Time For A New Champion?

In this first season of racing under the most radical rule changes in many years there should be plenty of scope for a new world champion to emerge. Given their experience any of the five previous champions in the current field of 22 drivers might be favored to win again but uncertainties about the performance and reliability of everyone’s new equipment present a welcome opportunity for a change in the status quo that has prevailed for nearly a decade.

Following Alonso’s first driving title in 2005 Raikkonen, Hamilton, Button and Vettel have subsequently worn the crown. Collectively they have won nine championships, a number at odds with the fact that there have been 32 different champions in the 63 seasons since the driving title was first awarded. The statistical average of a new champion every couple of years suggests the time for a new winner is overdue.

But times have changed for drivers, with their team and equipment now having much greater influence than before. While the exceptional talent of Fangio enabled him to win five driving titles with four different teams in the 1950s, the next four decades each produced from six to seven different driving champions. Five drivers won championships in the first decade of the new millennium, when Schumacher dominated. In the first half of the current decade four driving titles have been won by Vettel who, like Schumacher, benefitted from having superior teams and cars, as well as team mates who were required to be subservient.

F1 is now more than ever a team sport, with drivers having to race according to instructions from the pit wall and under-funded teams ill-equipped to win. But this year’s circumstances featuring unfamiliar cars with unproven performance potential should level the playing field considerably. Double points awarded in the final race and the likelihood of good or bad luck having greater influence in the results make predicting the identity of the 2014 world champion much more of a guessing game.

If a new first-time champion is crowned a shortlist of likely candidates must be headed by Nico Rosberg, whose Mercedes team looked strongest in pre-season testing and whose father Keke won the title in 1982, a decade when Scheckter, Jones, Piquet, Lauda, Prost and Senna also won championships.


WHY CHAMPIONS COME AND GO
Enzo Ferrari's 'Parabolic Curve of Champions'...

"A champion is born, forms himself and grows until such time when the anxiety to test himself beyond his human capilities blinds him to anything else. He becomes blinkered, determined to win. Winning is all that counts. Having reached the peak of his career the champion has new needs in life, of environment and interests. The metamorphosis completes itself: The champion no longer manages to win as often as before and has a tendency to blame this fact on other people and situations, absolving himself, at times justifiably, but more often as a result of preconceived ideas. In reality the main cause of him becoming obscure lies with himself. The fighter has ceased to exist. The champion is now a suffering utility man, and only his intelligence can save him from becoming dim and tarnished." - Enzo Ferrari