The race was also the final event for Bruno Senna, Vitaly Petrov, Timo Glock, Pedro de la Rosa, Narain Karthikeyan, and the HRT Formula 1 Team, which withdrew due to financial difficulties having never scored a championship point.
Tyre supplier Pirelli used Friday practice to provide teams with early prototypes of their 2013 compounds. They brought the silver-banded hard tyre as the harder prime compound and the white-banded medium tyre as the softer option, differing from the 2011 race where they had supplied medium and soft dry tyres.
To win the championship for a third time, Vettel needed to defend a 13-point advantage over Alonso. Alonso needed at least third place even if Vettel failed to score, while a fourth place was sufficient for Vettel even if Alonso won.
Lewis Hamilton and McLaren set the pace across the Friday sessions, closely followed by Vettel and his Red Bull teammate Mark Webber. Hamilton topped both Friday sessions; Button was quickest in the third session on Saturday morning. Alonso struggled in the first session, trailing Vettel by 0.465 seconds, twice his typical deficit. Ferrari showed strength over long runs, with Felipe Massa posting the most consistently fast times, 0.1 seconds ahead of Hamilton. High temperatures made tyre degradation a concern; Hamilton commented it "felt almost as though I was sliding around the track with the tyres melting".
Saturday qualifying ran under difficult conditions, starting on a damp track with intermediate tyres before the track dried sufficiently for slick tyres in Q2. In Q1, Romain Grosjean collided with the HRT of de la Rosa and lost his front wing, leaving him 18th. Schumacher qualified 14th, almost half a second from his teammate. Hamilton took pole, his last with McLaren; Vettel and Alonso qualified fourth and eighth respectively. Pastor Maldonado received a 10-place penalty for missing the weighbridge, dropping from sixth to 16th and promoting Alonso to seventh.
With only light rain ten minutes before the start, all teams elected slick tyres. Vettel dropped to seventh off the line while Alonso moved to fifth. Vettel and Senna collided at turn four; Vettel spun and sustained left-sidepod damage before continuing from 22nd place. Massa helped Alonso pass Webber on lap two at the Senna-S, giving the Spaniard the third position he needed to win the title, though Alonso lost it to Nico Hülkenberg of Force India after running wide on lap four. Maldonado crashed out on lap two after losing control on the kerb at turn three.
Rain prompted the title contenders to pit for intermediates, while Button and Hülkenberg stayed out on slicks. The rain soon eased, and those on intermediates pitted again for slicks. Hülkenberg overtook Button for the lead at the end of lap 18, the official time differential between them at the finish line that lap recorded as 0.000.
Debris brought out the safety car on lap 23, at which point Alonso and Vettel ran fourth and fifth. At the restart on lap 29, Kamui Kobayashi took fifth from Vettel. The sidepod damage slowed the Red Bull further in dry conditions, and Massa helped Alonso by passing Vettel. At the front, Hamilton took second from Button and then passed Hülkenberg when the German half-spun; Hülkenberg then chased Hamilton and collided with him on lap 54, sending Hamilton out with front-left suspension damage and earning Hülkenberg a drive-through penalty. Button inherited the lead.
When rain returned, Vettel was among the first to pit for intermediates, but his radio had failed and the team was unprepared, causing a long delay. Ferrari timed Massa's stop to allow Alonso to take second. Vettel moved past Schumacher to take sixth, which proved sufficient to clinch the title with Alonso finishing second. The race concluded under the safety car after Paul di Resta crashed on the start/finish straight near the end. Petrov's 11th place for Caterham moved that team ahead of Marussia in the Constructors' Championship. Kimi Räikkönen had an eventful race, nearly hitting Vettel at the start and later mistakenly using an escape road that had been open at the 2001 Brazilian Grand Prix but was now a dead end. Schumacher finished seventh after recovering from an early puncture; he gave up sixth to Vettel to help extend his slim points advantage over Alonso.
The race drew widespread acclaim. The Guardian described it as a "rollercoaster". Three-time world champions Niki Lauda and Nelson Piquet stated they had never seen a race like it. German magazine Der Spiegel called it "spectacular" and "historic", citing a record 147 successful overtaking manoeuvres. Reuters declared the race "a thriller to stand the test of time". Vettel called it his "toughest race ever". At 25, Vettel became the youngest triple world champion in the sport, six years younger than Ayrton Senna had been when he won his third title. Vettel commented: "To win that third title here, where one of my greatest idols, Ayrton Senna, was from, it is very difficult to imagine I join him and other great names by winning three successive titles." Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said: "Sebastian has driven better than ever this season and has fought his way back into this championship, he's never given up and you saw that in today's race." The Daily Mirror credited Red Bull designer Adrian Newey with the decision, taken after photographing the damage, to adjust engine mapping to keep the exhaust cool, at the cost of some performance.
Alonso called the 2012 season "the best season of my career" and expressed pride in his team regardless of the result. Button called the win "the perfect way to end the season." Schumacher reflected on three years at Mercedes GP: "I have tried that mission to end successful. It didn't work this time but I'm quite happy to finish from here and go for a different life again." Former team owner Eddie Jordan said he believed Alonso deserved the title given his less competitive machine. Former driver Jaime Alguersuari argued Vettel deserved it having entered the final race with "the most difficult position — he had everything to lose."
Three days after the race, Ferrari considered filing an appeal with the FIA after video allegedly showed Vettel overtaking Jean-Éric Vergne under yellow flags; a 20-second penalty would have demoted Vettel to eighth and handed the title to Alonso. Two days later Ferrari withdrew the potential appeal after the FIA confirmed Vettel's move on Vergne had occurred under green flags. Formula One CEO Bernie Ecclestone called Ferrari's allegations "a shame" and "a joke."
Marussia's engineering director Nikolai Fomenko accused driver Charles Pic of deliberately letting Petrov pass, given that Pic had already signed with Caterham for 2013. No action was taken. In August 2018, Horner revealed that Vettel had privately blamed teammate Webber for his poor start, believing Webber had pushed him toward the wall at turn one, and that the Multi 21 controversy at the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix was Vettel's response.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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