With two F1 races left, it’s hammer time for Nico Rosberg

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On tap this week:

• Desperate times for Rosberg.
• Lopez on F1's broken finances.
• Hamilton surpasses Mansell's win record.
• Chase race winners spoiling the party?
• Quote of the week: Jeff Gordon's potty mouth.
• Only IndyCar gets its schedule strategy.

With two races to go in the Formula One season and facing a 24-point deficit to his teammate, it's hammer time for Nico Rosberg.

Unless disaster strikes Lewis Hamilton at Interlagos in Brazil next weekend or Abu Dhabi on Nov. 23, Rosberg needs to win the final pair of races just to have a shot at the title.

"Same approach from me: Fully committed, full attack, try and be on pole in qualifying and then win Interlagos and that's it," he said. "There are still many points to be had and a lot can still happen."

The big problem for the Mercedes driver is that all championship leader Hamilton needs to do is finish second in the final two races to take the title, even if Rosberg wins both.

Considering the pair of Mercedes drivers crossed the line 25 seconds ahead of nearest rival Daniel Ricciardo of the Red Bull squad in Texas, Hamilton can pretty much take it easy in the final two grands prix and cruise to the 2014 world championship.

"I think during the year you have to be balanced in the risks you take and I think that so far I've not been taking too many risks," he said. "I've done what I've needed to do to get by in the safest way, in the cleanest way, which has worked all year, so I should just continue to do the same."

The big wild card is the newly instituted double-points finale in Abu Dhabi, which prevents Hamilton from clinching the championship in Brazil. Had the series stayed with the normal scoring system, Hamilton would only have needed to score one more point than Rosberg next weekend to go home with the 2014 crown.

While many have panned the double-points finale, Rosberg has another point of view. "For me, that's great to hear, of course, because then there's a definite shot at the championship this year, even with the points that I'm now behind."

Random thoughts

The infighting in Formula One was front and centre during the Friday press conference at the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, where several team bosses went toe-to-toe over the financial model that sees the big teams get a disproportionate amount of revenue while the smaller outfits starve.

The questions and answers essentially saw Mercedes' Toto Wolff and McLaren's Eric Boullier scoff at cost caps and a new redistribution of the funds to the teams, while Gerard Lopez of Lotus, Sauber's Monisha Kaltenborn, and Force India owner Vijay Mallya pushed in the other direction.

Coming just days after two teams, Caterham and Marussia, went into bankruptcy protection and will not finish the 2014 season, the argument that the revenue split and the failure to cut costs had a direct impact on two teams disappearing from the grid this season held lots of weight. In particular, Lotus boss Lopez, a successful tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist before getting involved in F1, had some pretty scathing remarks about the sport's model.

Cited as particularly problematic are the $160-million contingency payments to some of the teams for just showing up, while those at the bottom receive less than 20 per cent of that amount as their entire share of the sport's revenues.

"When you've got teams showing up to the championship that get more money just for showing up than teams spending a whole season, then something is entirely wrong with the whole system and so that cannot be allowed to happen," Lopez said.

"It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, essentially, that the ones that have more get more, and as a result want more and want to spend more and so on, and the ones that have less, get less. There is something entirely wrong with the distribution model right now."

Lopez also underlined that the sport seems to have a Jekyll and Hyde personality when it comes to managing itself. "We say things and then we tend to do the opposite," he said.

"The birth of the new engines happened when we started talking about cutting costs and so forth. In our case this year, between the engine and development we probably spent something like $50-million (U.S.) to $60-million. That's not cost cutting in our books, that's essentially throwing money out the window."

By the numbers

Lewis Hamilton's win in Sunday's U.S. Grand Prix made him the most successful British driver in Formula One history with 32 victories. His triumph on Sunday puts him one ahead of Nigel Mansell who scored 31 victories in 187 grand prix starts between 1980 and 1994. Hamilton broke Mansell's mark in his 146th F1 race.

While many may see that as a signal of Hamilton's superiority as a driver, it must be remembered that Mansell raced in an era where the cars were not almost bulletproof, and reliability played a key role in the outcome of a grand prix.

