Championship deciders.

Any regular reader of this blog may well have spotted that my favourite kind of sport involves speed - motor-racing both cars and bikes with the series I most closely follow being F1 cars, MotoGP bikes, British Touring Car Championship, British Superbikes, British F3 cars, World Superbikes... etc but those are the main ones, British GT is in there as well esp this season which was good.

So this is the time of year that championships wind up. F1 is still up for grabs but given the dominant performance in the last few races I get the feeling Vettel is going to reclaim the top crown for a third year running. It'll be a good fight back as they were not the all conquering team of the last two years and he has had to show his metal and come back into contention, but a shame as this starts to look like Schumacher at his dominant form in the 90s early 2000s. It'd be nice to get some other names up there I feel. Still some way to go and anything can happen, I wouldn't write Alonso off yet but frankly if he does win it in this years Ferrari he deserves a special mention, clearly nowhere near the best car but he fights it to get the results, if he was in a Red Bull or a Mclaren frankly it would no doubt have all been over by now!

MotoGP was decided this weekend in the cruelest of fashions. Lorenzo has been either 1st or 2nd in every race bar the one he crashed out of. So Dani Pedrosa had an uphill struggle to stay in the fight for the crown. When he hit the front and pushed hard to get a break on sadly a millimeter too much here or there caused him to run wide on cold tyres and that was his race and the championship over. Lorenzo fully deserves it with such a consistent season.

The real fun has been in some of the British Championships with all of them going into the last round undecided. Shaky Byrne was brilliant to win the BSBs - he hit the last round with three races to run - he won them and that was that worthy champion. If the rumours he'll be promoted to MotoGP next year are true I hope to see him have some good results.

BTCC was similar - Gordon Sheddon taking it on the 2nd race of the last round of 3. He still didn't really believe it when he crossed the line - he's been a stalwart in the championship for many years, often playing support to his title winning colleague. He won more races than everyone else so again just reward for a battling title race. Jack Harvey in F3 overcame a poor penultimate round where he seemed to be penalised for everything, luckily one of those was overturned on appeal which I thought right - he overtook on the outside and the guy inside him locked up and hit him and he got the penalty, seemed more than harsh to me. Again he bang in a win at the last round and got the result. I hope he can get the funding so illusive to many UK drivers these days to progress to the very top of the sport - given how he won this against some very tough opposition it'll be a tragedy if he doesn't.

Now to the two tightest. World Superbikes - Max Biaggi won this in the last race by the tightest of margins - Tommy Sykes who won that race doing all he could was 0.5 point behind Max in the final reckoning. Tough luck on Tommy and I hope he can come back next year stronger and have another go - we could do with a new British World superbike champion since Toseland and Hodgson both retired.

Then the British GT championship - through the last race the crown went back and forth over three contenders throughout! In the end the winners actually had never won a round over the year but then it should be about consistency for the championship but I can't help thinking the Nissan boys really deserved it and were robbed by a mechanical failure when in the lead and looking good to step onto the top of the podium