The teams had finished with Europe, then, but before they had the chance to fly off to the final four rounds of the season, there was plenty more politics and controversy to get through. The FIA tried to deflect some attention away from the impending dread of Fixgate by announcing their new 13th team to replace the outgoing BMW, choosing a dodgy Malaysian redress of the historic Lotus name ahead of the new Qadbak-owned Sauber team. Never mind, they’d get their chance.
Alas, standing up and shouting "Oi, everyone, look! It’s ruddy Lotus!" didn’t really deflect any attention from the impending day in the World Motor Sports Council, which was becoming so over-used you began to wonder why they didn’t just stage a round of the championship there while they were at it. Renault attempted to deal with ex-driver Nelson Piquet Jr’s accusation that Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds had conspired with him to ensure Piquet deliberately crashed during the 2008 Singapore race to allow a safety car that would hand Fernando Alonso the race lead by promptly admitting that yes, that probably did happen. They sacked Briatore and Symonds and switched their defence from one of defending the actual charges to showing that they had cut out the rotten bits from the team in the hope of sparing themselves a lengthy ban from the sport.
In the build-up to the trial, all the usual talking heads had they say, and a fun-packed day unfolded in Paris. In the end, Briatore and Symonds were banned, with Crazy Flav getting a lifetime ban from motorsport, while the team themselves merely got a suspended sentence and Nelson Piquet Jr, immune from prosecution in his role as the snitch, escaped scot-free, putting on his best contrite face after the trial in the hope of appealing to a team for next year. Good luck with that, Nelson.
The FIA attempted to mitigate the fallout from the scandal described by some hyperbolic journalists as "Literally the end of civilisation. This is it people, grab tinned goods and as much water as you can, I’m off to the bunker in the basement!" by announcing a feel-good 2010 calendar, complete with a shiny-happy return to Canada and that definite 100% trip to Donington Park that was certainly going to happen, absolutely for sure. Meanwhile, Renault made a bloke nobody had heard of their new boss, haemorrhaged a load of sponsors and confirmed that they were 100% committed to the sport in the future despite this scandal. Unless something mad happened like Toyota withdrew, but that would never happen.
In a pleasing display of uncomfortable irony, the teams headed to Singapore, in the shadow of Fixgate that had ruined the previous year’s night race without anyone really realising that it had. The irony-o-meters, stressed already by the simple fact that we were back at the scene of the crime, disappeared off the scale when Piquet’s replacement Romain Grosjean conspired to crash at exactly the same corner as the Brazilian had decided to spin at 12 months ago in practice.
In the important stuff, Lewis Hamilton dominated the weekend, scorching to pole after Rubens Barrichello ended the session early by crashing, and then dominating one of the dullest races of the year to take his second victory of the season. Jenson Button continued to live a charmed life, having cocked up qualifying. He recovered to 5th in the race, one place ahead of Barrichello and only one behind Vettel, who had started nine places ahead of him, but was hit by a bizarre pit lane speeding penalty, handed to him due to some bizarre way of measuring pit lane speeds. Mark Webber, meanwhile, was in the sort of full-on run of luck that made you question whether he spent his free weekends standing under ladders killing black cats, being penalised for the crime of overtaking during the race and then suffering brake failure. His miniscule title dreams had now completely vanished.
As the teams headed for Japan, the main news was that Fernando Alonso had secured the least-surprising job transfer in the history of time, while there were still worries over Toyota’s future, but almost certainly nothing would come of that. Still, at Suzuka, after a long and miserable wet Friday, the weekend played into the hands of Sebastian Vettel, as the German swept to pole position in a session notable for the number of crashes involved. Both Toro Rosso drivers went off, with Sebastien Buemi’s crash claiming a number of victims for avoiding yellow flags, which led to a period of contemplation where nobody was really sure what the proper grid order was. Timo Glock, meanwhile, crashed heavily in his Toyota, and eventually missed the race and the rest of the season. Still, it could have been worse for him, something awful like Toyota withdrawing or something. At least that didn’t happen.
In the race itself, Vettel was dominant, while Button could only flop around to 8th place, one spot behind Barrichello. All that meant that with two rounds of the season to go, Button had a 14 point cushion over his team mate and a 16 point advantage over Vettel. Everything was looking remarkably comfortable.
