The film was nominated in the RTS Craft and Design Awards, and won the Graphic Design - Programme Content Sequences category.

The judges described it as "a slick, beautifully conceived and executed piece of work, with skilful design following throughout".

F1 editor Mark Wilkin and Richard Gort, the producer of the film, were on hand to pick up the trophy.

You can watch the film, and the F1 title sequence, here:

Button joins Lewis Hamilton in an all-English line-up that will have those watching F1 salivating. Some will be attracted by two such appealing figures in the same team - not to mention the glamour that will be provided by their respective girlfriends. Others will be fascinated to see how the two drivers match up on the track.

And that is where the risks for the McLaren new boy are immense, even though Button has seven years' more experience than his new partner.

The issue is not Button's pure pace when everything is to his satisfaction. At times like that, there are few, if any, faster than him, as he proved with his glorious run to six victories in the first seven races of 2009, the foundation of his title campaign.

The problem Button will face is that, as one former F1 driver put it on Wednesday: "He needs a perfect car - that's been obvious throughout his career."

When he is not happy with his car, Button can struggle - and Hamilton provides a sterner challenge than any of his team-mates so far.

Complicating the issue at McLaren next year will be that Hamilton and Button like very different things from their racing cars.

The fates of Button, Hamilton and Raikkonen have become inextricably entwined

Hamilton likes a rear end that moves around a lot - he uses the rapid change of direction that provides to pitch him quickly into the corner and get him pointing in the right direction for the exit as soon as possible.

It is an unusual style, for the simple reason that it makes the car unstable - but Hamilton does not worry about that, he simply corrects the slide he knows is coming and carries on.

Button's style is completely different. He likes a stable rear end, using subtly changing pressure on throttle, brake and steering to alter the car's direction. Give him a loose rear end, and he struggles.

Can McLaren provide two cars set up in such different ways? Even if they can, will they want to, given the two varying development paths to which each approach may lead?

These concerns might sound esoteric to the average sports fan, but they are absolutely critical to an F1 driver's performance on the track. And that is why so many observers worry for Button at McLaren.

Button himself is obviously not concerned - he surely would not have signed up if he was. Underneath that laid-back exterior is a highly competitive man who clearly thinks himself more than capable of handling whatever Hamilton can throw at him. Only time will tell if he is right.

Just as fascinating is how the world champion has ended up leaving the team with whom he won the title.

This situation carries echoes of 1996, when Damon Hill lost his Williams drive despite becoming world champion.

Hill was only left with scraps after Williams told him late in the day that he would not be keeping him, and he ended up 'defending' his crown in an Arrows-Yamaha. Predictably, it did not go well.

Button, by contrast, has been the master of his own destiny, and he appears to have plumped for what he believes will be the most competitive car - a decision presumably based on McLaren's strong end to the season and Brawn's dip in competitiveness, as well as, he revealed on Wednesday, his new team's historic position as one of F1's few consistent success stories.

A bigger question hangs over how Button's former team have managed to let the man who won them their first world title slip through their fingers.

That is a complicated question, the answer to which at least partially lies in Mercedes's takeover of Brawn, which was announced on Monday.

There are lots of conflicting rumours doing the rounds. The most common one is that Brawn/Mercedes did not offer Button the salary he wanted, and that he preferred both McLaren's offer, and what he perceived to be a likely more competitive car.

But some media outlets have quoted "Brawn sources" saying they were offering Button £10m, which is almost certainly at least as much as he will get from McLaren.

Equally, there are rumours that Mercedes, the new owner of Brawn, was not that bothered whether Button stayed or not - and that, to keep the unions and anti-F1 members of the company's board happy, they were not prepared to offer him big money.

This is in the context of Mercedes's decision to end their part-ownership of a perfectly good F1 team to take a bigger share of another.

As ever, F1 is a tangled world - and that extends to another piece of news that broke on Wednesday.

Kimi Raikkonen, the 2007 world champion, will not be racing in F1 next year having failed to reach an agreement with McLaren.

The fact that the Finn could not finalise a deal with a team that made moves to sign him as long ago as August is at least partly down to the fact that Raikkonen wanted more money than McLaren were prepared to pay.

