New Delhi: Fernando Alonso breathed new life in his championship challenge after finishing a creditable 3rd in Turkey on Sunday. A couple of days later, the Ferrari driver did some number crunching and found out that despite trailing championship leader Sebastien Vettel by a whopping 52 points, all was not lost.
Alonso's premise is that last year he was trailing the championship leader by 47 points with only eight races left while this year, he has 15 races to recover from.
However, there is one thing that Alonso hasn't take into account in his little numbers game… defending champion Sebastien Vettel! It is the Vettel factor that may have already put the title beyond Alonso's grasp.
For what is significant this year is that Alonso is trailing Vettel by 52 points. Last year, after the British Grand Prix, it was not Vettel but Lewis Hamilton who was leading the championship and had opened a 47 point gap from Alonso. At that time, the difference between Vettel and Alonso was 23 points, the biggest between the two in 2010.
After the 2010 British Grand Prix, both Alonso and Vettel went into an overdrive with a string of impressive performances.
They were going neck and neck in pursuit of Hamilton and, later Mark Webber who had taken a lead for a while. After the Italian Grand Prix, Alonso had taken a slender lead over Vettel in the championship which he managed to keep till the last race in Abu Dhabi.
The reason why the Vettel factor is important is because similar to this year, Red Bull Racing had the quickest car in 2010.
Out of the 19 races, Red Bull Racing cars (Vettel and Mark Webber) were on pole 15 times. The reason why Sebastien Vettel didn’t managed to wrap up the title much earlier was because of his driving errors.
Hamilton's McLaren was not the quickest car among the grid and therefore, Alonso always had a chance of catching up to him.
However, had Alonso been trailing Vettel by the same margin, he would have struggled to get as close to the German as he eventually did at the end of the season. (Alonso lost the title to Vettel by a mere three points)
Besides Red Bull Racing having the quickest car, what would make Alonso’s title challenge even more difficult is the improvement in Vettel's temperament this year. Last year, Vettel lost out on winning more races or scoring extra points because of indiscretion.
This year though, he has looked more methodical, focused and composed. As a result, Alonso's mathematics, though logical, seems a bit incomplete.
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