Reflections on the championship - A Fan's View

As usual we have had many great comments and some interesting points of view put forward about the outcome of today's championship.

I wanted to give the fans a voice tonight and so I've picked out this post from JM Randle, which expresses his view on this epic season and gives a good assessment of our new world champion.

"With an hour or two having passed since the race finished, first and foremost we have to congratulate Sebastian Vettel – a combination of a truly awesome racer, able to extract the maximum from his car over both one lap and a race distance, and the magnificent Red Bull RB6, the class of the field for almost the entire season and suitably rewarded with the Drivers’ and Constructors’ World Championship titles.

With that said, I don’t know if I was alone (probably was!) in feeling slightly deflated by the way the final race of this epic season panned out – the track and tyre degredation (or lack thereof!) played a huge role in the final result, rather bringing things full circle from the first race in Bahrain. The difference being that THIS time, Vettel’s Red Bull didn’t give up on him!

The lack of wear of the so-called “soft” tyres was just ridiculous, but it’s not the first time this season it’s happened – maybe this is something that will change with the introduction of Pirelli tyres next year? But most frustrating was the lack of overtaking opportunities, a which is particularly disappointing given that they had a completely blank sheet of paper (not to mention a blank cheque!) with which to design the track. What that meant is that every single one of the title protagonists (aside from Vettel of course, who needed to overtake nobody) were unable to get past whichever driver they found themselves behind; Hamilton behind Kubica until the Pole’s late stop, Alonso behind Petrov and Webber behind both of them. Clearly, this situation would not have arisen on a circuit where overtaking is more achievable, though credit of course must go to the Renault drivers for not putting a wheel wrong!

You have to give credit to Vettel for putting himself in a position, race after race, where he just has to drive away from the rest of the field and let the rest of the drivers sort things out for themselves! The question marks over his overtaking ability will remain for as long as he’s in a dominant car and putting it at the front of the grid each race – you only have to look at how RB qualified in the top 10 at every single race this season to see how we never got to see how they fought their way up through the field, so from this season, we only really have Vettel’s crashes in Turkey and Spa as ‘evidence’ of how he handles this other important element of being a top racing driver!

However, in the end, if you can put your car on pole and drive off, regardless of the quality of your opposition and no matter how many times safety cars come out and whittle your lead down to zero, your ability to overtake is almost irrelevant! Today, Alonso and Ferrari threw things away somewhat by concentrating too much on what Webber was doing – if they’d have been more patient on the soft tyres like the 3 cars in front were, they may well have experienced the same benefits! Instead, a poor strategic decision conceded track position to slower cars on a circuit where overtaking had already proven nigh-on impossible. Webber was nowhere this weekend unfortunately, but his own struggles to get past Alonso/Petrov amply demonstrate that even with the clear fastest car on the grid, the overtaking issue hasn’t gone away, particularly on these sorts of tracks!

A memorable season anyway, a shame that the final race wasn’t really befitting of the occasion (again, more the track than anything else, which is a shame because Abu Dhabi could do so much better!), but full credit to Vettel and Red Bull, and if next season is even half as competitive, we’re in for another cracker