weeks ago, and now, that initial list has been pared down to three finalists for each of the five awards. The finalists were announced at a press conference by frequent Autoblog contributor and co-chair of the awards, Matt Davis (above).
The finalists for the overall title of 2014 World Car of the Year are the Audi A3, the BMW 4 Series and the Mazda3. The World Luxury Car of the Year will be either the Bentley Flying Spur, the Mercedes-Benz S-Class or the Land Rover Range Rover Sport, while the Performance Car of the Year will be awarded to the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, the Ferrari 458 Speciale or the Porsche 911 GT3 (which, um, yeah...).