And so, attention turned to Brazil, host of the climax of the title race for the last four seasons. Button only needed to keep his two remaining rivals within touching distance during the race to clinch the championship with a round still to go, but his hopes of doing that looked slim after a delightfully chaotic qualifying session, which saw Barrichello take pole and Button end up 14th, with Vettel even worse off in 16th. The scene seemed set for the Boobens to force an unlikely title decider in Abu Dhabi.
Except he didn’t, for three very good reasons. Firstly, his car’s pace was never good enough to stay in front of the charging Mark Webber, secondly, he managed to give himself a rear puncture on Hamilton’s front wing while disputing third late-on in the race, which dropped him to 8th place by the flag, and thirdly, and even more strangely than all that, Jenson Button did something. The champion-elect had spent most of the second half of the season dithering about looking a shadow of the man that dominated the early season running, but in Brazil, he came alive. True, only to the extent of overtaking Grosjean, Nakajima and the stupefyingly fun-to-watch Kamui Kobayahsi, who had replaced the injured Glock at Toyota, but those moves in the early stages of the race were enough to elevate him up to a point where his points haul for the day genuinely put pressure on Boobens, who couldn’t stay where he needed to be to force a final-race decider.
How much of Button’s late season performances were down to him driving within himself to slowly inch his way to the title rather than risk a few points on a DNF may never be known, though the one time he promised to 'be aggressive', back in Belgium, he ended up having his first, and only, retirement of the season, so maybe he was just driving for the points. Whatever the case, he had begun to adopt no small amount of ire among F1 followers for his slightly lame method of winning a championship, and his first stint at Brazil went a long way to resolving that. By which we mean it didn’t resolve it at all, but it was at least something. And he seemed happy anyway, which is all that really matters.
So, the title was decided. No matter how odd 'Jenson Button, world champion' sounded, that was the result of this tumultuous season. Before the thrills of the now meaningless final race though, the rumbling demon of the FIA presidential election was settled, which had raged on since Max Mosley announced the end of his presidency way back when the FIA/FOTA nonsense finished, but was frankly too tedious to keep discussing in this review. So Mosley's long and divisive reign was over, replaced by the thinking man’s Mosley, Jean Todt, who was swept into power ahead of The People’s Ari, in an election predictably tainted with smears, questionable tactics, dubious allegiances and all the rest of the fun and games you’d expect from an independent, free and fair election.
So, with the FIA secure in the knowledge that they’d kept the Ferrari bias moaning going for another four years at least, we rolled into Abu Dhabi for the final race of the season, at F1’s newest track for the sport’s first day/night event. The whole weekend unsurprisingly had an after the Lord Mayor’s show sort of kitsch to it, and in the end, the whole thing was rather forgettable, with Hamilton dominating qualifying and looking set for a third win of the season before his car broke and Vettel came through to secure another victory, his fourth of the season.
The dire fare of the race was enlivened in the closing stages when Webber and Button went head-to-head for second place behind Vettel, the Australian producing a manful display of weaving and blocking to keep the Brit behind him and secure the Red Bull 1-2 result. It was a joy to watch, and also odd that after a season of Brawn v Red Bull in the championship, we had to wait until the last lap of the dead rubber final race to see them properly going at it on track.
So, Button and Brawn celebrated their titles, and the 2009 season was at an end. As we left Abu Dhabi, the feeling was that, though 2009 had been utterly barmy, 2010 would be a belter, with the new frontrunners of F1 looking to defend their position from the resurgent powers of McLaren, Ferrari, et al, at the front of a mammoth 26-car grid full of potential for fun. We know now that Donington won’t be there, Toyota won’t be there, Renault might not be there, and neither may some of the others, and the post-season giddy optimism for the future has been replaced by the 2009-vintage mix of fear and loathing. Good old F1.
So that was that, F1 2009, the season that in future people may well refer to as "what the bloody hell were they all on that year?". It was fun, it was painful, it was annoying, it was worrying, it was exciting, it was nail-biting, it was sublime, it was farcical, it was all of those things. It was, in summary, ruddy brilliant.
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