Andrew Benson

It wasn't meant to end this way.

When Sebastian Vettel signed to replace Fernando Alonso at Ferrari at the end of 2014, his dream was to emulate his childhood hero Michael Schumacher and win the world championship with the Italian team.

Sir Stirling Moss, who has died aged 90, personified motorsport to at least two generations of his countrymen after establishing himself as the greatest racing driver of his era in a short but stellar career.

Moss raced in Formula 1 in the sport's romantic age of the 1950s and early 1960s, winning 16 grands prix. Yet despite his rivals at the time acknowledging he was the best, he never won the World Championship.

The Formula 1 season will start in Australia this weekend amid a climate of uncertainty, anxiety and distrust.

There is anxiety over the global coronavirus outbreak, which has led to the postponement of the fourth race of the season, in China, and forced the second - in Bahrain - to be held behind closed doors.

The Formula 1 teams have completed their pre-season testing programmes and the shape of this year's competition is beginning to emerge.

It is notoriously difficult to form any firm conclusions from testing because the number of potential variables is just too high.

The Formula 1 teams are half way through their pre-season testing programmes and world champions Mercedes could hardly have had a more impressive start to 2020.

That's not to say they will necessarily start the season in their familiar position at the front of the field, but they have certainly underlined their status as favourites.

Lewis Hamilton ended 2019 with a dominant victory in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, a fitting end to possibly the most impressive season of his career.

The Mercedes driver has won 11 races - just over half - and has had a lock on his sixth championship since the early summer. But the predictability of Hamilton's confirmation as king of F1 yet again was a stark contrast from the often vivid and compelling on-track action of the individual races.

It took 20 races, but finally the inevitable happened at Ferrari at the Brazilian Grand Prix. Their drivers Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel collided, taking both out of the race and leaving the team with a rather large problem on their hands.

"Silly" was the word team boss Mattia Binotto used to describe the incident. In his cool, detached way, he deflected a series of opportunities to lay the blame, and said he would reconvene with Vettel and Leclerc at the factory in Maranello this week to analyse what happened, come to some form of judgement and decide on next steps.

After clinching his sixth world title, Lewis Hamilton talked in abstract rather than concrete terms about the scale of his achievement.

"I am working on a masterpiece," he said, "and I haven't quite finished it yet. I am trying to understand. It takes a long time to master a craft and while I feel like I am mastering it, there is still more to master, still more to add to it, still more pieces of the puzzle to add.

Lewis Hamilton made this one look easy, much as he has been doing all year, but the victory in the Mexican Grand Prix that took him to the brink of a sixth world title was nothing of the sort.

It was the Mercedes driver's 10th win in 18 races in 2019, but this season has surrendered to Hamilton because of the consistent excellence of the 34-year-old Briton and his team, which was again on display on Sunday.

Mercedes set a new standard in Formula 1 at the Japanese Grand Prix as they secured a record-breaking sixth world championship double - and yet there was their team boss Toto Wolff after the race talking about not being able to appreciate it yet because they had been beaten by Ferrari in qualifying earlier in the day.

"We are somehow so eager to go well," Wolff said, "that this non-performance sits in our bones. But probably it is going to sink in overnight flying back to Europe."