Petrov's Wall: How One Renault Driver Decided the Championship

The 2010 World Championship arrived at its final round in Abu Dhabi with four drivers mathematically capable of the title: Sebastian Vettel, Fernando Alonso, Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton. In order of likelihood, given the points distributions, Alonso was the most favourably positioned. He did not need to win — he needed to score sufficiently while Vettel finished outside the top five. It was achievable.

What Alonso could not have planned for was Vitaly Petrov. The Russian driver, in only his first season in Formula 1, was running in clean air when his strategy left him between Alonso's Ferrari and the points positions that mattered. Alonso caught Petrov, came right up behind him, and attempted to find a way past. He found none. The Yas Marina circuit's long straight — where the DRS overtaking aid would later be introduced — offered some opportunity but Petrov defended with confidence, holding his line and his nerve lap after lap while the championship dissolved in Alonso's mirrors.

At the front, Sebastian Vettel drove with the calm authority of a man who knew his destiny was in his own hands. He led from pole position, managed the race, and won it. He crossed the line as the 2010 World Champion at the age of 23 years and 134 days — at that moment the youngest champion in the sport's history. The record would stand until Max Verstappen took it twelve years later in this same city.

Alonso finished seventh. He had finished the season with more fastest laps and arguably more impressive individual drives than Vettel. The championship is not decided by individual performances. It is decided by points, and Petrov, entirely unintentionally, had held the points away from Alonso with a defence that cost the Spaniard a title he had believed was his.

Sebastian Vettel won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix for Red Bull, his first race victory at Yas Marina and his first World Championship. Lewis Hamilton finished second, too late to affect the title picture. Jenson Button was third. Fernando Alonso, whose championship hopes had rested on passing Petrov, finished seventh — outside the positions that might have given him the title.

Vettel's championship: 256 points. Alonso: 252. Webber: 242. Hamilton: 240. The four-point margin between Vettel and Alonso represented the most dramatic final-round title resolution since Hamilton's last-corner victory in Brazil two years earlier.

The 2010 championship was the first of four consecutive titles for Vettel and Red Bull, a run of dominance that would define the early 2010s in the way Schumacher and Ferrari had defined the early 2000s. Vettel's 2010 season had been marked by some spectacular performances and some spectacular errors — he had led races and crashed out of races in equal measure. His Abu Dhabi victory, measured and controlled, was unlike many of his other wins that year and suggested a maturity that had not always been apparent.

For Alonso, losing the championship to a car he knew was slower than his Ferrari in the first half of the season was a source of frustration that he was typically direct about. He had scored 252 points — more than enough to win most championships — in a year when four drivers contested the title to the last corner of the last lap.

November 2010 found the United States processing the midterm elections that had delivered what Barack Obama himself called a 'shellacking' — Republicans regaining the House of Representatives in a wave that reflected public dissatisfaction with the pace of economic recovery following the 2008 financial crisis. The global economy remained fragile and the austerity debates that would define European politics for the next decade were beginning to take shape.

The UAE in 2010 was completing the Burj Khalifa — the world's tallest building, opened in January of that year — and was positioning itself as a global hub for finance, tourism and sport. The Formula 1 race was central to that project. Yas Marina, with its hotels and marina and floodlit circuit, was the most ambitious new venue the sport had seen in years. The championship decided there in 2010 gave it immediately the historical weight that new circuits rarely acquire so quickly.

Clear and warm under the Yas Marina floodlights, temperatures around 26°C at race start, cooling as the evening progressed. The circuit was dry throughout, the Abu Dhabi winter evening offering perfect racing conditions. The clarity of the atmosphere meant the occasion could be seen for what it was: a championship decided by the ordinary mechanics of racing, complicated by one man on a slow car who simply refused to be passed.