Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel turned title teaser on Sunday after putting himself back in the Formula One championship mix with a victory in Brazil.
The 23-year-old German’s fourth win of the season left him 15 points behind Ferrari’s championship leader Fernando Alonso and seven adrift of his own Australian teammate Mark Webber, who finished second, with one race remaining.
The points mean that another Vettel-Webber one-two in Abu Dhabi next weekend would hand the title to Alonso even if the Spaniard finished as low as fourth.
Photo: Reuters
A Webber-Vettel finish would make the Australian champion instead and make sure Red Bull ended the season with both titles after it won the constructors’ crown on Sunday.
Asked if he would do “the honorable thing” if the same positions were repeated going into the final lap in Abu Dhabi, Vettel swerved.
“We go there, try to qualify as high up as possible and then race hard and then see where we are, and then obviously in my case it’s pretty straightforward,” he answered.
“You will have to judge according to the situation. I think both of us know how to act,” Vettel added.
Pressed on the point, he added with a grin: “It’s one week away. As a kid, I never liked it when my parents teased me for something and didn’t answer my question, so now I’m in a good position to tease you, so you will see.”
He returned to the theme later when he passed through the team hospitality unit as reporters quizzed team boss Christian Horner.
“When I was young people teased me,” Vettel said. “Don’t say anything.”
Webber, last year’s winner in Brazil, would have been just a point behind Alonso had he beaten Vettel at the Interlagos circuit, but he recognized Red Bull were never going to order Vettel to move aside for him in the race.
“It’s not in the team’s philosophy. That’s how it is,” he said. “It was a good drive by Seb [Sebastian] today for the win and that’s how it is. I think the team’s position has always been on the sporting side.”
Vettel said the simplest solution for him would be for Alonso to retire with a blown engine from the race in Abu Dhabi, although he hurriedly added that he meant that with no malice.
“I don’t wish anything bad to happen to him, but I think we wouldn’t mind if we saw some nice Ferrari smoke,” said Vettel, who was just a wide-eyed teenager when Alonso won his first title in 2005.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier