• Ferrari tweet: ‘An off track from Fernando hampered session’
• Alonso had recorded the fastest time of the morning

Fernando Alonso has driven his Ferrari into a barrier during the third and final day of Formula One testing at the Mugello circuit, but appears to have escaped uninjured.

Ferrari wrote on their Twitter feed: “An off track from Fernando hampered morning’s session. At least two hours to repair the damages. It is a shame but that’s testing!”

Alonso had recorded the fastest time of the morning session when he lost control of his F2012 and damaged a wing on a track owned by Ferrari, near Scarperia in Tuscany, central Italy.

These are the first in-season tests in Formula One in four years.

The next race is the Spanish Grand Prix on 13 May. Alonso, who won the Malaysian Grand Prix, the season’s second race, is fifth in the standings.

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• ‘We need Ferrari to be competitive,’ says McLaren driver
• Button calls for help to combat Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel

Jenson Button, whose old playboy image was once seen as symbolic of Formula One’s epicurean mores, wants another party – but this time he wants it on the track.

“We need more than just Lewis Hamilton and myself to fight Sebastian Vettel,” he said. Button and Hamilton, with one victory apiece, are the only drivers to question Vettel’s hegemony in the first seven races of the season.

Now Button is looking to Ferrari, and Fernando Alonso in particular, to break the dominance of Vettel, who increased his lead in Canada two weeks ago despite being beaten, thrillingly, by the 2009 British champion.

“We need Ferrari in there,” Button said. “If they are quicker than us they will take points off us, so it is tricky both ways. But I think we would rather take the risk and have them competitive and hope we can do a better job than both of them. Seb is still the man to beat, but Fernando’s car worked well in Canada.

“They had a very efficient DRS [drag reduction system], a very good qualifying mode which they won’t have here. Fernando has had a couple of races where he feels he could have done better. And at one of his home grands prix he will be motivated.”

Motivating the local hero Alonso, the world champion in 2005 and 2006 and the highest-paid driver in the sport on an estimated salary of £30m, is not a problem, even though he languishes 92 points behind Vettel. At least he finished top of Friday’s second practice session to give some hope for Sunday.

But Alonso has not won since his victory in South Korea eight months ago. His triumph in the treacherous conditions at the Yeongam track was his third in four races. But now, to the despair of its adoring tifosi, the prancing horse is going through yet another malaise and is 154 points behind Red Bull in the constructors’ championship.

So many of the big names associated with the team’s dominance at the start of the century have long gone – Michael Schumacher, Ross Brawn, Jean Todt, Rory Byrne. Now, after this season’s early failures, they have been joined by the technical director, Aldo Costa.

There is an altogether more Italian look about Ferrari these days, although it is an Englishman, Pat Fry, who has been brought in, in an effort to solve their many concerns, which include trouble with their wind-tunnel testing as well as restrictions on their previously unlimited practice facilities at Fiorano and Mugello.

But on Sunday, at the European Grand Prix, Italy and Spain are united in a desire to see Ferrari and Alonso on top of the podium once more.

The Spanish Grand Prix was run in Barcelona a month ago. A second Spanish grand prix, the European Grand Prix, came to Valencia for the first time in 2008, purely because of Alonso’s popularity.

“When I was a kid, Formula One was not important at all,” he said. “It was not a sport we followed. I never saw a race on TV in my life until I was 17 or 18.

“When I was racing in go-karts I never saw a Formula One race. There was some news at the end of the year about who was world champion and who was not world champion but we didn’t know any of the names.

“Now it’s quite popular in Spain. People love this sport. It’s not easy. It’s quite complex. But they love it as we love motorbikes here. Now there are many drivers. I’m happy because it’s my sport and something that I love and now I’m happy that the country shares this love.”

But Valencia has not loved Alonso in the three rather disappointing European GPs. He had a first-lap accident in the first race three years ago and was eighth last season when he got tangled up with the safety car and lost more places after going into the pits. Sixth in 2009 is his best result.

He said: “I raced for a Valencian team in Formula Nissan or F3000 so I have quite a close relationship with this town. It has always been a nice feeling here in this city.