Comparing Hamilton's numbers against Mansell's reveals a stark difference when it comes to finishing races.

In his 146 races so far, Hamilton has failed to see the chequered flag just 19 times or 13 per cent of the time. On the other hand, Mansell didn't make it to the end of the race in 45 per cent of his starts, not finishing 87 times in his 187 starts.

Technically speaking

With one race to go in the Eliminator Round of NASCAR's Chase for the Cup, drivers outside the championship playoff continue to play a huge role in who gets to be one of the four drivers to go for the winner-take-all Nov. 16 finale in Miami.

Sunday's winner at the Texas Motor Speedway, Jimmie Johnson, got knocked out of the hunt a couple of weeks ago as did the previous race victor Dale Earnhardt Jr. In both cases, the second place finisher — Kevin Harvick on Sunday and Jeff Gordon a week ago — were both trying to score a win to get an automatic berth in the Miami showdown.

Instead, Harvick now lies last of the eight remaining challengers and certainly must win to have a shot at the 2014 title, while Gordon's prospects are a bit better.

The four-time champion is fourth in points after a late race accident saw him end the day 29th in Texas. Gordon also ended his evening with a fistfight in the pitlane after confronting Brad Keselowski, who he blamed for the accident that cost him a possible win.

That means at least three drivers — possibly all four — will get into the Miami Chase decider on points. The only chance left to earn an automatic bye into the finale is with a win in the season's penultimate race in Phoenix on Sunday, and Gordon expects to be in the winner's circle.

"We are just going to take this fire that's inside of us and this momentum, we are going to take to Phoenix and win that race," he said.

Quote of the week

"That dumb (expletive) — the (expletive) two car ran into us, that's what happened."

Jeff Gordon telling crew chief Alan Gustafson about contact with Brad Keselowski that saw the four-time NASCAR champion cut a tire and spin on the first attempted green-white-checker finish in Sunday's AAA Texas 500 at the Texas Motor Speedway.

The last word

In announcing the 2015 IndyCar schedule, Series CEO Mark Miles said: "I'm not sure people understand our thinking about this yet, we don't think you simply race any weekend you can have a race."

The ironic thing in Miles' statement is that few people do understand his thinking but nobody is asking IndyCar to race every weekend. What fans want is a season that goes past Labour Day and Miles not getting that fact points to a complete lack of understanding by the series of the fan base.

Rather than trying to hear its fans' concerns, IndyCar seems to be intent on following a strategic plan based on the conclusions of a consultant with little experience in racing. That plan is the origin of the completely impractical compressed season that made its debut in 2014 and overtaxed drivers and crews and demanded focused attention of fans during a 22-week span from March to August.

Adding Brazil in 2015 has expanded the length to 25 weeks due to an earlier start, but IndyCar steadfastly insisted it has no plans to push the finale back from its present date. The idea is that there are too many distractions in the fall, such as the Major League Baseball playoffs and the beginning of the National Football League season.

Essentially, the series wants to "own the Labour Day weekend" after which it will go dark for more than half a year and leave those interested in racing to watch other series, something which ultimately threatens to take casual fans away from IndyCar rather than bring them to it.

It seems to be having a similar effect on hardcore fans, too, who want more races at better venues that the series seems determined to ignore. They also want to watch open wheel when the weather permits, which in the U.S. means going to late October, early November. That could easily be accomplished with a race every two weeks after the opener in Brazil, rather than forcing the teams and drivers to endure back-to-back-to-back events shoehorned into a six-month period.

A quick look at North America's hugely successful racing series — NASCAR — reveals a 36-race season that begins in February and ends in November. Now nobody thinks IndyCar should race every week for the better part of 10 months, but looking back to the glory years of the old Championship Auto Racing Teams shows that series usually had somewhere around 18 races spread over an eight-month schedule.

And finally, owning Labour Day may not be the best plan anyway. So far in the 10-race NASCAR Chase for the Cup playoff that decides the season champion, that series has averaged roughly 10 times the TV audience that IndyCar races usually get (four million vs 400,000), and all of those stock car tilts happened after Labour Day.

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