2013 Canadian GP: It's Alonso's race - Piece of cake

Firstly, let’s state the blatantly obvious: as pretty as it may look, Monaco has once again proved itself to be wholesomely inadequate and inappropriate as a venue to stage a modern-day motor race.

After last month, and highlighted by Sebastian Vettel showing what the pace of a racing F1 car can be – with an awesome fastest lap on the penultimate monotonous lap (way ahead of the pace he had been showing) – there can be no doubt this is not a circuit where cars race or are capable of racing.

The jewel in the F1 crown? A decayed tooth in a mouthful of gold fillings more like!

Secondly, for the clarification of those that have been in touch: regardless of a racehorse being found to be pumped full of Stanozolol (the notorious anabolic steroid which, in 1988, turned Ben Johnson’s eyes yellow and his 100m medal gold); an athlete having taken enough amphetamines to send Pablo Escobar’s grandchildren to Eaton; a car found to have raced with fuel so octane laden its capable of launching the space shuttle; or a team having availed of an offer to take 1,000 kilometres of free testing; bookmakers settle bets as/when the jockey is weighed-in, an athlete collects his medal and, in F1, the drivers have done both. Any subsequent demotion or disqualification has no relevance to your bet.

OK, no literary niceties this week. Those shenanigans only came around when my school teacher, on my attaining a resounding U for the fourth time in an English O’Level exam, declared: “Brindley, you have the IQ of a sponge”.

Concurrently, my maths teacher was questioning if I had stolen exam papers while querying if I’d be interested in a scholarship to Oxford. Figures are my sausage and mash.

But sadly, the consensus of the betting public, the bookmaker’s odds formulated by the weight of financial support for each driver in a marketplace scenario, shows the mean average of all those opinions concurs with the story the stats tell.

The following pie chart shows the race winners of all F1 Grands Prix since the outset of the 2012 season and the percentage of the races they have claimed:

You could easily argue there is little room to make a profit with the form and prices translating so transparently.

The only real discrepancy is Button’s huge shift out in price. He is given a two percent chance of victory despite boasting an eleven percent win to race ratio. This should require no explanation. His car is not as good as it was when those wins were achieved last season.

Essentially figures cannot lie. Results can.

Firstly, stick a line through the last two Monaco races. They count for nothing. Actually stick a line through every Monaco race since cars reached speed of 100mph.

Then remove Raikkonen’s Australia win and replace him with the rightful winner, Fernando Alonso, who was a victim of bad strategy calls on the day.

Give Alonso another, the 2013 Malaysian GP, and take it away from Sebastian Vettel, who we now know would have never have won the race if it were not for the Spaniard losing his front wing. You could possibly draw the same conclusion from Bahrain 2013, where there’s every chance that sticky DRS cost him victory over his chief rival.

Suddenly, Alonso’s piece of pie grows and the probability of him winning greatly increases.

Alonso, without a competitive car for most of 2012, has to be the bet this week. Most judges agree his Ferrari F138 is custom made for Canada’s Gilles Villeneuve Circuit, as it’s a high-speed and low-grip racetrack.

And a word of caution: There is always an avalanche of support for the Ferrari No. 1 on the eve of any F1 race in which he has qualified with the remotest glimpse of the front row.

It’s doubtlessly money from the pockets of his adoring countrymen and the ever faithful Italian Tefosi, both in the belief you could put a Ferrari T-shirt on Douglass Bader and he’d win a 10k road race!

If you are backing him back him early.