“This is a circuit where the attendance is not great in past years and there has been a lot of effort from everybody to get maximum fans this weekend so we need to put on a good show for them and hopefully they will enjoy the race.”

But the attendance on Friday was poor, even though it was a public holiday, and Valencia’s future as an F1 host is in serious doubt. It is not only Alonso and Ferrari who will be tested on Sunday. The same applies to the crowd.

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• Sebastian Vettel recovers from crash to be second fastest
• Difficult day for Lewis Hamilton and McLaren after puncture

Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso topped the second practice session at the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve on Friday. And if this was a trailer for the real thing on Sunday the Canadian Grand Prix will be a cracker – or should that be crasher?

There were a number of incidents, to add to Sebastian Vettel’s prang in the morning session. But Red Bull rivals who thought Vettel might have damaged his prospects for Saturday’s's qualifying session were disappointed.

The world champion missed a large part of the morning run-out but returned and was second to Alonso in the afternoon – in 2008 Vettel also crashed here in practice and was unable to take part in qualifying.

In the second run Felipe Massa was third, ahead of the McLaren pair of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. It was another frustrating day for Hamilton, who had a puncture in addition to his earlier problems with his steering wheel data.

The third Briton, Paul di Resta, was sixth on his first time on the track, one place ahead of Mark Webber. But the afternoon session was more memorable for its crashes than its fast times.

This is an unforgiving circuit and with 30 minutes to go Kamui Kobayashi hit the wall at the first chicane and his Sauber was in pieces.

When the session restarted it was not for long. After a few more minutesVirgin’s Jérôme d’Ambrosio came unstuck at the same part of the track and another heavy contact was followed by another red flag.

Adrian Sutil also had problems with his Force India car. He hit a wall coming out of Turn 7. And there were a number of other small incidents.

The morning practice was dominated by Mercedes, who were well off the pace later on. Nico Rosberg was fastest and his team-mate Michael Schumacher was third; Alonso was the filling in the German sandwich with Button and Hamilton fifth and sixth respectively. But it was the second session that had most of the thrills and spills.

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• Ferrari were right to cover Mark Webber, says Spaniard
• Russian Vitaly Petrov ‘drove well’ admits Ferrari driver

Fernando Alonso refused to criticised his Ferrari team or Renault’s Vitaly Petrov after he missed out on the world championship on Sunday.

Alonso could only finish in seventh place in Abu Dhabi, allowing the race winner Sebastian Vettel to take the drivers’ title by a four-point margin.

“It was a tough race, really difficult,” said Alonso after the race at the Yas Marina circuit.

“I lost one position at the start and then we saw problems with the soft tyres and we tried to cover for [Mark] Webber.

“It was a choice between [covering for] Webber and [Niko] Rosberg and we covered for Webber. This is a sport, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

“[I have] no complaints about strategy. After the race it’s always easy to see the best strategy. It was a very difficult call I think.”

The Spaniard also had no complaints with the performance of Petrov, despite failing to get past the Renault driver for 40 laps, and appearing to gesture to the Russian driver after climbing out of his car following the end of the race.

“I tried to pass him once and he tried to protect [himself] and was very aggressive and he drove well without mistakes,” added Alonso. “We will try again next year.”

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Final race of gruelling, thrilling season has four drivers in championship contention

After 220 days without rain in Abu Dhabi, clouds appeared over the parched sands this week. Since a wet track is a factor almost as essential as a hint of skulduggery to enliven any grand prix, observers were tempted to detect the influence of Bernie Ecclestone in creating freak conditions for the showdown to the 2010 season, the first time in six decades of world championship history that four drivers have gone into the final race of the year with a chance of winning the title.

On Tuesday, as the members of the grand prix circus began assembling at this futuristic circuit, built on a man-made archipelago close to the capital of the richest of the United Arab Emirates, they were greeted by a brief shower. Yesterday morning came a downpour that soaked the circuit and kept most of the Formula One cars in their garages as they waited for the track to dry. The weekend forecast indicates 1mm of rain tomorrow, although there is no guarantee that its arrival will be delayed until 5pm local time (1pm in the UK), when the race, which begins in daylight and ends under floodlights, is scheduled to start.

