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An incredible finish to an incredible season – the best scriptwriters in the world couldn’t have dreamt of a more exciting finish to the 2007 Formula 1 world championship.

With just two races left in the 2007 Formula 1 season, defending champion Fernando Alonso was 10 points behind championship leader, Lewis Hamilton – Kimi Raikkonen was a further 7 points adrift. It appeared that Kimi needed an act of god to win the championship – and that’s exactly what he got.

In the changing weather conditions at the penultimate race in China, Hamilton and McLaren should have played it safe. They needed to finish in the points to effectively seal the drivers championship – yet they chose to push the envelope and attempted to seal the title a race early. The team left Hamilton out on a drying track on badly worn intermediate tires and paid a very heavy price indeed. Driving on what looked like the carcass of a tire, Lewis spun off the track at the entry to the pit lane – his car was beached in the gravel, and his championship lead greatly marginalized going into the final race in Brazil.

Despite this uncharacteristic and untimely mishap, Hamilton was still clearly the title favorite. He’s had an incredible season with some fantastic drives – but most of all, it’s his consistency that’s impressed above all and kept him in the lead of the championship. Combine that with McLaren’s fantastic reliability all year, and only the very courageous would have bet against Hamilton becoming champion.

Lewis appeared to be calm and collected all weekend – he qualified on the front row, behind Massa, and ahead of his title rivals, Alonso and Raikkonen, on his maiden visit to the tricky Interlagos circuit. Surely this meant that the title was in the bag – but as we’ve seen so many times in the past, anything can happen in motor racing, and especially Formula 1.

Things started to go wrong for Hamilton immediately after the start, as he lost two places in the first set of corners. He then proceeded to lock his brakes and drive straight off the track in turn four. He rejoined in 8th place and was still in a position to salvage the title. All he needed to do was calm down and stay on the track. But the final nail in the coffin came soon after when his McLaren’s gearbox malfunctioned and automatically selected neutral. He dropped to 18th place and out of contention.

The gearbox gremlins inexplicably stayed away thereafter, as he fought his way back up to 7th, which left him with a total of 109 championship points, tied with Alonso following his 3rd place finish, but much more importantly, 1 point behind Kimi who ended up with 110 points following his win. With this mechanical failure, the first for Hamilton all year, and the teams misjudgment in China, McLaren seems to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Hamilton would have been the first rookie Formula 1 champion. His stunning debut season has still made history but he’ll have to wait to be world champion. Being just 22 years of age, he has time on his side, and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’ll be a regular in the title fights from now on – but this year at least, it wasn’t meant to be.

Hamilton’s disappointment aside, it has to be said that there is a little bit of poetic justice in the results. The Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen was by far the quickest car of the pack in the second half of the season – he has the most race wins of all the championship contenders and is a deserving winner. Kimi’s done a great job of adapting to the Ferrari and the Bridgestone tires after appearing to struggle following his first win at the opening race at Melbourne. But that’s not all – this result puts an end to any speculation behind the spy scandal that’s shrouded Formula 1 over the past several months. If McLaren did gain a competitive advantage through the information they received, although that’s not proven, then the result is fitting and finally closes an unpleasant topic.

This comeback by Scuderia Ferrari also reinforces what we’ve known all along – that the Ferrari team is a passionate and strong professional outfit. They’ve bounced back despite not having the benefit of the Schumacher, Brawn, Byrne, and even Stephney, dream team. Ferrari struggled with reliability, and even pace, at certain points during the year but they found their reliability and tied it together in the end.

It bodes well for the team that Kimi seems to have made himself very comfortable within the Scuderia – he says that he’s never been happier in F1 and he loves his new team. It appears that the Ferrari family has won him over, and he’s repaid them with the ultimate prize – he’ll now be a son of Italy forever. The post race press conference also revealed that the soft-spoken Finn can be quite coherent and cohesive if he wants to be – he ended up sounding, in Schumacher fashion, very much like a real team man.

Everything suggests that the next season will be even more exciting than this one, with multiple drivers capable of fighting for the title. The racing’s been good all year – expect it to be even better in 2008. The absence of traction control should add to the excitement even further.

The big question now is – where will Alonso be next year? At the post race press conference, he suggested that he’s had a good season with McLaren – on track anyway, with 4 wins to his name. He appears to be trying to rebuild burned bridges, as he contemplates what he should be driving next year. Frankly I can’t imagine him staying at McLaren, but as we’ve seen with the last few races, never bet against anything in Formula 1. Nonetheless, it seems he may be headed back to his old championship winning team, Renault.

A final piece of interest for India – the Spyker Formula 1 team, now under the ownership of Dr. Mallaya, has been renamed ‘Force India’ for next year. Dr. Mallaya feels this is an apt name considering India’s emerging position in the world today – we wholeheartedly agree. We also wish them the best for next year. Let’s hope to see an India driver leading the charge as well.