The Formula 1 World Championship has reached the end of an extremely long season that started over eight months ago in Australia and consisted of 18 F1 race weekends held across four continents until this weekend's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix held at the slick and futuristic looking 5.554km Yas Marina Circuit.
The two 90 minute free practice sessions held today revealed Mercedes AMG F1 still ahead of the field in terms of one lap pace, but perhaps not as strong when it came to race pace. With both the constructors' and drivers' titles wrapped up a month ago at round 16 in the United States, the attention of F1 followers has largely shifted to the battle between Mercedes teammates Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. Along with many off-track developments such as the mystery around the vocal Red Bull Racing's engine supply for 2016 and beyond, new technical regulations for the 2017 season that are aimed at making F1 cars around five seconds a lap faster than they are now.
Other off-track talking points included McLaren-Honda's Fernando Alonso being the unwitting star of a social media meme that went viral in Brazil, talk of an independent budget engine supplier, the threat to the future of the largely successful race at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin on account of not being able to pay the exorbitant race hosting fees and ex-F1 driver Mark Webber becoming a drivers' world champion in the FIA World Endurance Championship.
The very long season, dominated once again by Mercedes but punctuated by some enjoyable races, has tried people's patience at times but at the end of the day will go down in F1 history as one where Mercedes had all their bases covered and left little to chance. That even included keeping both their drivers on exactly the same strategy in a race rather while allowing them to fight each other for a race win. This led to Hamilton speaking out against the move as he felt it prevented him from finding a way past Rosberg in Sao Paulo.
As far as Abu Dhabi is concerned, it appears Rosberg will have a disadvantage to Hamilton on account of using an old engine that is down on power to Hamilton's.
Nevertheless, Rosberg overturned a 0.141 second disadvantage to Hamilton from the opening practice session to clock the fastest lap of the weekend so far with a time of 1m41.983s at the end of the second session, 0.138s faster than Hamilton's best effort. The time was only around six tenths of a second off the best time in the same session at the 2013 edition of the race, when the cars were lighter and produced more aerodynamic downforce, and a second faster than the time set in the session last year.
Kimi Raikkonen of Ferrari and Sergio Perez of Force India-Mercedes took turns in being the best of the rest in terms of one-lap pace in the first and second sessions, respectively. Raikkonen's Ferrari teammate Sebastian Vettel and Red Bull-Renault drivers Daniel Ricciardo and Daniil Kvyat also showed good pace as they look to finish the season on a high note.
The fight for fourth place in the drivers' championship between Raikkonen and Finnish compatriot Valtteri Bottas of Williams-Mercedes is the on-track development that is still of interest but both Williams looked to be well behind Ferrari in terms of one-lap pace as they were outside of the top 10.
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