Can Formula One get any better than 2012?
AP Sports Columnist 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 overlong, because the outcome remained so uncertain. The tension of not being able to be sure who would finish as champion built up nicely through the year, be- coming 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 swung in September and October through Asia, where he won four successive races in Singapore, Japan, Korea and India.
To the end, Alonso clung like a bulldog to Vettel’s coattails. After thousands of kilometers (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 finish- ing second, or had his German rival finished just two spots lower than his 6th place, then it would have been Alonso, not Vettel, being crowned as a 3-time world champion and