F1 Fanatic

Thing is, Vettel’s already had his bad-luck DNF, albeit in a mechanical nature. In a sense, you could say Vettel and Alonso’s luck has evened out. In any case, one more DNF for Alonso, and Vettel would become an enormous favorite.

Raikkonen 5% – Lotus are no longer on the pace and may have the smallest budget of the top 4 teams, making it difficult for them to catch up. If they couldn’t win with their car in the summer, I don’t see them winning now. And they’ll need to do a lot of winning just to get back into range.

Hamilton 20% – I can see McLaren having the fastest car on some of the remaining circuits – they’ve always been strong in Abu Dhabi, and may be able to top the times in Brazil too. But Lewis doesn’t seem to be in the right frame of mind right now. Beyond driving fast (which he does more often than not whatever is going on), he needs to motivate and lead his team back into contention. His impending departure for Mercedes will not be fatal to his title chances, but it won’t do them any good either.

Alonso 35% – The good news for Fernando: Felipe Massa seems to be back on form. He can finally become the effective #2 Fernando needs to win the title. The bad news for Fernando: the F2012′s pace has been erratic as of late. Fernando may be able to drag that car up the order after qualifying to places where it doesn’t deserve to be. But as we’ve seen lately, poor qualifying means it’s a lot more likely that you’ll get taken out by someone else’s mistake. To make matters worse, Ferrari’s wind tunnel seems to be suffering issues and has had to be closed for checks. That will impact Ferrari’s ability to develop the car not only in this critical stage of the season, but also for 2013. Simply put, in the words of Alonso from 2010, he will need to finish on the podium at every race until the end of the season to have a good shot at the title. And hope for a little misfortune hitting Vettel as well.

Vettel 40% – A very fast (if not the fastest) driver, in the fastest car on the grid right now. If Red Bull can be consistent and keep their gap over Ferrari all the way to Brazil, they will be in excellent shape. But some question marks remain over Red Bull’s reliability – especially those pesky alternators. One other thing to note is Vettel already has 2 reprimands – one more of that and he will get a 10-place grid drop, something he just can’t afford at this point.

No offense to Vettel, but would he be the worse 3 time champion? TBH I think he would.

Jack Brabham: He won in his own team! He also won his 3 championships against Jim Clark, Graham Hill etc…

Jackie Stewart: He made drastic improvements to the safety of the sport.

Nelson Piquet: Invented tyre warming blankets, tyre heating, and mid-race refueling.

Niki Lauda: Cheated death in Nurburgring, won a championships after his near-fatal incident. Retired, came back 3 years later, won in 1984 and the only driver to date to out-score Prost in equal cars over a season’s course.

Ayrton Senna: Nuff’ said.

I just don’t like the idea of having Vettel amongst these names. Alonso should be up there before Seb IMO.

I love how the phrase “no offense” is almost invariably followed up with something meant to cause offense.

Right now I would say Alonso 40%, Vettel 40% and Hamilton 20% change of winning the world title. Hamilton, cause the Mclaren is probably still the fastest car in general, good at every circuit. I estimate the Redbull and Ferrari equally quick on race-pace, with the RB8 a bit better in qualifying. On the other hand, the Ferrari seems more reliable. As for the drivers, i think Vettel=Alonso. Both are very quick, and are able to recover from low grid positions. Recent examples: Vettel at SPA, Alonso at Monza.

@kingshark F1 has always been about 85% team, 15% driver. Red-Bull therefore deserve both titles because they are ahead of everyone else yet again and, tbh, Ferrari don’t deserve anything. Their car coming into this season was hopeless and their windtunnel development is an embarrassment.

Alonso is merely a member of the team and he has done exceedingly well to transcend what has been the 3rd/4th best car this season into a contender. But Newey & Red-Bull deserve this and Vettel again has delivered.

Maybe this proves that driver stats aren’t necessarily be all and end all of F1.

I’m sure it’s obvious to everyone that there are only two drivers with a realistic chance of winning the title now, but there are still five with a mathematical chance, so I thought I’d look at what each of them need from the Abu Dhabi GP to keep their chances alive:

Lewis Hamilton: must win, with Vettel finishing outside the top ten and Alonso finishing outside the top three.
Mark Webber: must win, with Vettel finishing outside the top eight and Alonso finishing outside the top two.
Kimi Räikkönen: must either win, with Vettel finishing outside the top six, or come second, with Vettel finishing outside the top ten and Alonso finishing outside the top three.
Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel: will still have a chance after Abu Dhabi no matter what the outcome.

That means that we’ll have no more than four contenders after this race, as it isn’t possible for both Hamilton and Webber to win. I’ll post another update like this ahead of the USA Grand Prix, though I expect it will be for only two drivers.

It’s a good thing you guys are not bookies:-)

Webber 0% (that’s really sad to see cause I was hoping he’d one-up Vettel this year)
Hamilton 0%
Raikonnen 0.25%
Alonso 15.75%
Vettel 84%

It’s a long, long shot for Alonso.

@Kingshark
Whew that makes sense – I thought everyone was joking as I looked at the numbers;-)