Just where will Hamilton & Rosberg's 2014 'Desert Duel' end up in F1's glittering list of final-race championship showdowns?
Wednesday 19 November 2014 12:04, UK
The 2014 Abu Dhabi GP will represent the 28th time in Formula 1’s 65-year history that the battle for the Drivers’ Championship has gone down to the final race of the season.
While some of the most memorable races that have settled championships have taken place before the final round of the year – the most famous being Senna and Prost’s Suzuka collisions of 1989 and 1990, both of which were at the penultimate stage of the season – there’s always something just a little extra special about a win-or-bust showdown at the final race.
So here, in reverse chronological order, we recall some of the most famous down-to-the-wire deciders…
The most recent of F1’s title showdowns and undeniably one of the very best. While the Interlagos finale of two years ago lacked the isolated golden ‘moment’ that often ensures a decider goes down in the annals – think Hamilton’s final-corner pass of Glock in 2008 or Nigel Mansell’s spectacular tyre blow of ’86 – what it certainly did have was a narrative of unpredictability running right through its 71-lap distance.
Heading into the weekend and reigning double champion Sebastian Vettel held a 13-point lead over Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso and only needed to finish fourth to secure a third straight crown. Having finished on the podium in the previous six races, winning four of them to overturn his rival’s large mid-season title advantage, Vettel seemed destined to be crowned champion again.
What followed was arguably the biggest scare of what proved to be a four-year era of domination for the Red Bull driver.
The title had appeared to be Alonso’s after Vettel, trying to recover from a poor start, spun on lap one after tagging Bruno Senna’s Williams under braking at the end of the backstraight. Not only did the hefty collision drop the German driver to the back, but it caused significant damage to the left-rear side of his Red Bull.
A DNF initially seemed inevitable but Vettel, despite being down on aerodynamic performance, fought on in the drizzly rain and eventually finished sixth to Alonso's second, giving him the title by a scant three points.
Pre-race standings: 1. Vettel - 273 points, 2, Alonso - 260 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Vettel - 281 points, 2. Alonso - 278 points.
F1’s hitherto only four-way championship decider. After a season full of twists of turns, the top four in the championship were separated by just 24 points entering the final weekend of the season. Frankly, although mathematically both in the hunt, the prospects of Vettel and particularly Hamilton were slim given they were respectively 15 and 24 points behind title leader Alonso in the standings.
The battle for the crown was therefore expected to be a duel between Alonso and the other Red Bull of Mark Webber, who trailed the Spaniard by a seemingly more surmountable eight points. However, against all those predictions, the season and the title battle turned decisively at the first round of pitstops when Ferrari pitted Alonso to cover a struggling Webber and only succeeded in dropping their man into traffic.
Although Webber could only finish eighth, Alonso was to come a cropper as well. For 37 laps the Ferrari driver tried and failed to find a way past Vitaly Petrov’s Renault, condemning the Spaniard to seventh place in the race and second place in the Drivers’ Championship after Vettel pinched the title by four points with a comfortable race victory. Little did F1 know at the time, but a new era had dawned.
Pre-race standings: 1. Alonso - 246 points, 2. Webber - 238 points, 3. Vettel - 231 points, 4. Hamilton - 222 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Vettel - 256 points, 2. Alonso - 252 points, 3. Webber - 242 points, 4. Hamilton - 240 points.
“Is that Glock?!” If you’re looking for sporting melodrama, and the most memorable F1 soundbite of the last ten years, then the breathless climax to the 2008 Brazilian GP is arguably as good as you’re likely to find.
Hamilton’s pass on Totoya’s Timo Glock in the rain at Interlagos meant the then McLaren driver won his first championship on the last corner of the last lap of the last race of the season. It simultaneously also crushed the wild celebrations of Ferrari and the boisterous Brazilian crowd, who for 30 seconds had thought their man Felipe Massa had become World Champion.
In reflection, the last-gasp drama that has since seen the 2008 decider widely described as the best showdown of all time had seemed in slightly short supply for most of the race. Massa, the outsider, was leading comfortably in the wet-dry-wet race from pole but Hamilton was still doing a little more than enough for the title, running in fourth when a fifth was all he required. However, the return of rain with five laps to go spectacularly brought proceedings to life with Hamilton pitting for intermediates and then running wide just two laps from home, dropping him behind Vettel to sixth and out of a title-winning position.
