Motor Sport / Ralph Ellis / 26 August 2011 / Leave a comment Bet Now View Market

Red Bull are dominating and many of the top teams are turning their attention to 2012, although Ralph Ellis thinks they wouldn't admit that in public.

We mere mortals tend to know when we're beaten. Four goals down on a windy Sunday morning, we tend to accept the game's over; in the summer if we're 65 for eight chasing 150, then all out 75 tends to follow fairly fast.

Professional sportsmen are a different breed. They are taught from the moment they sign up in academies, or first enter a youth training scheme, that the one thing you never do is give up. Amazing things happen. Keep going, keep believing, and you can always find a way to win.

This Formula One season, however, might just be different. You fear it is not only we punters who accept, deep down, that Sebastian Vettel is already such a certainty for the drivers' title that [1.13] actually represents good value. The teams know it too. And it's why as the second half of the campaign begins in Belgium on Sunday they are already turning their attention to the next campaign.

They are trying to say the right things, of course. McLaren's managing director Jonathan Neale is promising that Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button will arrive at Spa with new upgrades to help them chase the Red Bulls.

More packages are planned for Singapore. But even he let slip in a sponsors' phone-in this week: "It would be a brave man that puts the tools down half way through a season and says: 'That'll do me'. But at some point we're all faced with the choice about what we do in terms of next year's car versus this year's car."

Other teams, looking at Red Bull's astonishing 103 point lead in the constructors' championship and Vettel's 85 point advantage over the other drivers, are being even more pragmatic. Renault, for instance, have knocked out Nick Heidfeld and pushed their rising star Bruno Senna into the car to use the rest of the campaign to gain experience. They hope he can help overhaul Mercedes for fourth place, but in reality it's more to make sure that the glamour of employing Ayrton's nephew is matched by performance in 2012.

Ferrari's Fernando Alonso is [2.82] favourite in the winner without Vettel market. That's one to lay if you listen to his boss Stefano Domenicali who says: "In terms of the development of this year's car we are almost at the end of the road... work has not come to a complete halt, but as of now we are working full throttle on the 2012 car."

All of that leaves the field clear for Red Bull to dominate the last eight races of the season in the way they did when Vettel won six of the first eight. And it makes Mark Webber at [5.1] an astonishing value bet to retain his current hold on second place.

Five things you might not know about Bruno Senna
1. Born October 1983 in Sao Paulo, the family connection to Ayrton Senna is via his mum Viviane who was the great Brazilian racing driver's sister. Bruno wears a modified version of Ayrton's helmet in tribute to his uncle

2. His father Flavio Lalli raced motor cycles, and tragically died as the result of a crash in 1996, two years after Ayrton's fatal accident.

3. As a boy Bruno raced Go-Karts, but stopped after his uncle's death. He resumed ten years later when an Italian friend gave him a copy of his Ayrton's 1986 Lotus 98T.

4. He was expected to make his F1 debut for Honda after driving three tests in 2008 - only for them to pull out of F1 because of the global financial crisis. When the team reformed as Brawn GP, Jenson Button got the gig.

5. His favourite drink is Guarana soda, made from a Brazilian berry that has the same properties as caffeine.