Fernando Alonso: Legend in waiting

Every sport gets the heroes it deserves, and, the chances are that today in Abu Dhabi, Formula One will finally, irrevocably get Fernando Alonso. If the Spanish front-runner collects the second-place finish he needs to win the most closely-fought Championship since Formula One's inception in 1950, then there will be no denying his greatness.

Many superb drivers have won two championships, including swashbuckling road warriors such as Jim Clark, Alberto Ascari, Graham Hill, Emerson Fitipaldi and Mika Hakkinen. And yes, Alonso too. Yet winning three titles is an altogether different proposition. Membership of this elite club automatically confers legendary status because, in a sport obsessed with technology, it proves that it's not just all about the car.

If the majority of drivers who have won a brace of titles have done so with the same car, of the eight men who have already won three or more Championships, only one has ever done so with just one manufacturer, and that man was an undoubted genius called Ayrton Senna. Of the other seven - Juan Manuel Fangio, Jack Brabham, Jackie Stewart, Alain Prost, Nelson Piquet, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher - all won their titles with more than one team, while Brabham, Piquet, Prost and Schumacher emphasised an extraordinary durability and mental toughness by winning their third title after a hiatus of at least four years.

• Sebastian Vettel leads from the front

Alonso is in that mould. This is the man who won his last title with Renault four years ago, and who was trailing the leaders by 47 points after July's British Grand Prix. Back then, he was already being written off. What has followed since has been a remarkable reckoning in a Ferrari car which has, by common consent, been considerably slower to corner than the Red Bulls of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel, and slower than the McLarens of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.

Since Silverstone, there have been eight Grands Prix, of which Alonso has won four despite not finishing in Hungary and Belgium. Even more remarkably, he was on pole for just two of those races. It has been a bravura performance, not just from Alonso, widely recognised by his peers as the most talented driver of his generation and is the only driver apart from Schumacher to score 100 points in three consecutive seasons, but, more controversially, for Ferrari.

There has long been a feeling within Formula One that Ferrari has been favoured by the sport's governing body to an embarrassing degree. This feeling hasn't been eased by the revelation this week that FIA president Jean Todt, former team principal at Ferrari, has appointed Rome-born Emanuele Pirro as a race steward with the power of adjudicate on race incidents and issue sanctions that include grid and drive-through penalties.Pirro's personal website has a picture of him standing next to his beloved 1971 Ferrari 512M under the heading "All Italian boys love Ferraris".

For many, that feeling has hardened into a conviction this year after an incident which has overshadowed Alonso's championship charge and which will undoubtedly tarnish any title he wins today unless he triumphs by more than eight points. The incident in question is, of course, that at the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim when Ferrari issued clear team orders to Felipe Massa, telling the Brazilian to move aside in favour of his team-mate ("Alonso is faster than you. Can you confirm you understand?")

For a blatant contravention of regulations, there was no doubt that Ferrari would be punished; the only question was the scale of that punishment. In the event, it turned out to be a fine of 100,000. In the context of Ferrari's enormous budget - in 2008, they spent 260 million, expending 1.2m for each point won - it was barely a slap across the wrist. The crucial thing for Ferrari was that Alonso was allowed to keep his 25 points for winning the race, a fact that surprised many in the sport. As Paul Stoddart, the former Minardi team owner and a respected F1 commentator, said: "Ferrari quite obviously employed team orders in Germany and the fact that they were found guilty of it leaves me somewhat amazed that those points still stand."

Alonso has form for this sort of malarkey. When he was with McLaren in 2007, after a second-place finish at Monaco his team-mate Lewis Hamilton angrily suggested that team orders had been imposed which had seen Alonso win the race. In Hungary that same year, in qualifying Alonso blocked Hamilton in the pits, stopping his team-mate coming out for a final attempt at pole position. Alonso, who had been on pole, was relegated to sixth on the grid, while Hamilton moved from second place to pole. Crucially, McLaren were docked championship points in conspicuous contrast to what happened to Ferrari this year. Even then, Hamilton thought the penalty "quite light, if anything".

Alonso, though, could scarcely care less. Indeed, he seemed genuinely bemused at the controversy. Like Schumacher and Senna - who also mixed a total lack of self-doubt with a ruthless willingness to employ underhand tactics if necessary - Alonso has an almost total focus on his own needs.

If Ferrari are focused entirely on an Alonso win, the same is not necessarily true over at Red Bull, where both Webber and Vettel can win the championship.

The Austrian team has been riven by infighting all season, with the 34-year-old Australian veteran Webber complaining bitterly (and with some justification) that the team have shamelessly favoured the young German.The two men have had a fractious relationship since Japan in 2007 when Webber was chasing his first win in the driving rain and carnage of Suzuka despite having already been sick in his helmet and running a dangerously high temperature, only to be taken out of the race by the rookie German.

That relationship hasn't improved this year, but Webber may yet need Vettel - the German finishing in the top two today is central to Webber's hope of stalling Alonso's Formula One deification.

The only thing for sure is that Abu Dhabi is set to provide a suitably dramatic denouement to a Championship which promised so much and, for once, has delivered.