Fernando Alonso's F1 title hopes rest on Ferrari transplant operation

A shared Latin culture is what makes Fernando Alonso feel at home in the Ferrari team but, as he attempts to secure his third world championship in Brazil this weekend, the Spaniard has been assiduously maintaining the outward serenity with which he has risen from virtually nowhere in mid-season to an 11-point lead over his nearest challenger, Mark Webber, with two rounds of the title race to go. While a tense Webber was revealing the internal divisions that have hampered the Red Bull team's ability to capitalise on their performance advantage, Alonso was telling a journalist that his only recent outburst of high emotion came on Wednesday night, when he watched the referee at San Siro failing to notice that Milan's Filippo Inzaghi had scored against the Spaniard's beloved Real Madrid from an offside position. Beneath Alonso's display of equanimity, however, lies a nagging anxiety. For more than six decades the heart of every Ferrari has been its engine – the only bit of the car that the company's founder, old Enzo Ferrari, really cared about. And Alonso's fate this weekend may be decided by the success of a critical transplant operation. Alonso will recapture the title on Sunday if he finishes the Brazilian grand prix having extended the gap to 25 points or more over his nearest pursuer, enabling him to go to the final race of the season, in Abu Dhabi tomorrow week, already assured of the championship. But he has already made use of every one of the eight engines permitted to each competitor during the course of a year. In the last minute of the first practice session today Alonso coasted to a silent halt on a grass verge around the back of the circuit when his engine died. Ferrari had already announced that a change of power plant would be made between the morning and afternoon sessions but the failure did nothing to silence speculation that the limited number of effective engines available to Alonso may form the most serious threat to his late run for the championship, in which he has won three of the last four grands prix. The maximum useful life of a Formula One engine is about 2,000km but power losses start to occur after the distance of a single race – just over 300km. In the old free-spending days Ferrari's mechanics would have fitted a brand-new unit for every race and every qualifying session but now the engineers are having to shuffle through their restricted stock of power plants in order to find those that suffered the least amount of wear earlier in the season. "Engines are OK for us so far," Alonso said after arriving here this week. But it was as early as the fourth race of the season, in Shanghai, that Ferrari adopted a new strategy after he suffered a failure for the second meeting in a row. "We had some difficulties early in the year," Chris Dyer, the team's Australian chief track engineer, said today, "and after China we sat down and made a plan for how we would manage the rest of the year. Since then things have gone absolutely to that plan." To run out of effective engines altogether would mean bringing in a ninth engine and incurring a 10-place grid penalty. "Everybody plays the game of juggling the eight engines," Dyer said, "making decisions about where it's sensible to use the fresh engines, based on the circuit characteristics." Luckily for Alonso, Interlagos and Abu Dhabi's Yas Marina are not circuits that make ultimate demands on sheer horsepower. "They're not the easiest on the engines," Dyer said, "but they're not the hardest either." In eight appearances at this demanding circuit in a suburb of São Paulo Alonso has compiled two second places and three thirds but no wins. Yesterday he partially deflected suggestions that a third championship would be sullied by the extra seven points gained when Felipe Massa was ordered to hand him a controversial victory at Hockenheim in July by expressing the hope that his Brazilian team-mate – victorious at his home circuit in 2006 and 2008 – would win both this season's remaining races. "Felipe is normally very strong here," he said. "And the best thing for us, and even for me in championship numbers, would be to have him winning the race." A win for Massa would deprive Alonso's rivals of the chance to score a maximum 25 points, significantly reducing their chances of closing the gap to the Ferrari leader. After various kinds of failure – including his own errors – blighted the promise of an opening win in Bahrain Alonso has watched the team pull themselves together for the second half of the season. "The last four or five races were very important for us," he said. "One retirement could have been our bye-bye to the championship. But everything went well because we kept our concentration, with no mistakes, and that's the way we've got to continue." Two factors, he said, prompted the uplift in his fortunes. "First, the performance of the car improved a lot. In the last two or three months we brought some updates to the car that really worked. Second there was luck, which maybe was not on our side in the middle part of the championship. Remember Monaco, where I crashed on Saturday morning at 60kph? If I crashed like that 100 times, 99 times I'd go through to qualifying with no problems. It's not normal to break the chassis at that speed. But now the consistency is good, the car's performance is good and we've been lucky – like in South Korea, where Webber retired and Sebastian [Vettel] as well. "Now it's very exciting. It's like starting from zero. Whichever of the three or four contenders does the best job in the last two races will win the championship." For Dyer, who is in his 10th season with Ferrari, the battle is reminiscent of 2007, when he was Kimi Raikkonen's race engineer as the Finn made a late run to snatch the title from Lewis Hamilton. "If anything this year is a little more difficult because in 2007 our car was as fast as anything out there," he said. "This year we've had to work a little bit harder. We're still not in a position where we have the fastest car but we've closed the gap to the point where we've put a lot of pressure on the other people." Alonso, who finished third in today's second session, behind the two Red Bulls, calmly acknowledges that Webber and Vettel have the benefit of faster machinery. "We know they are the favourite on any circuit," he said. "They've been very dominant and we expect very strong competition with them – and with McLaren as well. On a bad weekend you can find yourself fifth or sixth very easily. But our approach will not change. Consistency will be the priority and getting on the podium will be our goal. Whether it's good enough to win the championship, we'll see in Abu Dhabi." Or perhaps, if Ferrari can squeeze the last ounce of speed and reliability out of one of those remaining engines, and Alonso's luck holds, even on Sunday.