Lewis vs Max: The ultimate explainer for F1’s decider

How does it stand in the championship?

After 21 of this season’s 22 races, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton are tied on 369.5 points at the top of the drivers’ standings.

Verstappen officially holds the lead, however, on Formula 1’s countback rule.

The Red Bull driver has won nine races to the Mercedes man’s eight.

What’s at stake for each driver?

Verstappen, the 24-year-old in his seventh season on the grid, is aiming for his first F1 title. He would be the first Dutchman to become champion and just the second Red Bull driver after Sebastian Vettel.

For Hamilton, the most significant achievement in the sport’s history is up for grabs. An eighth world title would set a new all-time outright record for drivers’ championships, one more than Michael Schumacher.

Have drivers been tied on points going into a final race before?

Only once before in the 71 previous seasons of the world championship.

That was back in 1974 when Brazil’s Emerson Fittipaldi and Switzerland’s Clay Regazzoni were tied heading into that season’s final round in the USA.

But that was in a campaign of only 15 races, making the fact Verstappen and Hamilton are level after 21 rounds all the more remarkable.

How can Verstappen or Hamilton win the title?

To put it most simply, whichever one wins the race is world champion (they have won 17 of the season’s 21 races between them so far).

To put it slightly less simply, whichever one finishes ahead in the top eight positions is also world champion.

Can they finish level on points – and what happens then?

Yes, and in such a scenario Verstappen would take the title.

But under the sport’s points system for a race’s top-10 finishers (25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1) there are only two ways where a points tie can now happen.

The first is if both drivers finish outside of those points-scoring positions entirely, that means 11th or lower (including race retirement).

Up to 2021, this had never actually happened in races that both Hamilton and Verstappen had competed in yet has occurred twice this season.

The first time was in Azerbaijan in June when Verstappen suffered a tyre blow-out while leading and Hamilton finished 15th after plummeting down the order once knocking the wrong steering wheel button on the race’s late restart. Then of course, there was the high drama of the Italian GP in September when the rivals ended up beached in the gravel trap after colliding while battling over position.

But there is one other way they could finish level on points too.

If one were to finish Sunday’s race ninth (two points) and the other 10th with the fastest lap bonus (1+1) then they would be tied on 371.5 points. Again, due to countback, Verstappen would be champion.

Drivers have never finished a season tied on points at the top of the championship; the closest-ever finish was 0.5 points between Niki Lauda and Alain Prost in 1984.

If a driver finishes outside the top 10, they cannot score a point even if they hold the race’s fastest lap.

Could the season be decided by a collision?

The question that is inevitably cropping up in conversation given the increasingly combative nature of Verstappen and Hamilton’s rivalry, making it not an entirely fictitious prospect.

After all, the duelling pair have collided to race-ending effect for at least one car on two occasions this season – and very nearly with a similar consequence in Saudi Arabia last weekend – while there have also been numerous wheel-touching and off-track moments as they have fought over positions.

Championship-deciding collisions have been seen in F1 before, although not especially recently.

Both the 1989 and 1990 title fights between Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna were settled in this way at the respective campaign’s penultimate rounds, while Michael Schumacher came together in final-round deciders with Damon Hill in 1994 and Jacques Villeneuve in 1997.

Attempting to draw a line under such tactics, the FIA took Schumacher’s season’s points away from him after the controversial conclusion to the latter campaign and all final-race showdowns have since passed without such contentious incident with F1’s rulebook on driver conduct rather more comprehensive nowadays.

All parties have said they want to win this year’s championship the right way, and Sky F1’s David Croft believes this weekend’s race stewards – which include experienced FIA man Garry Connelly and former F1 driver Derek Warwick – believes it would nonetheless be useful for officials to remind the title contenders before the weekend of the expected rules of engagement.

“They will have the courage of their convictions to decide this in the championship in the stewards’ room, if they need to,” said Croft on Sky Sports News. “But the best thing to do is to sit down with the drivers and remind them of their responsibility to keep it firm, keep it fair, keep it clean and keep the wheel-to-wheel action on rack without contact.

“If we do that and someone does transgress the rules, you’ve done your job as a steward and that makes the big decision that much easier should it be necessary.”

What’s the Abu Dhabi track like? And what has changed there?

The Yas Marina circuit in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates joined the calendar in 2009 and has had the honour of hosting the final race of the season in every year since 2014.

It will be the fourth time in those 12 years that it has staged a title decider.

While arguably still the sport’s most spectacular-looking venue, with a 499-room hotel that straddles the circuit its unique feature, the layout has generally not produced thrilling racing.

The track gained infamy at the final round of 2010 when pre-event title leader Fernando Alonso spent much of the race trapped behind a significantly-slower Renault of Vitaly Petrov, which allowed Vettel to cash in and claim his maiden title.

The advent of DRS the following season helped improve things and there have been some more exciting races in the years since, although last year’s Verstappen-dominated event proved particularly soporific.

Aware of that reputation, the circuit has this year been remodelled in three places of the lap to help create more overtaking and the possibility for wheel-to-wheel racing.

The chicane before what was Turn Seven has been removed and the hairpin at what is now Turn Five widened. At end of the second DRS zone further around the lap, four corners have been taken out with one fast banked turn now in its place (Turn Nine). Four corners around the hotel section have also been altered to improve racing.

All in all, the lap length has been shortened to 5.2km from 5.5km with lap times expected to be 10s faster than before. Verstappen’s pole time from 2020 was 1:35.246.

Who is the circuit likely to favour?

Making accurate predictions about the competitiveness between Mercedes and Red Bull has proved fraught with difficulty all season.

Yas Marina had been considered a banker Mercedes track in the hybrid-engine era until Red Bull and Verstappen dominated there last year, the Dutchman winning by 15 seconds. But Mercedes went the wrong way on set-up, Hamilton had just returned from Covid-19, and the championship fights were long since settled.

The track, of course, has since been remodelled too and is now significantly faster.

Writing in his recent Sky column, expert analyst Mark Hughes said: “Abu Dhabi is traditionally a track placing more emphasis on the rear of the car and as such might in theory favour Red Bull, especially in the last sector with its street circuit-like series of bends and acceleration zones.

“Red Bull beat Mercedes there fair and square in 2020 but we cannot take that as too much of a predictor for these two cars, which are quite different in their respective strengths and weaknesses compared to last year.

“Especially with the Mercedes apparently in the ascendant since Brazil, with a rethought set-up that seems to suit Hamilton very well.”

When does Sky live coverage start and when’s the race?

All the track action is live on Sky Sports F1 and Sky Sports Main Event.

The first of three practice sessions start on Friday at 9.30am. Qualifying is at 1pm on Saturday, with the Race also at 1pm on Sunday with Sky F1 build-up from 11.30am.

Sky’s live coverage begins on Thursday afternoon with the Verstappen and Hamilton section of the Drivers’ Press Conference from 1.30pm, followed by The F1 Show at 3pm on TV and YouTube.