Five reasons Vettel is the 2011 champion

Plus he's won a lot of stuff. 1) Red Bull were quickest out the blocks.

For all the time, effort, analysis and speculation the F1 media (Patty included) threw at the hectic month of pre-season testing before the 2011 season, we all may as well not have bothered. The final analysis of the 15 days of aimlessly pottering around a selection of Spanish test tracks had suggested that the situation between Red Bull and Ferrari was close, with renowned source of actual F1 knowledge Autosport even claiming that their study of relative lap times during testing showed Ferrari had a slender performance advantage over Red Bull.

They didn't. In fact, nobody could get close to Red Bull at the opening race in Australia, and Vettel kicked things off with a pole-to-flag win. And while remarks of 'CHAMPIONSHIP OVER!' appeared slightly knee-jerk when he struggled to dominate to a similar extent over the next few races, there was little doubt that his rivals were playing catch-up from the very start.

They did catch up, that much was inevitable. But that took time and effort and saw Vettel leap into a comfortable early championship lead. Much, in fact, as Jenson Button did in 2009, though this time with some actual development funds available, the team has been able to sustain and extend that lead as the season has dragged on.

2) He has got better since 2010.

It is impossible to tell how much of the flaky, hot-headed Vettel remains underneath this new, cheery and imperious German Dominator 2.0 exterior. Truth be told, it is difficult to throw away points, crash into people and generally panic when your car is perfectly reliable and you're leading yet another race from pole position.

Nevertheless, while it might take another season where Vettel is in a car that is not quite the best on the grid to really establish how much of the 2010-era 'crash kid' remains, Vettel has appeared to be on another level throughout 2011, presumably benefiting from the confidence that comes with securing your first championship title.

There have been mistakes, most notably his errors when fighting for the lead in Canada and Hungary. But the odd blip which cost him a place or two is far removed from his gleeful shunting of 2010. And for every lead-losing error, there has also been some dogged and determined drives to hold on to the lead, in Barcelona, Monaco and Singapore, to name but three.

3) McLaren have thrown away points.

It takes two to tango, and in order to build up an enormous championship lead, you not only need to accumulate points yourself, but also get a helping hand from your rivals chucking away points themselves with gleeful abandon. And Vettel has had just that thanks to the typical yearly McLaren incompetence show. Throughout the year, the team and the drivers at the Woking outfit have made far too many errors.

Lewis Hamilton's issues are well-documented, and somewhat amusing, but a more telling tale of missed opportunities perhaps comes from Jenson Button, the man who is ostensibly Vettel's nearest rival. Button has lost points thanks to silly errors (for example, his drive-through at Melbourne) but also thanks to team cock-ups (for example, his loose wheel retirement at Silverstone).

These mistakes and lost points wouldn't have kept the championship massively close, of course, but they would have kept the gap smaller than it is now. Vettel wouldn't already be champion, and although Button would still be a rank outsider with the greedy bookmakers, there would at least be a bit of pressure on Vettel's shoulders to complete the job.

4) He has had the luck.

If Vettel spent most of 2010 suffering from the sort of luck usually reserved for a man who had just thrown a black cat into a fragile mirror display while standing under a ladder, with random technical failures and other setbacks losing him plenty of valuable points. He won the first three races in 2011, and it is easy to forget that he should have done the same in 2010, but for his gearbox issue in Bahrain and his brake failure in Australia.

For 2011 though, his bad luck from 2010 has been paid back with interest. He is the only driver to have finished all fifteen races so far, and plenty of those strong results have been thanks to a smidge of good fortune. Most notably, his win in Monaco was secured when cars were allowed to change to fresh tyres after a late red flag, robbing Fernando Alonso and Button of a chance to pass the German on his older Pirellis.

While there's a lot to be said of the idea that 'you make your own luck', and there's certainly no doubt that Vettel would still have been champion even without the breaks he has been afforded, he has had it a lot easier in 2011 thanks to his Midas-esque streak of fortune.

5) He hasn't had to deal with Webber.

While the misadventures of Mark Webber in 2011 deserve a whole blog to themselves (one that we might get The Foot to write one day if he ever emerges from the sobbing foetal position he adopted some point in mid-April this year), the fact that the Australian has been so emasculated by Vettel in 2011 has helped the German's title push as much as anything else.

Compared to 2010, where the Red Bull intra-team battle was more close and intense than anybody would have usually expected, and the pair often lost sight of their title ambitions in their efforts to simply gain the upper hand over each other, this year Vettel has enjoyed pre-eminence in his own team. And compared to the still-raging McLaren bumfight, that is clearly the best position to be in.

This year, then, there was no 'Favouritism-gate', or 'Crash-gate' or the like, and aside from the teensy bit of team orders issued to Webber at Silverstone, Vettel has not had to concern himself with his 'number two driver'. If he won the title with Schumie-esque dominance, he did it with a driver who for whatever reason slotted into the perfect Boobens-esque role.

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