It’s been a long season, two more to go

This weekend is the penultimate round of the championship as the F1 circus spends the weekend in Brazil. In theory it could all be over this weekend is everything goes Alonso’s way and the other contenders have issues, but that seems unlikely.

Alonso clinches under the following scenarios:

• If Alonso wins and Webber finished fifth or lower
• If Alonso is second, with Webber no higher than 8th and Hamilton and Vettel not winning
• If Alonso finishes 3rd, with Webber finishing outside the points and Hamilton and Vettel finish fourth or worse

Once again Korea the Red bull cars were the class of the field on Friday and Saturday, but neither finished. Out of the 17 races so far this year one of the Red Bull drivers have been on pole for 14 (Vettel 9, Weber 5) of them, and had both P1 and P2 on the grid at eight rounds. The team also claims seven wins, more than any other team.

Those nine pole positions of Vettel have only led to three wins (compared to four wins for Webber). While the Red Bull cars have had reliability issues (Vettel more so than Webber), should neither driver win the title it will be down to errors and mistakes by the team and drivers. The crash where Vettel took out his team mate while running 1-2 in Turkey and running into Button at Spa are the most obvious.

On a single lap Vettel is remarkable, over the year he is 25 points behind Alonso in the championship. I don’t doubt at this time that Vettel will go on to win the championship, probably more than one. Some drivers look like they belong in F1, I think Vettel is one of them.

So if Webber wins the final two races and Vettel second, even if Alonso finishes third in both races, Webber wins. If Vettel wins the last two, with Webber second and Alonso third, the Ferrari driver wins.

This weekend Red Bull has to go for the win, they have no choice. However does team principal Christian Horner have Vettel support Webber, or let them fight it out? This week Horner said “Our strategy remains unchanged – this championship will not be over until the last lap in Abu Dhabi has been completed, and we will be pushing flat out until that time.”

It seems a rather naive strategy if it’s true. The team clearly feels Vettel is their future, but winning the championship this year may mean asking him to put his ambitions aside for this year. Let them race and they could hand the drivers championship to Alonso and the manufacturers’ title to McLaren.

This has been a wonderful season, lots of good racing and some very interesting stories. Five drivers have won races, a further three have stood on the podium and 19 out of the 24 cars have scored points. This as as good as I’d hoped it would be at the beginning of the year.

I think this championship is going all the way to Abu Dhabi, that will be a shoot out.