The 2014 Abu Dhabi GP Proved The Season Finale Needs A Venue Change, Not Double Points

The 2014 F1 season has drawn to a close, and as it turned out, the silly double points award in Abu Dhabi made no difference to who won the driver’s championship. But, one thing the Grand Prix did show us is how poor a venue Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit is for the season finale, particularly compared to its predecessor: Brazil.

The Brazilian Grand Prix has been on the calendar since 1973 (a non-championship race was held in 1972), and while it was held near or at the beginning of the F1 season for many years, it’s become more recently associated with being the final race of the year. Interlagos circuit held its first finale in 2004, again from 2006-2008, before Abu Dhabi took over for a couple of years.

The honour went back to Brazil for the 2011-2013 seasons before Abu Dhabi once again was handed the final race for the 2014 season, a decision which irritated me greatly.

Why? Because Interlagos (below) has hosted some epic season finales over the last few years. Who can forget 2007’s race, which saw the F1 title slip from Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso’s fingers and into the clutches of Kimi Raikkonen, or the following year, when Hamilton took the championship after passing Timo Glock in the last few corners in the rain. More recently, we had 2012’s epic Brazilian GP, where Sebastian Vettel had to fight through the field to get where he needed to be to claim his third driver’s title, after a first lap collision left him stone dead last.

Interlagos is on many levels a much more interesting place to end the year than Yas Marina. The challenging nature of the circuit means that mistakes from drivers are much more likely - just look at Hamilton’s spin at 2014’s race - there’s the much more temperamental local climate to liven things up, and overtaking is easier than at other more modern circuits. When Yas Marina held the last race in 2010, by contrast, Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso were ruled out of the championship fight when bad strategy calls left them both stuck behind slower drivers, unable to overtake.

It’s looking unlikely that the double points rule will stay for 2015 - thankfully - but if the F1 big cheeses want to make things more exciting for the season’s last race, they should swap the venue back to Brazil. Even if the champion is crowned before the race on the regular points system, it’d still make a much more fitting way to wrap up the year. Such a change is unlikely as money (the most likely reason Abu Dhabi hosted it again this year) does the talking in F1, but we can only hope.