No season has ever been launched with higher expectations, based on the promise of a battle royal between a field containing four world champions, among them Michael Schumacher, making an unexpected return from retirement. The comeback of the seven-times champion turned out to be an anti-climax, as did the opening race at another desert circuit, in Bahrain. Since then, however, the season has pulsated with incident, spectacle and close competition, and now Ecclestone is able to repay the Abu Dhabi rulers’ huge investment by bringing the show to their track with the title still at stake and no shortage of intrigue in the paddock.

Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, viewed by most of Fleet Street as the sport’s very own pantomime villain, is the favourite to be celebrating his third championship tomorrow night. Mark Webber, lying eight points behind the Spanish driver, needs to win the race in his Red Bull, with Alonso finishing no higher than third, in order to grab the opportunity of becoming the third Australian to hold the title. For that, however, he may require the co-operation of Sebastian Vettel, his team-mate, who will start the race with his own chance of entering the record books as the youngest ever champion but has hinted that if he is not able to win it himself, he may be ready to give in to the pressure to hand victory to a man 11 years his senior.

The fourth contender, Lewis Hamilton, lies 24 points behind Alonso, 16 behind Webber and nine behind Vettel, which leaves him needing snookers, or at least the sort of chaos generally brought about by a sharp shower early in the race, if he is to win his second title. His silver McLaren glittered under the lights as he set the fastest time in yesterday evening’s second practice session, which was an encouraging start.

So the stage is set for an epic shoot-out. After 18 rounds and more than 2,600 miles of racing across four continents, the issue will be settled over 55 laps of a 3.45-mile track which winds around a harbour, under a seven-star hotel enclosed in a glass bubble and past spectacular canopied grandstands. Unstained by the blood and grime of history, the Yas Marina circuit resembles an airbrushed setting for a video game and could hardly be less like such traditional battlegrounds as the Belle Epoque amphitheatre of Monaco, the majestic flat-out challenges of Spa-Francorchamps and Monza, the open countryside of Silverstone or the howling, passion-filled cockpit of Interlagos.

But this, by Ecclestone’s decree, is Formula One’s future. In resolutely following the scent of new money, the sport’s ruthless impresario has fulfilled his ambition to turn grand prix racing into a genuinely worldwide enterprise. Next year there will be a race in Delhi, followed by one in Austin, Texas in 2013 and another in Sochi, Russia a year later.

The first world championship, in 1950, was decided over seven rounds, all but one in Europe. This year there have been 19, involving each member of the eight UK-based teams in a travel itinerary totalling just over a quarter of a million miles, 54,000 of them in the past eight weeks as the campaign reached its climax with a hectic succession of trips to the far east, South America and the Persian Gulf.

This weekend most of the teams’ workers are running on empty, relying on a squirt of adrenaline to see them through to the finish. Not all, however, will admit to exhaustion.

“Not this year,” Ole Schack, a 32-year-old Dane who is the No2 mechanic on Vettel’s car, said yesterday in Abu Dhabi’s spacious paddock. “Not at all. We’ve had a fantastic season and when you go from one strong result to another, you look forward to the next race – even if it’s a tight schedule and you’ve got a lot of work to do in between.”

The two Red Bull drivers have won eight of the 18 races between them, scoring maximum points for a one-two finish in Sao Paulo last weekend as the Milton Keynes-based team, who took over the Jaguar infrastructure in 2005, wrapped up their first constructors’ championship. “That means a huge amount to us,” Schack said. “It’s what every team works towards, and in six years we’ve achieved the biggest prize in Formula One.”

Not, of course, the most glamorous. It is the drivers’ title that engages the emotions of the sport’s global audience, but Schack was adamant that no special tensions are evident in the Red Bull camp this weekend as Vettel and Webber prepare to fight it out with Alonso and Hamilton. “The pressure’s always there,” he said. “You prepare to be the best you can, and this weekend is no different.”

