The battle for the World Drivers’ Championship continues at 2 a.m. Sunday morning with the Formula One Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka.
With six races left in the 2012 Formula One season, every point will be hotly contested as Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel, Kimi Raikkönen, and Lewis Hamilton all strive to add another title to their résumés.
With 150 points up for grabs, most of the field is still mathematically in the hunt but realistically, only these four drivers have a chance. Ferrari’s Alonso has 194 points, Red Bull’s Vettel, 165. Raikönnen is third with 149 and Lewis Hamilton, after his disastrous transmission failure while leading at Singapore, has 142.
With Ferrari’s latest updates not delivering the promised performance and McLaren having transmission woes, any of the top four drivers could while Vettel’s RB8 and Raikkönen’s ES20 deliver reliable performance, it is impossible to predict who might win the race, let alone the title.
Both Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso emphasized this in interviews on formula1.com, F1’s official website.
“There’s a lot of races left and it’s a bit difficult to predict what’s going to happen,” said Vettel. “We have to make sure that we finish the races first of all. I think the pace is there, even if we are not quick enough to win then it is good enough to collect a lot of points. It’s a tough championship so far but we’re still in it. We’re still looking forward to the next couple of races, and obviously the target at the moment is to beat Fernando.
“It’s a little bit difficult to predict,” Alonso agreed. “All this year we’ve been up and down for all the teams and it’s the same for us. For sure, we need to improve the performance we saw in Singapore. Maybe Silverstone is also quite similar to Suzuka and we were quite okay there so hopefully we can repeat that kind of performance.”
Suzuka’s twisting 18-turn, 3.6 circuit is challenge to drivers, with some high-speed corners, fast technical sections and very little runoff. Lewis Hamilton is a fan of the track.
