The race is on and the epic battle for the Formula One World Championship will be decided in the season-ending doubleheader in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.

Max Verstappen holds an eight-point lead, but with Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes on form after back-to-back wins,

is this a situation where the driver with a points advantage is only second favourite?

I'm Ed Sture and joining me to answer that question and many more are Gary Anderson and Mark Hughes.

Well, Gary, how are you doing? We haven't had you on the F-Hon podcast for a little bit.

Good opportunity because Scott Mitchell's at the dentist, so we've managed to get an upgrade and get your wisdom on. Yeah, hopefully it's been very painful, so yeah, I don't like dentists myself, but Scott will be enduring the pain. Yeah, it's good to be back on the podcast again. I mean, it's two races to go, so it's all fairly exciting at the moment. So the championship's all tightening up quite a lot. So there's very little to go risk-wise, but a lot to go championship-wise. Yeah, exactly. This one feels like it's going down to the wire, but we'll get into that a little bit. And Mark Hughes, obviously, you've been revelling in this season, and you'll be preparing to head out to the last couple of races,

just as I am. It's good when there's a live championship, isn't it? I think this season would have

this many races in and after the rapid fire runner races, if it was all done and dusted, this

would be quite a painful end, wouldn't it? But as it is, it's brilliant. Yeah, it'd be quite difficult to find the motivation for the energy that you need for this last little bit of slug. But yeah, it is. It's fantastic. It energizes everyone. And I, you know, even though in your intro there, you said, um, is, is this the case of, uh, the guy in form being the the favorite even though he's behind on points?

I'm not even sure I could call it that way because it's been, it's changed so many times,

isn't it, from what we're expecting going into a weekend.

So I'm still expecting that there's still a twist in the tail yet.

Yeah, that's where it's going to be the place we start really, because while there is that kind of wide feeling that the championship swung decisively in favour of Hamilton and Mercedes, ultimately, Vestappan could clinch a championship in Saudi Arabia this weekend. It's fairly unlikely it would require him to be first or second with Hamilton having various levels of disaster, depending on where the fastest

lap point goes. But to me, it seems all a little bit premature, given we have seen so many

regular performance swings this year. As you alluded to, Mark, it's very, very hard to pick a

favourite. Yeah, it's very volatile. And yeah, the two cars have got certain traits which

work or don't work according to the track layouts.

And that's the sort of foundation of the swings.

But it's way more complex than that because as soon as you start getting track surfaces and how that works, interacts with the tires and track temperatures and how they've set up the car in one way and

the track temperature goes another, all these different things. And there's certain limitations

on the setups of each car. There's certain places they don't like to be taken to in their

setups and how that dovetails in with a particular circumstance of a weekend. It's just made

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