For two tortuous laps he had seemed to have blown the title for the second straight year, before Toyota’s Timo Glock, who had gambled on staying out on slicks, lost grip right at the last. So the title was Hamilton’s in just his second season, but only just.
Pre-race standings: 1. Hamilton – 94 points, 2. Massa – 87 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Hamilton – 98 points, 3. Massa – 97 points.
Lewis Hamilton stood on the brink of two landmark F1 achievements when he took to the Interlagos grid at the end of his astonishing maiden season: the first rookie World Champion and, at 22 years old, the youngest. While a Shanghai gravel trap had scuppered his attempts to close things out at the first attempt the race before, the McLaren starlet appeared in the box seat despite team-mate Fernando Alonso and Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen still having their own title chances heading to Interlagos.
That it was rank outsider Raikkonen - by a solitary point - who ultimately triumphed at the expense of the two McLaren drivers came to represent the final nail in the team's 2007 coffin. The explosive events of Spygate - which saw McLaren hit with a $100m fine and disqualification from the Constructors' Championship - had occured alongside the dramatic breakdown in relations between Alonso and the team’s senior management. For all of that Hamilton, whose startling breakthrough had caused much of Alonso's angst, should still have had his hands on the title.
After a rash response to dropping behind his team-mate at the first lap - Hamilton ran off the road attempting to repass Alonso on the backstraight - the youngster had settled down and looked to be back on course only for a disastrous gearbox glitch to intervene. It lasted for seconds rather than minutes, but the lost ground cost Hamilton dear and his eventual seventh-place finish wasn't good enough to deny race winner Raikkonen the crown.
Pre-race standings: 1. Hamilton – 107 points, 2. Alonso – 103 points, 3. Raikkonen – 100 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Raikkonen – 110 points, 2. Hamilton – 109 points, 3. Alonso – 109 points.
As tense title-deciding weekends go, Jerez ’97 just about had it all. Michael Schumacher, F1’s undisputed superstar and then double World Champion, and Jacques Villeneuve, the peroxide-blonde Canadian firebrand, were the two protagonists having completely dominated the season. It was also Ferrari against Williams, red against blue, in the battle of two of the sport’s traditional titans. Excitement for the duel was heightened in qualifying when Villeneuve and Schumacher, to much amazement and more than a little scepticism, set identical qualifying times of 1:21.072. Such thoughts turned to ones of outright conspiracy when the second Williams of Heinz-Harald Frenzten made it three drivers on the same time.
Villeneuve started on pole from Schumacher courtesy of the fact he had set his qualifying time first but was outdragged by the Ferrari into the first corner. As the first two stints progressed Schumacher established a small, but seemingly comfortable, lead and the title drivers’ title seemed to be heading Maranello after an 18-year wait in just the German’s second season at the team. However, the race, and the title duel, turned after the final pitstops as the Ferrari, seemingly struggling with his new set of tyres, was caught by the Williams with Villeneuve suddenly making a move from a long way back. Schumacher was seemingly caught unawares and, while his initial move of the steering wheel was away from the oncoming Williams, the German turned back in, making inevitable contact with his rival’s sidepod.
Schumacher ended up beached in the gravel and, while the Williams was damaged, Villeneuve was able to continue. "That didn't work, you hit the wrong part of him my friend," famously declared Martin Brundle from the commentary box.
As Schumacher watched on from the side of the track, Villenueve drove on to finish in a title-winning third place – the Canadian overtaken with the minimum of resistance by McLaren duo Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard late on. Schumacher, at the centre of a maelstrom over his on-track conduct for the second time in four seasons, protested his innocence in the collision but in a post-season FIA hearing was stripped of the runner-up position in the standings.
Pre-race standings: 1. Schumacher – 78 points, 2. Villeneuve – 77 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Villeneuve – 81 points, Schumacher DSQ (78 points)
F1’s most tragic of seasons following the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna had largely been dogged by controversy thereafter, with much of it affecting the title race between developing rivals Michael Schumacher of Benetton and Williams’ Damon Hill. A showdown on the streets of Adelaide had seemed a rather unlikely prospect when Schumacher started the season with six wins from seven but two race disqualifications, followed by a two-race ban for the German driver, had allowed Hill, who had started the season as Senna’s understudy, the chance to take things to the wire.