For Andy Latham, who has spent this season as Hamilton’s race engineer, and who says he will only allow himself to feel exhausted once the season is over, the year’s fortunes have been more fluctuating. The McLaren team began with the surprise package of the innovative F-duct, but took time to get into a winning stride.

“For me the high point was Lewis’s win in Canada, which was strategically a tough race,” said Latham. “The low point was the crash with Webber in Singapore – our second failure to finish in a row, which made the championship look a lot more difficult. Lewis was a little bit down after that. We all were. The car was a match for anything at that point and he was driving fantastically.”

The reference point has been the speed of the Red Bulls. “All three of the leading teams have been battling hard to upgrade their cars all year,” Latham said, “and we’ve done a good job to be where we are. But they’ve been the class of the field in terms of ultimate pace for most of the season, to be honest.”

Of all the contenders, Hamilton and Latham have the most straightforward task. “We’ve got to win the race,” the 32-year-old engineer said. “We can’t do a lot about what happens to the rest. It’s just got to be a perfect weekend.”

For Ferrari, who are sponsored by one of Abu Dhabi’s investment companies and who launched their vast theme park – complete with a 150mph rollercoaster ride – next to the track this week, the perfect weekend would involve a championship for Alonso in his first season with the team. The four horsemen of this season’s F1 apocalypse topped the timing sheets under the lights last night, with Hamilton ahead of Vettel, Alonso and Webber. Were they to finish the race itself in that order, the title would be the Spaniard’s.

“We need to do the things we normally do,” Stefano Domenicali, the team’s 45-year-old principal, said last night, knowing that the Scuderia Ferrari long ago outgrew a reputation for imploding under pressure. “We don’t need to think too hard or make too many strategies, otherwise you get lost.

“Every one of us is trying to control the emotions that we feel inside,” he concluded, speaking for his own team but echoing the thoughts of all those with a stake in this most compelling of Formula One finales.

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The Spanish driver has never been happier and still believes he can win the Formula One world championship this season

This is a good time to be a Spanish sporting hero, a thought that brings a sudden smile to the face of Fernando Alonso as he sits in the Ferrari motorhome in the rainswept paddock at Spa. His compatriots Rafael Nadal, Alberto Contador, Pau Gasol of the LA Lakers, the MotoGP champion-elect Jorge Lorenzo and this summer’s World Cup winners – including his old friend Xabi Alonso – enjoy global renown. And he, twice Formula One’s world champion, is approaching the climax of his first season as the leader of the sport’s most charismatic team.

“You have to believe in yourself,” he says, “and 15 years ago it was difficult to believe that Spain was a good country for sport. Now everybody believes that we can do what other countries are doing. That self-confidence is very important.

“Spain as a country has developed very quickly. In terms of facilities we are now very well prepared. If you go to any little town in the middle of nowhere, you always have a tennis court, a basketball court, a building to do other sports in. That helped the current generation. We need to enjoy it, because a period like this may be difficult to repeat in the future.”

Alonso certainly gives the impression of relishing the latest phase of his 10-year career as a grand prix driver. Although his first season with the Italian team has been filled with incident and controversy, in cultural terms he appears to have found his spiritual home. But is he, for all the obvious pleasure of working in a Latin environment, nevertheless disappointed to find himself lying only fifth in the championship standings, behind Mark Webber, Lewis Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel and Jenson Button, and the target of fierce criticism for the victory reluctantly handed to him by his team-mate, Felipe Massa, in Germany five weeks ago?

“No, the opposite,” he says. “I’m very, very happy. My life now is the best I could imagine, ever. I’m driving for the best team in the world, and the integration with the team is very good. I fell in love with Italy and the tifosi, and I feel their support.”

He is spending more time in Maranello, he says, than he ever did at the headquarters of his previous teams – “Sometimes working, sometimes not working.” When there is nothing much to do at the home in Lugano which he shares with his wife, the singer Raquel del Rosario, he goes to stay with a friend near the Ferrari factory, or installs himself in Enzo Ferrari’s old apartment at the Fiorano test track, and explores the hills of Emilia-Romagna on his racing bike.

