Abu Dhabi Grand Prix – Digital Race Facts

It’s the final race of the season and Bernie couldn’t have staged a more dramatic finale. Last week in Sao Paolo, Red Bull Racing secured the constructors title, an accomplishment that was long overdue as the Newey-designed RB6 dominated for most of the year. Now it’s time to settle the drivers title and we’ve still got 4 contenders in play.

Fernando Alonso, announcing back in July that he would win the title in 2010, has continued to outperform his rivals in the 8 races since the British GP. Meanwhile Fernando has admitted he is only aiming for second in Abu Dhabi on Sunday afternoon, which would land him a third Formula One driver’s title.

The debate over whether Red Bull will instruct Sebastian Vettel to ‘assist’ Mark Webber’s title efforts on Sunday continues to wear on, with seemingly a different answer depending on who you ask in the team. The co-owner of Red Bull Racing, Dietrich Mateschitz announced earlier this week that losing the drivers’ title to Fernando Alonso and Ferrari would be preferred over pushing the team drivers into ‘team orders’. “We don’t manipulate things like Ferrari do,” he concluded saying, “It’s better to loose than to cheat.”

Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has announced that both, Vettel and Webber will be free to race however it is the team’s intention to deny Ferrari the drivers title and therefore he would expect both drivers to act in the best interests of the team. Hmm…

Meanwhile Mclaren’s Lewis Hamilton believes he no longer has a chance of winning the F1 Drivers’ Championship in 2010, as the McLaren MP4-25 car is not fast enough. Instead he intends to “just have fun” on Sunday. He hasn’t mentioned if this means acting as a spoiler in the last act of the title play, but if I were Fernando I’d be just a little bit worried..

As usual we have a bunch of preview videos over on SkiddPlayer in the Formula 1 2010 Channel, and this time we’ll single out the excellent Murray Walker preview which is the last of his exclusive Castrol Rankings vodcasts of 2010.

There will be an abundance of information to help guide us through the weekend, from McLaren’s excellent live data and commentary, the BBC’s interactive TV coverage and the many twitter streams that keep you close to all the action [See our: Essential F1 Twitter Sources].

Whatever you do this weekend, we hope you have a good one and enjoy the thrilling conclusion to 2010.