Raikkonen is being paid millions of pounds not to drive for Ferrari next year after the Italian team decided they preferred to have Alonso.

Yet it seems Raikkonen was determined to be paid what he and his management team deemed a wage reflective of his status as a former world champion - and the deal fell down because, while McLaren were offering the Finn a very substantial salary, it was not what Raikkonen had in mind.

As Raikkonen's manager David Robertson put it to me this morning: "It wasn't in his interests to race for the sum they were offering."

For now, Raikkonen and Robertson are viewing it as a year away from F1 to have some fun in the world rally championship. But, unless Raikkonen shifts his expectations, it may well turn out to be a rather more permanent arrangement than that.

F1 might not miss Raikkonen's android-on-Mogadon news conferences, but the man behind the wheel is another matter.

When he is in the mood, Raikkonen is one of the very finest drivers in F1 - arguably, with Hamilton and Alonso, one of only three who can win a race in a car that does not deserve to.

For a driver of that calibre to slip out of F1 in such an unsatisfactory manner is sad indeed. Hubris can be a dangerous thing.

Of greatest interest to most people in Britain will be the now-very-likely prospect that Jenson Button will become Lewis Hamilton's team-mate at McLaren, the new world champion's negotiations with the Mercedes-nee-Brawn team having reached an impasse.

While it is still just about possible that Button could stay at what will now be called Mercedes Grand Prix, it is very unlikely and, on the face of it, that leaves McLaren with an all-British line-up that, in terms of publicity at least, lives up to the billing of 'dream team'.

The last two world champions - both of them English, good-looking, with glamorous girlfriends and immensely marketable - in the same team would surely guarantee McLaren the lion's share of interest at the start of next season.

It will be surprising to many that Button will almost certainly not be staying with the team that made him world champion.

It seems odd that a global car company setting up its own F1 team would not want to have the current world champion driving for them.

But, despite Mercedes's insistence on Monday that its team will be an international one, in the same way as it is a global brand, it seems Button's face does not fit - at least not at the price he wants.

Having taken a pay cut from £8m to £3.5m to help secure Brawn's future last winter, Button was after something like £6m for 2010. Mercedes/Brawn refused to budge. And now Button is likely to receive something like £7-8m from McLaren - still a long way off the salaries of Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, and what Kimi Raikkonen will earn not to drive next year, unless he can find a seat after being forced out of Ferrari to make way for Alonso.

I'm led to believe, though, that Button's failure to agree a deal with Brawn/Mercedes is not solely down to financial reasons.

McLaren have a vacancy, and in the context of their dramatic rise back to competitiveness in 2009 - and Brawn's relative fall from it - many in F1, Button perhaps among them, believe McLaren may well have the quicker car next year.

On Friday evening, I texted a friend, a respected F1 journalist, to tell him that Button had been given a tour of McLaren that day, the implication being that he was close to signing for the team.

"Mmm. Not sure that would be wise," was the response.

It's a fascinating match-up, to be sure, but good though Button is you would not find many people in F1 who fancied his chances of beating Hamilton in the same car.

Hamilton and Button share a joke - but how would they get on as team-mates?

Hamilton is widely regarded as the out-and-out fastest driver in F1. On top of that, McLaren is very much Hamilton's team - he has been nurtured by them from the age of 11.

McLaren insist they treat both their drivers equally, and that they provide them equal equipment. But Alain Prost, David Coulthard and Alonso have all found that does not stop the unfavoured driver feeling very much an outsider.

Complicating things further for Button is the fact that his and Hamilton's driving styles are diametrically opposed.

Unusually, Hamilton thrives on oversteer, using an unstable rear end to get his car quickly turned into the corner and pointing in the right direction for the exit - and the McLaren has been developed in that direction.

For Button, though, an oversteering car is anathema. He prefers a car that has a touch of understeer, which he can control with his delicate application of throttle and brakes.

It's not impossible for a single team's cars to be set up in two such contrasting ways, but development will generally take the car in a direction that suits one style or the other - and not both.

There will be days when Button will beat Hamilton - perhaps at Turkey, for example, where Hamilton's acrobatic style has caused him problems with excessive tyre wear in the past - but I am not alone in suspecting these are likely to be few and far between - unless Button is very much better than he is currently considered to be.

