As much as people are saying he's not fighting Maldonado for the title - he is fighting for the points still and shouldn't be expected to just give up a chunk of points because he happens to have a lunatic trying to get past who will spear him off the road if he fails.
Even more is, an unsafe driver is an unsafe driver, if he let Maldonado past down the straight Maldonado could still decide to drive into him, that is all that is relevant. We've seen Maldonado do that before and we saw Kovo hit by someone randomly hitting him when he made no trouble for the guy getting past.
If Maldonado did what he did on purpose, and I absolutely don't discount that, then he could have done that on a straight even if Hamilton got out of the way. A maniac on the track is a maniac on the track no matter what you do. Hamilton was running his race and driving safely in all incidents of overtaking, Maldonado wasn't, regularly doesn't and the only reason Hamilton didn't finish in either 3rd or 4th was Maldonado commiting a ridiculous attempt at an overtake then a horrifically unsafe move in coming back onto the track mid corner and smacking a car in the side.
He seems to have a temper, and worse, he seems utterly willing to use his car as a weapon when his temper gets the best of him, he really doesn't have any business being out there.
The fact that he hit a steward under yellows and got banned from Monaco proves that, who else has that happened to, who else is rich enough to bribe his way out of the ban?
Ultimately, I do wonder if that is why it was a 20 second penalty and not something VERY harsh.... how much money does he personally bring to the team, to Bernie and the sport, we've already seen that money buy his way out of trouble and into a drive, is it that far fetched that the same guys who take his money don't want to either ban him or give him harsh penalties?
Anyway, well done Alonso, he put in a few really nice moves, mostly at the start of the race as it turns out the Grosjean move basically didn't matter(still good don't get me wrong just the importance of those early moves made the race for him). He was given a huge gift from Mclaren pit crew again, would have been nice to see Hamilton/Alonso fight it out in the dying stages of the race but wasn't to be
Ultimately people need to realise practice pace means literally nothing, qualifying pace doesn't mean an awful lot either. With refueling and or previous seasons tyres we've seen a significant increase in pace throughout a race, with these tyres, this year, race pace isn't remotely close to qualifying outside a few people who pit ultra late and put on a bit of a spurt(great to see, but the whole race should be like end of Canada or end of Valencia for Schumi/Webber). What was pole a 1:38 something, and what laps were we seeing start to finish, 1:44? IT doesn't matter if you can't get pole because you can't get in the low 1:38's, in the race your car is capable of 6 seconds faster than it will ever actually go
The boring thing is previous races, as fuel comes off the tyres were used, so times came down, everyone got faster. These tyres everyone tries to maintain same pace on the tyres start to finish with a very small decrease in lap times.
For such a rubbish track, this race was half-decent!