Thanks to a career-best victory in torrential rain at Suzuka, Hill headed Down Under within a point of F1’s new young star, although it was the Briton’s then 41-year-old stand-in team-mate Nigel Mansell who upstaged both championship protagonists to take pole for the decider. However, it was Schumacher, followed by Hill, who led away at the start of the race with the Briton shadowing his rival through the first half of the race. It was on lap 36 when things got tasty: Schumacher outbraked himself and ran wide over the kerb and hit the outside wall, before returning to the track right in front of the oncoming Williams.
Hill, who hadn’t rounded the corner in time to see the leader hit the wall, instinctively dived for the inside of the Benetton at the next right-hander but Schumacher turned in too, making destructive contact. The clash briefly put the German up on two wheels before he came to rest in the tyre barrier, and while Hill briefly continued, his FW16B was critically damaged. It meant that the world title, for the first time, was Schumacher’s but the controversial way in which he achieved it would dog him for the rest of his career.
Pre-race standings: 1. Schumacher – 92 points, 2. Hill – 91 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Schumacher – 92 points, 2. Hill – 91 points.
“And colossally that’s Mansell!” The immortal words of Murray Walker in stunned response to the spectacular title-denying puncture on Nigel Mansell's Williams as the most dramatic moment of the 1986 season and, perhaps any, title showdown played out in heart-breaking fashion for a nation's racing hero. It was the kind of rank misfortune that would often intervene on the Britain's unwanted behalf before he eventually wrapped up his sole F1 crown some six years later.
Mansell had been one of three drivers in contention for the drivers’ title going into the Adelaide decider, but his points advantage over team-mate Nelson Piquet and McLaren’s reigning champion Alain Prost meant he could afford to finish on the bottom step of the podium and still be champion. While a poor start from pole dropped him to fourth, Mansell, in a topsy-turvy race in which tyre problems had already played their part, was in the required third place when his left-rear tyre blew in spectacular, spark-frenzy fashion 18 laps from home as he passed a backmarker down the Brabham Straight.
Mansell slewed into the escape road and into immediate retirement, Williams called Piquet into the pits for a precautionary check-up and Prost, with the race victory, was the against-the-odds World Champion.
Pre-race standings: 1. Mansell – 70 points, 2. Prost – 64 points, 3. Piquet – 63 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Prost – 72 points, 2. Mansell – 70 points, 3. Piquet – 69 points.
It’s certainly easy to see why the James Hunt v Niki Lauda title duel of 1976 ultimately came to be portrayed on the big screen. Notwithstanding the stark differences in style between the two protagonists at the heart of it, the ingredients of a compelling tale were all there across the 16-race campaign: drama, controversy, against-the-odds fightbacks and, in the case of Lauda’s horrific German GP accident which nearly cost the Ferrari star his life, deep sorrow.
That it all distilled into a tense title decider at a rain-soaked Fuji ensured the story was unpredictable right to the last too. Having quite unfathomably only sat out two races while he convalesced from the serious burns sustained in his fiery Nurburgring crash, Lauda, thanks to a dominant start to the year, arrived at the finale three points clear of flamboyant McLaren driver Hunt, who had won three of the previous four races. In horrendously wet race-day conditions in Japan, Lauda protested against the decision to start the race by withdrawing his car at the end of the second lap, leaving race-leader Hunt seemingly on his way to the title.
That’s how things would eventually turn out, but not before one final bout of tense drama when Hunt was forced into a late pitstop for a puncture and then returned to the track and passed Alan Jones and Clay Regazzoni for third. The title was Hunt’s – by all of a point.
Pre-race standings: 1. Lauda – 68 points, 2. Hunt – 65 points.
Post-race standings: 1. Hunt – 69 points, 2. Lauda – 68 points.
So who will triumph this time? The final chapter in Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg's epic 2014 title fight - the Desert Duel of Abu Dhabi - is live on Sky Sports F1 this weekend. Don't miss it!
Watch all of the battle between Hamilton and Rosberg with a Sky Sports Week Pass. No contract
