Massa's Last Win, Vettel's Miracle Title

The 2012 Formula 1 championship had been one of the most open and unpredictable in living memory. Seven different drivers had won the first seven races. Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso had traded the points lead across a season that refused to settle. Arriving at Interlagos for the final round, Vettel led Alonso by thirteen points. Alonso needed to win or finish second with Vettel outside the top six. It was achievable. It was not straightforward. Formula 1 rarely is.

The race started at pace and fell apart almost immediately for Vettel. A collision with Bruno Senna — Ayrton's nephew, driving for Williams — sent the Red Bull onto the grass with a puncture. Vettel was last. The championship lead he had held since Singapore was evaporating into the hot Brazilian air. Alonso, running at the front, began to believe.

What followed was a drive that defined Vettel's third championship season better than any of his nine race victories had. Starting from dead last, he picked his way through the field with the methodical precision of a driver who understood that careful progress was the only kind available. He was helped by incidents involving other cars. He was helped by the pace of the Red Bull once the tyres were right. Mostly he was helped by his own management of a situation that required clarity above all else.

At the front of the race, Felipe Massa was winning his home grand prix. The Brazilian, whose career had been shadowed by his near-fatal injury in Hungary in 2009, was dominant at Interlagos — in front of his home crowd, in the final race of his Ferrari career as a contracted driver, driving with the freedom of someone who had been told the season was ending whatever happened. Massa won. It was his last Formula 1 victory. Alonso was second. Vettel finished sixth. The three-point margin felt, as three-point margins tend to, immense.

Felipe Massa won the Brazilian Grand Prix — a victory of particular emotion for the São Paulo-born driver in what would prove to be his final victory in Formula 1. Fernando Alonso finished second for Ferrari, his teammate delivering him a front-row seat to the championship defeat. Sebastian Vettel recovered from his first-lap puncture and last place to finish sixth — enough for his third consecutive World Championship by three points over Alonso.

Vettel's title — 281 points to Alonso's 278 — completed a run of three consecutive championships that placed him in the company of Fangio, Brabham, Lauda, Prost, Senna and Schumacher as the sport's only multiple consecutive champions.

The 2012 championship's competitiveness — eleven different race winners, a title decided by three points — obscured how dominant Red Bull and Vettel became in the second half of the season. From the Singapore Grand Prix onwards, Vettel won four of the final five races. His recovery at Interlagos, from last to sixth, was the coda to a second-half charge that turned what had looked like Alonso's title into Vettel's third.

For Alonso, it was the second occasion in five years that he had finished second in a championship he might reasonably have expected to win. He had been outscored in 2010 by Vettel at the final race and again in 2012. His championship form across the period was arguably the equal of Vettel's; the results disagreed. He would wait until 2023 for another competitive title fight.

November 2012 was the month of America's presidential election. Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney on November 6, three weeks before the race, to begin his second term. The sense of a political era consolidating — rather than the revolutionary change of 2008 — defined the moment. Hurricane Sandy had devastated the US East Coast at the end of October, killing over 200 people and causing over $65 billion of damage.

In Brazil, the country was in the middle of an extraordinary decade of economic growth and social programme expansion under the Workers' Party governments. São Paulo's middle class was growing; poverty rates were falling; the city was preparing, alongside Rio de Janeiro, for the extraordinary double of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. The Interlagos crowd reflected a country that was feeling, in 2012, a particular confidence in its own trajectory — a confidence that would become more complicated in the years that followed.

Changeable conditions at Interlagos — warm and cloudy at the race start, with some light rain during the race adding to the unpredictability of an already complex strategic picture. Temperatures around 26°C. The intermittent rain was enough to complicate tyre choices but not severe enough to cause a safety car. It was the kind of weather that rewards the driver who reads conditions quickly and makes decisions with confidence.