{"id":19224,"date":"2013-09-09T07:00:20","date_gmt":"2013-09-09T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/?p=19224"},"modified":"2013-09-09T07:00:20","modified_gmt":"2013-09-09T11:00:20","slug":"rivals-admit-vettel-on-cruise-for-fourth-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/formula-1\/rivals-admit-vettel-on-cruise-for-fourth-title\/","title":{"rendered":"Rivals admit Vettel on cruise for fourth title"},"content":{"rendered":"

As he reinforced his dominance on the season with a sixth win of 2013 on Sunday, Sebastian Vettel’s rivals acknowledged at Monza the German is on course to be a four-time world champion.<\/p>\n

\"Sebastian-Vettel-6\"With seven races still to run this year, the Red Bull driver’s closest challenger is Fernando Alonso — and the Spaniard’s deficit is 53 points.<\/p>\n

That means that if the Red Bull simply comes second for the rest of the year, with Alonso’s Ferrari managing an unlikely seven-race winning streak, Vettel will still be champion after November’s Brazil finale.<\/p>\n

“I think we need to be realistic about the championship now — there’s a very big gap,” Alonso said after finishing second in Italy.<\/p>\n

“We don’t have enough races (left) and probably we don’t have the speed right now.<\/p>\n

“We need to be lucky and we need to have some DNFs from Sebastian or something to win the championship,” he added.<\/p>\n

Lewis Hamilton is a further 28 points adrift, so he got out of his Mercedes on Sunday and admitted: “Obviously that’s that for the championship.”<\/p>\n

Later, after a shower and a team debrief, the Briton insisted he’s actually not giving up.<\/p>\n

But even his boss Toto Wolff admitted to German reporters that continuing to charge for the title is now an “unrealistic” goal.<\/p>\n

So with the title looking like a Vettel whitewash, the bigger talking point after the Italian grand prix was the behaviour of the Ferrari-loving ‘tifosi’.<\/p>\n

They chanted, booed and whistled throughout the German national anthem, moving Vettel’s teammate Mark Webber – hardly a big fan of the 26-year-old – to surmise that the atmosphere on the podium was “not completely correct”.<\/p>\n

But Vettel, despite earlier complaining about being booed at Silverstone, seemed less bothered.<\/p>\n

“I said on the radio on the in-lap that the more booing we get, the better we have done today.\u00a0 It’s normal,” he told reporters.<\/p>\n

“I don’t blame the people to be honest, I think their love of Ferrari is in their genes.”<\/p>\n

As for his seemingly inevitable charge for a Michael Schumacher-esque fourth consecutive world championship, the German said he is not celebrating yet.<\/p>\n

“I don’t go for predictions, I go for facts, and fact is that mathematically a number of scenarios are still possible,” he told F1’s official website.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As he reinforced his dominance on the season with a sixth win of 2013 on Sunday, Sebastian Vettel’s rivals acknowledged at Monza the German is on course to be a four-time world champion. With seven races still to run this year, the Red Bull driver’s closest challenger is Fernando Alonso — and the Spaniard’s deficit …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,149,5340,2137,154,92,129,164,5359],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19224"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19225,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19224\/revisions\/19225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}