Meanwhile, Mercedes's decision to buy its own F1 team completely flies in the face of the approach being taken by all other car manufacturers.

Honda, BMW and Toyota have gone already; Renault is teetering on the brink. Yet Mercedes is investing millions in creating its own team, when it already had a 40% shareholding in a perfectly good one.

Despite buying Brawn and selling back its 40% shareholding in McLaren, Mercedes will continue as both engine supplier and major sponsor of McLaren at least until 2015.

That has come about because the contract that tied McLaren and Mercedes together included a clause that neither could do anything in F1 without the other's permission.

McLaren did not want Mercedes to buy Brawn so when the German company insisted, they demanded a quid pro quo that, as far as McLaren are concerned, contains all the positives of a Mercedes involvement but none of the negatives.

Mercedes has justified its decision on the basis that, following the political battles of 2009, running an F1 team is much cheaper than it was, and teams are guaranteed more income from the commercial rights holders.

Whether Mercedes makes a better job of running an F1 team than its fellow manufacturers remains to be seen.

More than a few people, though, have questioned the wisdom of selecting Nico Rosberg as its lead driver.

Quick though the German undoubtedly is, he has done nothing in his four years in F1 to prove he is one of the true elite. Yet this is the man Mercedes has apparently chosen to represent them in battle with Hamilton in a McLaren and Alonso in a Ferrari.

Mercedes almost certainly has at least one eye on prising Sebastian Vettel out of the grasp of Red Bull, but that will have to wait at least another year, and even then the young German rising star would have to be bought out of a contract that ties him to his current team until the end of 2012.

One final thought. What a difference 11 months have made to Brawn bosses Ross Brawn and Nick Fry.

They spent last winter desperately trying to save their team following Honda's decision to quit F1. To do that, they engineered a management buy-out that involved them paying a figure widely believed to be a euro for the team, which was largely funded by Honda this year.

Now, Mercedes has taken a 75% shareholding - which it has bought from Brawn and Fry. I have no idea how many millions it paid but, as well as securing the future of their team, Brawn - already a millionaire thanks to his years at Ferrari - and Fry are now undoubtedly rich beyond most people's wildest dreams.

Toyota follows Honda and BMW as the third manufacturer to pull out of the sport in the space of 11 months. But the three left in - Mercedes, Ferrari and Renault - all seem to be secure for the foreseeable future.

Certainly, no-one has any doubts about Mercedes and Ferrari.

Mercedes, which owns 40% of the McLaren team, is in the process of expanding and strengthening its commitment. It is currently deciding whether to take a controlling interest in the championship-winning Brawn team - perhaps as much as 75%, although that would probably mean Mercedes divesting itself of its shareholding in McLaren.

Ferrari, who are owned by Fiat, have been in grand prix racing since the 1920s - and are the only team to have raced in F1 every year since the inception of the world championship in 1950. And, historically, the car company was born out of the race team, not the other way around.

As far as Renault goes, there have been doubts this year about its commitment. During F1's summer of political discontent, the French company were mentioned by Max Mosley, the former president of F1's governing body the FIA, as one of three manufacturers likely to pull out - the other two being Toyota and BMW.

But in the wake of the Singapore race-fixing scandal, Renault's bosses confirmed to the FIA that they would remain in F1 in 2010.

And further indication of its commitment came in the signing last month of the highly rated Polish driver Robert Kubica. They are expected to announce imminently - perhaps as early as Thursday - that the German former Toyota driver Timo Glock will be in the other car.

Toyota, by contrast, might have been making noises about wanting Kimi Raikkonen or Kubica for 2010, but they were conspicuous by their lack of signings.

In eight years of F1, Toyota lurched from one mediocre season to the next. The closest they came to appearing to be on the right track was in 2005 and into 2006, after they signed the top designer Mike Gascoyne to lead their technical department.

But they sacked him in 2006 after one race - in which then Toyota driver Ralf Schumacher finished on the podium - because he questioned the management processes that he, and many others, felt were holding Toyota back.

The sun has set on Toyota's involvement in F1

The company is wedded to a management philosophy called the "Toyota Way". But while this has played a key role in making them the biggest car company in the world, it has proved less well suited to the quick decision-making required in such a fast-moving sport.

And after spending in the region of £1.6bn (more than half its last-posted annual loss) to win nothing in F1, the board's decision to cut its losses (literally) in the context of its worst-ever financial figures, and fears about the very survival of the company, is to be expected.

And following tyre company Bridgestone's decision to stop at the end of 2010, F1 will be without a Japanese corporate involvement for the first time since 1983, when Honda returned to the sport.

On top of the global financial crisis, this, according to my sources in Japan, is also a result of key executives in those companies not liking motorsport - and preferring to chase the bottom line. So it is unlikely this will change until the management of those companies changes.

This latest development also sheds a slightly different light on the political upheavals of the summer.

When Mosley was trying to force through his plan for a £40m budget cap in F1, Toyota were one of the members of the F1 Teams' Association (Fota) most vociferously opposed.

At the time, Mosley's contention that three manufacturers were on the verge of pulling out looked like a ploy and there was the fear that it would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It might still have been that. Yes, there are global financial reasons for Toyota's withdrawal - as there were with Honda and BMW - but how are we to know whether what the manufacturers viewed as Mosley's arbitrary and authoritarian governing of the sport did not also affect their decision?

Mosley lost the war with Fota - he was forced out, and failed to push through the budget cap. But he has been proved right up to a point.

F1 did need new teams to protect itself against the withdrawal of the manufacturers, and his attempts to drive down costs have definitely had an effect on getting them in.

As it stands, four new teams are already entered for 2010 and Toyota's withdrawal paves the way for a fifth. The Sauber team, which BMW bought and used as its F1 vehicle, was last month named as first reserve should any other teams pull out.

How many of these new teams actually make it on to the grid next year remains an open question - there are doubts about at least two of them.

But however many make it, there has definitely been a shift in the balance of power in F1.

When Fota forced Mosley to back down in the summer, it appeared to have emerged as one of the most influential forces in F1, with the FIA marginalised.

Mosley has gone now, to be replaced by his chosen successor, former Ferrari team boss Jean Todt.

But now there are only three manufacturers, and more than double that number of private entries, that surely means the power of the new FIA president has been strengthened.

Fota has stayed united in the face of all the FIA's attempts to divide them so far, but the new teams weaken that unity.

Todt has not yet revealed what his plans are - although he has mentioned cost-cutting. But whatever they are the latest development will probably make it easier to get them through, even if the big beasts of F1 do not like them.

BLOG UPDATE, 1700: The BBC has learnt on Wednesday that Renault is discussing at an emergency board meeting on Wednesday whether to pull out of Formula 1.

The board is discussing whether to quit the sport, stay on as an engine supplier, sell the team or pull out altogether.

A decision is not expected to be announced on Wednesday or Thursday, but could come any time after that.

Obviously this could change some of the views I expressed at the top of this article on Renault, but the thrust of much of what I have said remains valid no matter what Renault decides.

Our final selection was of great season finales - four of them title deciders at the final race of the season, a title decider at the penultimate race, and one, like this weekend's inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, a last race held after the championship had been won.

Our normal practice has been to select one race to highlight - a choice that is informed by respondents on this blog - and to show the full 'Grand Prix' highlights programme that was broadcast at the time for that as well as the shorter clips we cut for all the races.

But this time we have decided to give you a two-for-one offer, and we will show the 'Grand Prix' programme for two of the races.

I was actually quite surprised that the 1980 US Grand Prix East was the most popular choice, for which the 'Grand Prix' programme is here:

It was a late pick after we discovered that we did not have a complete tape of the 1997 title decider at Jerez in Spain between Jacques Villeneuve and Michael Schumacher - which I suspected might have proved the 'winner' had we been able to use it. And I have to admit that, without that race in the selection, I thought the 1988 Japanese Grand Prix would be the runaway choice among respondents here.

That race at Suzuka was one of Ayrton Senna's greatest drives, the one which clinched his first world title, and I thought admiration for the late, great Brazilian would win the day. In the end, it was the second most popular choice among respondents.

Watch short highlights of the 1980 US Grand Prix East
Watch short highlights of the 1981 Las Vegas Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1983 South African Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1984 Portuguese Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1988 Japanese Grand Prix

It seems that the enticing prospect of seeing some action from the little-talked-about 1980 season swung it, so we have the new world champion Alan Jones's stirring drive to victory at Watkins Glen after his Williams had slipped down to 14th place at the end of the first lap.

