Fleet Street has its say on the Abu Dhabi GP

Nico Rosberg might have rounded off the season with his third straight win in Abu Dhabi but it was the way Lewis Hamilton (eventually) toed the Mercedes line that vexed Fleet Street on Monday morning.

With both titles wrapped up for some time now, there had been calls for the Silver Arrows to decide their own strategies as the Yas Marina circuit, rather than rely on the brain - and computer - power present on the pitwall.  

Leading the charge into Turn One was The Times' Kevin Eason. 'How well the sport sold itself on this final day is questionable,' he wrote. 'On a Mickey Mouse circuit that looks like a Disney fairy castle, the dreams were again quelled by the mundanity of boffins, who crunch the numbers and make the plays.

'The human pilots are in danger of being reduced to automatons, the equivalent of Google's driverless cars.'

Mercedes did indeed make the plays, but it looked for a while as though Lewis Hamilton was going to take matters into his own hands, running a much longer middle stint and questioning the wisdom of stopping for a second and final time.

'As he has done in the previous two races, Hamilton quibbled and queried his team all the way, eager to plot his own path,' wrote The Daily Telegraph's Daniel Johnson. 'But as Toto Wolff, his Mercedes head of motorsport, said after the last round in Brazil, if Hamilton were to choose his own strategy alone he would have "lost every time".'

Hamilton did eventually stop - not that it made any difference as far as the battle with Rosberg was concerned. But for Mercedes, a 12th one-two finish of the season was paramount.

'Mercedes must feel damned if they do and damned if they don't,' wrote The Daily Mail's Jonathan McEvoy. 'What if they had given Hamilton his head and allowed him to persevere on worn tyres, only to see him, and them, lose second place?

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'Imagine if it had gone wrong. Mercedes would be conducting an inquest today.'

So, as is the way with Hamilton, he stole the headlines even though he didn't win. 'It is Rosberg's misfortune that his excellent recent surge will be tainted by the suspicion that the champion, however subconsciously, has lost some intensity,' Paul Weaver wrote in The Guardian, 'though it hardly showed when he was involved in another strategy-questioning conversation with his team in the latter stages of this 55-lap race.'

'Next season will define Rosberg: perpetual No 2 or world champion?' added Johnson. 'Those are the only options. A rivalry which was spiky in 2014 became straightforward in 2015, Hamilton in the ascendancy for most of the season, winning 10 races to Rosberg's six.'

Meanwhile, after Ron Dennis insisted that Fernando Alonso will race for McLaren in 2016 and not take a year off, the man himself has weighed in. "I will be racing [in 2016], 100 per cent," The Independent's David Tremayne quoted the Spaniard. "If I had to choose a sabbatical year, I would choose this one."

In fact, Alonso seemed that way inclined during the race, when - running last after being penalised for a first-corner collision with Pastor Maldonado - he threatened to retire his car.

Added McEvoy: 'This shows that Alonso's friend Mark Webber was about right when he said that Alonso is a 'ticking bomb' who will determine whether he stays in the sport on the first few days of testing, next February.'

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Don't miss the F1 Midweek Report for analysis of the Abu Dhabi GP and all the latest F1 news. Former BAR boss David Richards and car designer Gary Anderson join Natalie Pinkham on Sky Sports F1 at 8:30pm on Wednesday.