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Overtaken at the last lap
Steven LynchNovember 17, 2014
Going in to the Abu Dhabi GP, Lewis Hamilton is 17 points ahead in the drivers' championship. What's the biggest deficit overhauled at the end of a season to win the title? asked Greg Lawrence
This season, with the controversial decision to award double points for the last race, is obviously a special case. And before 2010, the margins were even smaller as the winner only received ten points (earlier it was nine, and earlier still only eight).
There have been several years when the man leading the standings into the last race didn't win the title, starting with the very first official championship in 1950, when Juan Manuel Fangio started the season-ending Italian GP with 26 points, four ahead of Nino Farina. But Fangio was forced to retire (he did have time to set the fastest lap, which back then was worth a point), and Farina went on to win, taking the title 30-27.
In 1964 John Surtees started the last race of the season, in Mexico, five points adrift of Graham Hill (39-34), with Jim Clark (30) also a threat. But Clark ran into mechanical trouble, then Hill was forced to retire - and Surtees came second, to collect six points and nick the title from Hill by a single point.
But the most famous case was probably back in 2007, when a win was worth ten points. A young driver was 17 in front with two races to go - he needed only four points (a couple of ninth places would have done) to lift the title in his rookie season.
But he crashed out of the penultimate race, in China, and limped home in ninth in the last one in Brazil, earning just two points after mechanical problems. Kimi Raikkonen won both those races, to steal the title out from under the nose of ... Lewis Hamilton.
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