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How bizarre could this season get? Even when it was over - it wasn't. Seven hours after the finish of the final race in Brazil, we didn't know the identity of the 2007 world champion.

Kimi Raikkonen, having driven from the circuit at the wheel of a Fiat Stilo a couple of hours before, was probably with his mates in a downtown bar in Sao Paulo, cracking open their second bottle of vodka in the belief that Raikkonen's sixth win of the season had been enough to win the title by a single point.

Meanwhile, as darkness embraced the Interlagos track, a couple of hundred journalists, keen to head off to the Red Bull party, were sitting in the media centre, laptops at the ready, waiting for the outcome of a stewards' enquiry.

The officials were discussing the engaging topic of the temperature of fuel samples taken from a Williams and two BMWs that had finished fourth, fifth and sixth. Why was this significant? If all three were excluded then Lewis Hamilton would move from seventh to fourth place - and win the championship. Talk about endless drama.

And we thought we had seen it all in the race.

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that Hamilton was in with a shout of winning the championship. In fact, he ought to have walked it in China but a massive screw-up by McLaren kept Hamilton out too long on rear tyres that were showing canvas.

An attempt to second-guess the weather failed completely and resulted in Hamilton sliding a million dollars' worth of technology into a gravel trap at about 20mph.

The vision of the McLaren's rear wheels spinning helplessly will probably be as enduring as that spectacular tyre failure that cost Nigel Mansell the championship in the final round in 1986.

For sure, the only pit lane in the world with a gravel trap - and, no, I haven't a clue why it is there - cost Hamilton the title as he sat up to his rear axle in shingle. A 12-point lead had just dwindled to four over his team-mate, Fernando Alonso, and seven over Raikkonen, who rekindled his chances by winning that wet-dry race in China.

Every cloud - even the gloomy one hanging over Shanghai - has a silver lining. McLaren's cock-up would ensure that the championship would run to Interlagos, one of the world's great theatres of motor sport. Frayed round the edges it may be with its tumbledown garages and leaking roofs, but the track has soul; a proper place to settle a championship rather than the sanitised blandness of Shanghai with its cardboard cut-out, standard-issue corners.