There was probably an element of truth in that, in that Alonso did contribute a large amount to their improvement over their winless 2006 campaign. They don’t seem to have lost their way without him, but there’s no doubt that Renault certainly did, and Alonso was the man to put them back on track. Who knows – with him remaining there next season, maybe be can drag them to the front of the grid again.

Another man in need of a strong showing this weekend is Alonso’s teammate Nelson Piquet, who got off to a dodgy start but has improved recently as Renault became increasingly competitive, culminating in a great drive to fourth in Japan. Unfortunately for Piquet, i’ve heard talk that they wish to have a Frenchman in the team, but he may find a berth at Honda in 2009.

At the beginning of the year you would have thought if anyone would be dropped at Honda it would be Rubens Barrichello, as Button has been a shoe-in at that team for so long, but in the last two or three races Rubens has done a better job. He’s quicker in practice today (Friday) in Brazil, he was quicker than him in China and Japan, and had that fantastic podium finish in Britain, where he put on the extreme wet tires at just the right time, so he also has a great deal more points than Jenson.

Putting aside the obvious professional reasons for wanting a good finish to the year, it’s also important on a personal level, because you’ve got months to reflect on your last race. Thankfully I never really had any bad races to end a campaign, although in the 1969 F5000 championship I had joined John Surtees’ team at exactly halfway through the season, and although I lost the championship by one point, I did win the final race. I was on a real big high after that, and it carried me over the whole offseason, with me thinking I should wipe the floor with them in 1970. Unfortunately we didn’t start until midseason, so the same thing happened again!

When you have a bad race you do fret about it, even if it’s only a couple of weeks, as you know everybody else is thinking “is that the best he can do?” It was probably worse in my day than it is now, as today they’ve got more races than they’ve ever had before, and a massive amount of flying around, testing, and doing PR, which fills in a lot of time that in my day would have been vacant in the offseason.

My winter seasons were often spent decorating the house, or cleaning out the attic, and maybe going on a vacation if I had made enough money to afford it! A winter spent like that would also make it difficult to get back into things at the beginning of the following year, because there wasn’t the testing that there is now.

The biggest problem was that, as clichéd as it sounds, practice makes perfect, and my non-racing friends could never understand that – they assumed that you just jump into a car and go quick, but of course winning races is like playing Chopin at a major concert hall; you can’t just start again in March when you played your last concert in November. I used to have several months’ layoff every winter, and it always cost me some speed.

Download the Interlagos Circuit Wallpaper





The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED