Rivals are driven to distraction as Vettel takes another step towards the horizon

LEWIS Hamilton scoured his brain for a metaphor to describe the tallest of tall orders he faces if he is to be Formula One world champion this season.

Sebastion Vettel

LEWIS Hamilton scoured his brain for a metaphor to describe the tallest of tall orders he faces if he is to be Formula One world champion this season.

"It will be like climbing Mount Everest . . . without oxygen . . . running up it . . . in swimming trunks. That's how tough it is," he said after collecting together a suitable number of stumbling blocks.

It was a description as vivid as it was true as Sebastian Vettel soared to victory in the Italian Grand Prix overnight while his rivals were left flat-footed and gazing up at a lead that is starting to look unassailable. The Red Bull driver extended his advantage to 53 points over Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, his nearest challenger. Correction: his only challenger, as Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen slithered down to earth with a bang.

Hamilton was ninth and is 81 points behind Vettel in the World Championship standings. Raikkonen, once the most consistent man in Formula One, finished eleventh after a first-lap prang that smashed up the front wing of his Lotus and is 88 points in deficit to Vettel, the three-times world champion.

Raikkonen finished in the points 27 times in a row but has now missed the top ten places in the past two races. His future is still under discussion and this time next week he could be signed as a Ferrari driver for next season. At least he will have something to look forward to, unlike fourth-placed Felipe Massa who is likely to get his P45 from the Italian team at the end of the season.

Shoulders were slumped around the paddock as though there had been a death in the family at the end of another processional race in which Vettel set off from pole position and cantered home, the German barely breaking sweat.

The Red Bull edifice of success is daunting and you cannot help but feel grudging admiration for a squad so astonishingly complete. Their crew handled pitstops in quick succession to send Vettel on his way in a 2.6sec blur, Mark Webber, his team-mate, in 2.7. There are no mistakes, just the relentless pursuit of perfection, from Adrian Newey, their brilliant designer, down to the most humble employee back at the factory in Milton Keynes.

Yet the loud click that might have drowned out the scream of engines around Monza's royal park was the sound of thousands of viewers, tired of the domination of a serial winner, switching off their televisions to give the lawn a trim or take a reluctant dog for a long walk in the rain. Vettel has won four times in the last six races, a test of resolve for even the most devoted grand-prix watcher. We have been here before, of course, with Michael Schumacher and a winning sequence that bored the fireproof pants off the sport.

Now F1 has a new mantra: Anyone but Vettel. It might be an unkind sentiment but the Monza tifosi took it to a higher and more unpleasant level as their boos tarnished the prize presentation ceremony.

Webber, who finished third and took a podium at the final European race of his career, was disturbed by the aggressive atmosphere enveloping a young driver who cannot help being good at his day job. The tifosi wanted a victory for Alonso, even though they had woken up to lurid headlines claiming the Spaniard had poisoned relationships in his team by unleashing a heavy dose of sarcasm after they messed up a qualifying strategy that had him starting from fifth on the grid, two rows away from his nemesis.

He drove magnificently to second place again, after finishing runner-up to Vettel last time out in Belgium. Runner-up places are not going to be enough to halt Vettel, though, and Alonso has spent his three-year career at Ferrari as the nearly man. This is looking like another nearly season.

Unlike Vettel and Webber, Alonso enjoyed his podium experience, snapping away with his mobile phone camera to record an occasion that could turn out to be little more than a staging post on Vettel's ascent to the summit of a fourth straight title.

It is difficult to see it any other way, as Hamilton readily admitted when he climbed out of his Mercedes. "When I got out of the car, I was angry and definitely thought that could be it," Hamilton said. "But I have been with my engineers and I am not going to give up. I have got to win every race basically. It is the tallest order but I am going to try."

Hamilton might want to run his thumb over last season's result: Singapore, the next grand prix, started a sequence of four victories in seven races that catapulted Vettel to the title. If the German wins under the floodlights in a fortnight, it will be all but game over for this season. Alonso took the title to the final race of last season and lost a 41-point advantage to Vettel on the way, so it can happen. But even Alonso is starting to believe that only a natural disaster or some similar calamity can halt his rival now, though.

"We need to be realistic about the championship because there is a very big gap," Alonso said. "We don't have enough races and probably we don't have the speed to win consecutive races.

"We need to be lucky and have some DNFs (did not finish results) from Sebastian. There is still a long way to go and we will try until the last race."

In 2008, a baby-faced rookie astonished F1 by winning the Italian Grand Prix at his second attempt in an unfancied Toro Rosso, a car usually found somewhere near the back of the grid; this time Vettel was the hard-nosed veteran notching up a hat-trick at Monza to go with his hat-trick of titles. Stand by for title number four.

The Times