PARIS - It may be as difficult to believe for fans as it is for the Formula One teams and the media, but the 2012 season is really, finally, over.
It was the longest season ever, with 20 races from March to the end of November, on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. I heard some fans say the season was too long. For many years the norm had been 16 races, then slowly crept up to 17, 18, 19… until we hit 20 this year. Personally, I don't feel the season was too long. Nascar has twice as many races.
The difference is Nascar's races all take place in the United States, basically, whereas the real problem with the final third of the F1 season, from the Singapore Grand Prix in late September to the Brazilian Grand Prix last weekend, was that there was intensive - very intensive - travel from one time zone to another, one part of the world to another, with no respite.
And there were three back-to-back race periods to close out the season. That meant that there were three groups of three races one week apart, in different parts of the world: Japan and South Korea; India and Abu Dhabi; Texas and Brazil. Journalists and team members were counting the dead in the last few races - sorry, I mean, the ill, the wounded.
At least one journalist was sent home when he arrived in Austin after discovering he had malaria from the India trip. Two other journalists were thought to have malaria, and were sent to rest in their hospital or hotels. They did not apparently have malaria (or the more worrying mosquito-carried dengue fever that Delhi has been battling lately).
Word from teams and other support personnel was that the illness level was much higher this season than usual. I spoke to someone - I cannot remember who! - who told me in Austin that the venerable Dr. Sid Watkins, Formula One's great safety innovator who died in September, had once told him that for a complete physical recovery, the human body needed a week for each time zone it visited.
Formula One personnel did not have that this year. My own travel schedule since early October: Two weeks on the road, one week at home in Paris, two weeks on the road, one week at home in Paris, two weeks on the road.
Am I complaining? No way! What a privilege to be able to do this job and bop around the world covering this sport. But there very definitely were times when I knew my body was not finding the adequate time needed to recover.
Funny enough, the people who suffered the least through all that work, play and travel, were the Formula One drivers. They are the first to admit that. Everything is done to protect their health and given them sleep and a break. Having said that, Sebastian Vettel, the man who won the title, spent a fortune to rent a private jet to take him to the final races in order to keep the physical exhaustion and stress as far away as possible. Looks like it worked - his Abu Dhabi and Brazil races were brilliant!
Having said that, on Thursday morning at around 2 AM, when I noticed a fellow journalist had posted something saying that the results of the season might change due to a suspicion that Vettel may have made an illegal move in Brazil, I thought it was a joke. I thought the journalist was just having fun now that the dust had settled and the season was over and he, like me, was just getting back into the rhythm of daily life as a grounded person.
The next morning I found that Ferrari had indeed sent a letter asking the International Automobile Federation, the series' governing body, to clarify why Vettel had not been penalized for a move that appeared to break the rules. Had Vettel been given the usual 20-second penalty, he would have dropped to eighth position, and the Ferrari driver, Fernando Alonso, would have won the driver's title.
After I read the F.I.A. explanation of what had happened on the track, it was clear that no rule had been broken. And when I saw that the F.I.A. had said all the teams and drivers had been educated in the correct way to deal with the electronic warning lights it made me suddenly think that perhaps whoever asked for clarification at Ferrari was also just too exhausted from all that travel to have remembered the details.
In the end, I learned that the only reason the whole issue came up was because fans had started showing videos on YouTube of this moment when it appeared Vettel had broken the rules, while passing Jean-Eric Vergne and Ferrari had received thousands of queries from fans on why Vettel was not penalized. So Ferrari decided that the best thing to do was to have the whole question settled by the F.I.A. The F.I.A. did this immediately, and Ferrari accepted the explanation.
It was interesting to see how the fans and YouTube can affect the climate surrounding the series. It was a season without major controversy - except for the Bahrain race - and the biggest controv ersy had suddenly come three days after the season ended, after Ferrari had graciously accepted defeat. And then it was pumped up by media and fan sites into looking like a major controversy with the title at stake…when there was no controversy whatsoever.
That is why if you read my season review stories in today's newspaper, you will find no mention of this post-season glitch. My main feature is an overview of the season; my Q&A is with Bobby Epstein, the chairman of the Circuit of the Americas, where the U.S. Grand Prix ran in Austin two weeks ago. And this year, I decided to write an article comparing the two finalists, Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso, because I thought they would not only make a great study in contrasts, but also that they both deserved the title.