In his last two seasons with Renault, he says, he was going to a race merely with the ambition of making it into the third qualifying session as one of the 10 fastest cars. “That was the motivation. So if I think of my position one year ago, life has changed from black to white. I cannot ask more. For sure, winning the championship here will be the top, the last thing to complete a perfect moment of my life.”

Nor has he given up hope of overhauling the drivers lying ahead of him in this season’s table, given the new scoring system, which awards 25 points for a win. He has 141 points to Webber’s 161, thanks to his results in the last two races: the contentious victory at Hockenheim and a second place in Budapest.

“I think it’s possible,” he says. “There are only 20 points to the leader now. That’s less than one race. With seven races to go, there are plenty of possibilities. We need to be very consistent, to be on the podium in every race if we can, and for sure to win at least two of the seven. The car’s performance has improved a lot in the last couple of races and if we carry on in this way it will be possible. If we can’t, it will be difficult. So it will be necessary to win the race in the factory, as well as on the circuit.

“But whatever happens, I know that with Ferrari I’ll have this possibility for many years because this team is always in a position to win. That makes me very confident and very relaxed about my future.”

Nevertheless, the season’s incidents have come thick and fast. Victory in the opening race in Bahrain, making him the sixth driver to win on his debut for the Scuderia, came after Vettel suffered an engine problem. In Melbourne, following a first-lap spin, there was a thrilling drive from last place to fourth. In China he jumped the start – “Driver error,” he says with a rueful grin – and, after a penalty dropped him to 15th, again chased through the field to fourth.

His Monaco weekend was ruined when he lost control at the top of the climb to Casino Square and smashed into the barrier during a practice session. There was a look of barely suppressed self-disgust on his face as he lifted himself out of the car, knowing that he would have to set off from the pit lane on another adrenalin-fuelled drive to sixth place.

“Driver error again there,” he says, before putting it in perspective. “I’m sure that for all championship contenders there are two or three races a year you would like to change because you did something wrong. In our case, because there are high expectations, there are many more comments. When I’m in front or I’m half a second quicker than my team-mate, that is seen as normal. When we do something wrong, it will be everywhere. We have to deal with that pressure.”

It redoubled at Hockenheim when Massa moved aside to let him take the lead in what was widely seen as an example of the team orders outlawed eight years ago after Rubens Barrichello let Michael Schumacher through to win in Austria. This time an immediate fine of 0,000 was imposed on Ferrari and on 8 September the affair will be considered by a meeting of the FIA World Motor Sports Council in Paris, with further punishment a possibility.

The imminence of the hearing makes Alonso reluctant to discuss the affair in detail, although he did dismiss trenchant criticisms of Ferrari’s conduct from Niki Lauda, a double world champion with the team in the 70s. “What Lauda said isn’t worth bothering about,” he said.

He and the team were clearly shocked by the vehemence of the reaction – particularly from the British media, which turned against him during his disputes with Lewis Hamilton during their turbulent season together at McLaren in 2007 – but his response now is bland. “Being in the best team in the world, you have to expect that everything we do will be 100 times bigger than what it is, whether we do well or make a mistake,” he says. “We have to concentrate on the race this weekend. Then we’ll see what happens in Paris.”

For public consumption, at least, he rejects the idea that a team with championship ambitions needs to concentrate its efforts behind one designated lead driver. “I think now everything has to be 50-50,” he says. “The cars are exactly the same and the drivers are all super-talented, so I think having a first driver and a second driver isn’t working any more. There have to be equal possibilities for both. But for sure when there are only a few races to go in the championship, then it’s time to think what is best for the team.” In that last sentence may lie the key to an affair which is likely to take further twists.

Meanwhile he was fastest in wet and dry conditions in both yesterday’s practice sessions for tomorrow’s Belgian grand prix, at a circuit where he won twice in the old F3000 but has managed no better than second and third places in the senior formula. For Ferrari, by contrast, there have been no fewer than 16 wins since the first for Alberto Ascari in 1952, including a hat-trick in the last three years: another example of the pressure loaded on to any driver, however illustrious, who aspires to leadership of the Scuderia, and in this instance one who had to read Bernie Ecclestone’s remark this week that Alonso will never match Michael Schumacher’s achievements with the team.

