SALON

Monday, Nov 26, 2012 12:30 AM UTC

Column: Can Formula One get any better than 2012?

By

Topics: From the Wires,

Column: Can Formula One get any better than 2012?Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel of Germany celebrates as Mercedes Grand Prix driver Michael Schumacher of Germany walks away from his car after the Formula One Brazilian Grand Prix at the Interlagos race track in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2012. Vettel overcame a first-lap crash to clinch his third straight Formula One championship title on Sunday, finishing sixth in an incident-filled Brazilian Grand Prix won by Jenson Button under pouring rain. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)(Credit: AP)

One of the most enthralling seasons of racing in recent memory finished with one of the most exciting races ever. Surely, Formula One cannot get much better than in 2012. Our hearts surely wouldn’t stand it. But next year could be special, too.

Unpredictable to the last lap. Competitive. Largely fair. With a deserving champion, Sebastian Vettel, pushed to his limits by a noble loser, Fernando Alonso, who might have finished as the 2012 champion himself with just a smidgen more luck. This year, F1 delivered everything one can reasonably expect from sport, and all at dizzying speed.

Ridiculously expensive and gas guzzling, F1 may seem like an anachronism at a time when governments and families are counting pennies and cutting back. But, wow, what a show.

With 20 races from March to November, this was the longest season in 62 years of F1. But it never felt too long, because the outcome remained so uncertain. The tension of not being sure who would finish as champion built up nicely through the year, becoming exquisite by the last race in Brazil on Sunday, where only Vettel and Alonso remained in the chase for the world title.

Seven different winners in the first seven races made this a year of exceptional variety. Having been so dominant last year, greedily winning 11 of 19 races, Vettel didn’t really get his nose ahead this year until the F1 circus traveled through Asia in September and October, and he won four successive races in Singapore, Japan, Korea and India.

To the end, Alonso clung like a bull dog to Vettel’s coattails. After thousands of miles of racing around the world in 19 different countries, the gap between them at the checkered flag at Interlagos on Sunday had withered to just three points, in Vettel’s favor — 281 to Alonso’s 278.

The Spaniard climbed out of his bright red Ferrari and stared long and hard down the track with blank, faraway eyes. Had he won that last race in Sao Paulo, instead of finishing second, or had his German rival finished just two spots lower than his sixth place, then it would have been Alonso, not Vettel, being crowned as a three-time world champion and the Red Bull driver painfully ruing what might have been.

But of the two drivers, Alonso was most impressive in 2012, because he made his Ferrari seem far quicker than it was. From the day in February when heavy snow at its factory in Maranello, Italy, forced Ferrari to cancel the unveiling of its F2012 model, so little this year went to plan for the most famous team in F1. The car appeared to be a dud in preseason testing. The team’s chassis boss said it was hard to drive. After the first race in Australia, Alonso said he felt the car was about one second per lap slower than it needed to be to get him on the front row of the grid.

That Alonso got to Brazil trailing Vettel by just 13 points was testimony both to his skill in squeezing every last drop of performance out of the car and Ferrari’s relentless work improving it as the season progressed. The car’s fundamental problems were also why Alonso hoped for a chaotic race in Brazil, because he knew his Ferrari had less chance of unsettling Vettel’s superior Red Bull in a run-of-the-mill Grand Prix.

Alonso got his wish, and more.

Rain slickened the circuit. Vettel had a sluggish start and a mistake on turn four of the first lap, diving too aggressively into the corner, thumping into another car, spinning and leaving him at the back of the race. The radio linking him to his mechanics also broke, so when he later came into the pits for tires better suited for the damp weather, his team wasn’t ready for him, costing him more time. At 25, Vettel is F1′s youngest triple world champion. But this wacky race surely aged him.

“The most difficult race we faced,” Vettel said.

But edge-of-your-seat entertainment for spectators.

“The most exciting race that I ever saw in Formula One,” said Nelson Piquet, F1′s champion in 1981, 1983 and 1987.

F1 plans to switch to smaller turbocharged 1.6 liter V6 engines from 2014, from the 2.4 liter V8s used now. That’s a major shift that could shake up the sport’s established hierarchy. But there aren’t massive changes in the rules for 2013, which gives reason to hope the action might pick up next season close to where it left off in Brazil on Sunday. One of the most visible differences in the cars next year will be purely aesthetic: They’ll be allowed to hide the kinks on their noses that were so ugly in 2012.

Wonder-designer Adrian Newey will be counted on to deliver another quick Red Bull, further refining his RB-series car that gave Vettel the platform to become the first driver since Michael Schumacher to win three successive world titles.

Schumacher will be back in retirement, after three ho-hum years at Mercedes where he didn’t get even within sniffing distance of being able to challenge for an eighth world title.

His replacement is Lewis Hamilton, the Briton with a fragile temperament so keen to add to his world title of 2008. The pressure will be on Mercedes to give Hamilton a better car than its slug of 2012, so he doesn’t quickly get frustrated and regret his move from McLaren.

At McLaren, 2009 world champion Jenson Button is licking his lips at the idea of now leading that team. Button won Sunday’s race, with what looked like speed to spare.

“To end on a high is fantastic and it bodes very well for 2013,” Button said.

Ferrari also is already working on its car for 2013. It hasn’t had a championship driver since Kimi Raikkonen in 2007 and hasn’t been able to deliver Alonso the third world title his talent surely deserves.

“We need to build a quicker car next year,” Ferrari chassis director Pat Fry said.

The biggest downer?

That the next race isn’t until March, in Melbourne.

The best measure of how exciting this season has been is that that seems like a horribly long wait.

___

John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org or follow him at http://twitter.com/johnleicester

More John Leicester.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
244 points245 points | 10 comments
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
218 points219 points | 47 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
185 points186 points | 1 comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
54 points55 points | 8 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
40 points41 points | 3 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations