MOTORSPORT: Triple-header title weekend

If not, the tussle between Holden driver Whincup and Ford’s Mark Winterbottom will go to the Sydney 500 in a fortnight.

Another big championship most certainly will be decided this weekend – NASCAR’s Sprint Cup, in which Brad Keselowski, in just his third full season in the top league of American stock car racing, goes into the final round with a 20-point advantage over five-time champion Jimmie Johnson.

Keselowski can deliver legendary open-wheeler team owner Roger Penske his first Cup title – and glory to Dodge as it bows out of NASCAR after it couldn’t find a suitable team to partner next year when Penske switches to Ford.

Formula One tries yet again this weekend to crack the American market with a new grand prix, the first in the US for five years, on a brand new circuit in Austin, Texas.

As if the challenge for F1 isn’t hard enough in America, the NASCAR finale will start in Florida at little more than half distance in the GP.

Americans are sure to have a much greater interest in the stock cars, and in any case the F1 title fight is more likely to go to the wire in Brazil a week later – unless Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel outscores Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso by 15 points in Texas.

While it all means a feast of TV viewing for Australian motorsport fans over the next couple of days, the races in America are at ungodly hours Monday morning for Australians.

There’s also the final round of the Australian Rally Championship this weekend, but Rally Victoria in Gippsland is a dead rubber with Eli Evans already having clinched the new premier two-wheel-drive title in a Honda Jazz and Michael Boaden the last four-wheel-drive champion in a Mitsubishi Lancer.

Although there is probably not a lot of competition for spectators between the ARC and V8 Supercars, and the rally is already underway and will be over by late Saturday, how did CAMS ever allow the scheduling of rounds of two national championships in the same state on the same weekend?

Everything points to four-time champion Whincup by Sunday

Jamie Whincup has 3360 points in the V8 Supercar Championship. Mark Winterbottom has 3064 and is Whincup’s only challenger for the title.

Whincup only needs to outscore Winterbottom by four points this weekend to secure another title.

He’s not counting his chickens before they hatch, and the possibility has been raised that a points penalty at Sydney’s Homebush street circuit on the first weekend of December could still trip him up, but it will be massive surprise if Whincup isn’t champion again – and that he won’t have the job done by this Sunday afternoon.

Winton is Ford Performance Racing’s home track, yet its long-time lead driver Winterbottom has never won a V8 Supercar race there. Indeed, he’s had only one podium finish there – a second in 2009.

Whincup, on the other hand, has had three V8 Supercar wins at Winton and been on the podium in three of his last four starts there.

Winton is the slowest circuit in the V8 Supercar Championship and, curiously, Queensland-based teams have had a much better record at it in recent times than Victorian teams.

Nine of the last 13 Winton races have been won by Queensland-prepared cars, with six wins by Triple Eight Race Engineering (which is on the cusp of another teams championship) and three by Dick Johnson Racing.

DJR’s future has been somewhat clarified this week and it intends to run three Falcons next year under the Car of the Future rules as well as two superseded cars in the development series.

Dick Johnson will remain the majority owner of the longest-running team in Australian touring car racing and which has won seven championships and multiple Bathurst 1000s.

Johnson’s partners and fellow directors on a board of three will be his loyal sponsor Steve Brabeck, the Crimsafe co-founder and owner, and south-east Queensland car dealer and financier Maurie Pickering.

DJR had little option but to continue running Fords next year after Pickering’s dream of campaigning the Mazda brand was scuttled by the Japanese manufacturer.

The team is still hoping for some financial support from Ford now that Stone Brothers is switching to AMG Mercedes C63s next year, but with more retrenchments at the Blue Oval’s factories Victorian imminent it is hardly likely that the company will stretch beyond its backing of FPR – even though Prodrive-run FPR has never delivered the ultimate success that DJR has.

Greenhill and its powerbroker Graeme Samuel, formerly head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, advised the National Rugby League on its latest billion-dollar deal with the Nine Network and Fox Sports, previously run by latest V8 Supercar chief executive David Malone.

While there have been media reports throughout the year of a contest between networks for V8 Supercar telecasts from next year, tucked away inside this week’s edition of Auto Action magazine (on page 19) was mention that “Seven is set to retain the TV rights”.

“Seven put out a press release a month ago outlining its 2013 program schedule and in a throwaway line down the bottom mentioned V8 Supercars. Expect an announcement soon – but not for as much money as it’s currently forking out,” AA reported.

The $100,000 fine on Gordon sounded huge, but in NASCAR terms it hardly was, and the various probations the key participants were put on until the end of the year were Mickey Mouse with just one race remaining in the season.

A cynic might sense that NASCAR authorities were not unhappy at what happened at Phoenix and the opportunity to make a big noise about the penalties in the lead-in to the Florida finale of the Cup season this weekend.

They also hit one of the title contenders, Brad Keselowski, with a $25,000 fine for having his mobile phone in his car. Keselowski has been in the bad books before for tweeting from his phone during stoppages in races and this week he was outspoken about Gordon’s behavior – another promotional bonus for NASCAR.

So now it’s down to Keselowski v Jimmie Johnson at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

The vastly more experienced Johnson has been applying the mental pressure during the week to Keselowski, at 28 nine years his junior.

Keselowski, whose racing drove his family into bankruptcy six years ago, only needs to finish 15th in the last race but Johnson has been emphasising to him that that is no certainty.

While Keselowski claims to be thriving on the pressure, his veteran team owner Roger Penske – winner of a record 15 Indianapolis 500s – has admitted to “a lot of butterflies”.

Penske has won 73 NASCAR Cup races – including the Daytona 500 - but never the title, although he came very close a couple of times with Rusty Wallace almost two decades ago.

Dale Earnhardt Junior rescued Keselowski’s career and now he’s on the verge of taking the biggest title in NASCAR – something ‘Junior’ is yet to do after his late father Dale ‘The Intimidator’ did it seven times.

Johnson won five titles straight but he’ll have to produce something special, and have more than his share of luck, to take the crown again for Chevrolet and Hendrick Motorsports on Monday morning, our time.

It coincides with the enthralling battle between Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso to become a triple world champion.

It could be settled in Austin early on Monday, maybe 45 minutes after the Sprint Cup final gets underway in Florida, but more likely – because of Alonso’s consistency, even if his Ferrari isn’t quite a match for Vettel’s Red Bull-Renault – is that the Brazilian GP a week later at Interlagos in Sao Paulo will be the decider.

There is excitement in the F1 community about Austin – and especially its uphill first corner and sections of the track with tricky cambers.

The car manufacturers involved in F1, especially Mercedes, are desperate to see the sport take hold in the US this time, but so many other attempts over more than half a century have failed.

Eddie Gossage, president of the Texas Motor Speedway near Dallas, said this week that “road racing isn’t an American sport – oval racing is”.

Gossage predicted the GP in Austin would “quite successful” this year, but added: “The question is can it sustain that success?” He clearly doubted it.

Vettel is driving his 100th GP in Austin. A victory would be his 27th – equaling the tally of Sir Jack Stewart, a triple world champion.

If Vettel takes the title, either in America or Brazil, he will join the Juan-Manuel Fangio and Michael Schumacher as the only two drivers to have done it in three consecutive years – and he would be the youngest of them.

Having won four races since the Singapore GP at the end of September and finished third in Abu Dhabi two weeks ago after starting from the pitlane, Vettel is 10 points in front of Alonso.

The German will be champion on Monday if he wins for the sixth time this season and Alonso does not finish in the top four.

If Alonso fails to finish in Texas then Vettel will take the title if he’s on the podium.

Almost lost in the focus on the new venue and championship battle is that Kimi Raikkonen is the last-start winner.

Raikkonen has given all his Lotus-Renault crew T-shirts emblazoned with his immortal words over the radio as he raced to victory in Abu Dhabi: “Leave me alone, I know what I’m doing.”

F1 drivers were told watch their language after Raikkonen and Vettel swore in post-race interviews in the Middle East.

Now Australia’s Mark Webber might find himself on the mat for saying, in explaining that temperatures and tyres will be more important than track layout at Austin, that “if the black things on the corners are not working then you can put the layout up your arse”.

Atkinson drove an Italian-prepared MINI for a Portuguese team for the last third of this year’s WRC, as well as winning the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship in a Skoda.

He was a Subaru WRC factory driver until that Prodrive-run team folded at the end of 2008.

Sordo was with Citroen from 2005-10 before the past two seasons with Prodrive, which this year lost full backing from MINI and its parent BMW.

While he has been on the podium 25 times, Sordo is yet to win an WRC event and may have to move aside when Frenchman Loeb drives several rallies next season – unless Citroen fields a third factory entry.

Meanwhile, the Australian Rally Championship organisers are boasting of a “bumper field of close to 60 cars” in Rally Victoria despite the 2WD and 4WD titles having been decided.

They say the largest ARC field of the year – 26 entries – has been complemented by Victorian championship entries.

Apart from Simon Evans in a Mazda2 challenging the Honda Jazzes of his new champion brother Eli and Mark Pedder, last year’s national champion Justin Dowell is debuting a Volkswagen Polo and Tasmanian Stephen Turner a Ford Fiesta R2 ahead of next year’s 2WD championship.

Dowell has imported the 2009 Polo from Volkswagen South Africa and said: “I need to unlearn everything from my 4WD days and relearn things for the new car.”

Six stages comprising 74km of competition are being run around Warragul in Gippsland today (Friday), with another 139km in nine stages before Saturday afternoon’s finish.

Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site…