“We all enjoy driving at Spa,” Alonso says. “The length of the circuit makes it very interesting. Seven kilometres give you plenty of time to feel the car and there are the type of corners that in qualifying, if you take a risk or if you push hard, you can make up a lot of time. The circuit has some gradients, up and down, and the kind of compression that you feel in your body at Eau Rouge is something that you only experience here. When you stop the car you say, ‘Wow, this was good fun.’ “

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• Vettel claims Red Bull’s 10th pole of the yearby 0.002sec
• Alonso pleased despite missing chance to take pole

Sebastian Vettel claimed Red Bull’s 10th pole position of the year following an electrifying battle with Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso.

The Spaniard, quickest in the first two qualifying sessions, seemed poised to take Ferrari’s first pole for 28 races, stretching back to the 2008 Brazilian grand prix. But Vettel snatched top spot from Alonso by just two thousandths of a second on his final flying lap to spark joyous celebrations among the home fans at Hockenheim. Vettel will almost certainly claim this to be the best pole of his six this season and 11 of his career.

“It would be interesting to see just how much it is, two thousandths of a second,” said Vettel. “It was very close all session. Fernando was really strong, and the Ferraris were very competitive.

“We knew it would be a difficult session, and two thousandths of a second is not what you are looking for, so we had to push very hard and it was very exciting. I’m extremely happy because it’s my first time on pole at home, but the challenge will come tomorrow when it will be a tough fight against the red cars.”

Alonso said: “We have to be happy because we are on the front row of the grid for the first time this season. Finally we have had a perfect Saturday, and although we lost pole by a very small margin, this is not important. The points are won tomorrow, so we also have to have a good Sunday.”

With none of the rain that blighted practice yesterday, as well as the start of this morning’s final session, Ferrari proved they have put recent problems behind them and Felipe Massa will start third on the grid. Mark Webber, winner last time out at Silverstone, is fourth, followed by McLaren’s Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton – the former outpacing the latter for the first time in seven races.

Renault’s Robert Kubica is seventh, followed by Rubens Barrichello in eighth and his Williams team-mate Nico Hulkenberg in 10th. Between them in ninth is Mercedes’s Nico Rosberg.

For the third time in four qualifying sessions, Michael Schumacher failed to make it out of Q2, with fellow German Hulkenberg proving to be his undoing on this occasion. Towards the end of the 15 minutes Schumacher had crept into 10th position, only for Hulkenberg to knock the seven-times champion down to 11th with his final lap.

Sauber’s Kamui Kobayashi and Renault’s Vitaly Petrov will line up 12th and 13th. Adrian Sutil qualified 14th in his Force India but incurs a five-place grid penalty for needing a new gearbox and will therefore start 19th.

Pedro de la Rosa in his Sauber will start 14th, followed by the Toro Rosso pairing of Jaime Alguersuari and Sebastien Buemi.

It proved to be a wretched qualifying session for Force India as the initial 20-minute run was red flagged after five minutes due to Vitantonio Liuzzi hitting a wall along the start-finish straight. Liuzzi made a mistake by running wide on the still wet astroturf on the outside of the final corner, known as the Sudkurve.

That sent the Italian careering across the track where he ended up ploughing into the concrete pit wall, immediately losing his front wing and a tyre that was narrowly avoided by a passing Ferrari. With fibreglass from the chassis scattered across the circuit, it took the marshals eight minutes to clear away the debris and the pit lane to re-open again.

Liuzzi will start 22nd, with only Hispania Racing’s Sakon Yamamoto and Lucas di Grassi for Virgin Racing behind him, the latter unable to set a time due to a technical problem. The four drivers ahead of Liuzzi who all failed to make it out of Q1 were the Lotus duo of Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen, along with Timo Glock and Bruno Senna for Virgin and Hispania Racing.

Due to Sutil’s penalty, Trulli and Kovalainen will move up to 17th and 18th on the grid, with Glock and Senna 20th and 21st.

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