The highlights will be on satellite and cable in the UK from 0900 GMT on Thursday 29 October until 0800 on Friday 30 October. Because of a lack of bandwidth, they will be only be available on Freeview channel 301 from 1040 GMT on Friday 30 October until 1230 GMT, which is in between the first two practice sessions from Abu Dhabi.

This was the last year of F1 cars with the famous 'sliding skirts', which provided a seal between the sidepods and the track. These allowed a full 'venturi effect' to be created under the cars, producing immense ground effect and, by extension, enormous cornering speeds.

These 'skirts' were at the heart of one of the bitterest political rows ever to hit F1. Concern about rapidly escalating cornering speeds had been rising all year, and the death of Alfa Romeo driver Patrick Depailler in a test at Hockenheim intensified it. Deciding that skirts were making the cars too dangerous and rendering the tracks obsolete, the powers that be banned them for 1981.

This led to one of the most ludicrous seasons in F1 history. The rules dictated that the cars should have a 6cm ground clearance. But this was only measurable in the pits, so the engineers soon followed Brabham's lead in fitting suspension which lowered them as soon as they were out on the track. So, after the first couple of races, every car that year was illegal...

After this farce, skirts were allowed again in 1982, but they were not allowed to slide. That meant that cars had to be fitted with rock-hard suspension, a contributing factor to one of F1's more lethal seasons of the modern age. It cost the lives of the Ferrari legend Gilles Villeneuve and Italian novice Riccardo Paletti, while the career of Villeneuve's team-mate Didier Pironi was ended in a horrific accident.

The other choices, of which we have shorter highlights packages, are the 1981 Las Vegas Grand Prix, held in a car park of the Caesars Palace Hotel, the 1983 South African Grand Prix, and the 1984 Portuguese Grand Prix - one of Murray Walker's choices for his five favourite races at the start of the year.

I went into detail about the circumstances surrounding those races in my blog last week.

I hope you enjoy the videos. Now, to round off, I will address just a couple of issues some of you raised in your responses.

First, why did we not choose the 1986 Australian Grand Prix in a selection of classic title deciders/season finales? As several of you pointed out, we included this in our classic Australia selection in March.

Second, why not Japan 1976? Again, this was in our Japanese Grand Prix selection.

Thanks for your offer of sending in your VHS copies of the 1997 European GP, but I'm afraid the quality of the resulting file would not be of high enough quality for broadcast.

Finally, I'd like to thank you for all the support you have given this series this year. We are delighted you like it so much - yes, even those of you who have taken us to task for the way we have operated it! - and we give you our guarantee that it will be back on the eve of the 2010 season.

The leadership of the previous FIA president, Max Mosley, had become identified with a period of bitter conflict, so Todt's election is a chance for everyone involved to start afresh. Given how unpleasant things got earlier this year, that is no bad thing.

In fact, it is a consequence of the depths to which the relationship between the FIA and the F1 teams sank that Mosley's 16-year tenure as president has come to an end.

Earlier this year, Mosley's agreement not to seek another term was critical to the resolution that ended the threat of eight of the sport's 10 teams to break away and set up a rival championship.

Had he refused to stand down, and ploughed on with his plans to introduce a budget cap into F1, the sport would now be on the edge of a precipice, with next weekend's Abu Dhabi Grand Prix the final race for F1 as the world knows it.

All the leading teams and drivers would be preparing to go off and race elsewhere, leaving one historically successful team - Williams - to race against a bunch of nobodies with second-rate drivers.

That is how bad things had got under Mosley, who the F1 teams believed was governing in an increasingly autocratic and arbitrary style. Happily, compromise was reached, and F1 will continue next year, bruised but otherwise unharmed.

The same cannot be said for Mosley's reputation.

The reality has been quite different. Mosley seemed to like nothing more than to meddle in the sport in which, with F1 tsar Bernie Ecclestone, he has been a central figure in one way or another for 40 years.

But while his legacy will always be one of divisiveness and conflict, Mosley has undoubtedly had a profoundly beneficial effect on F1 in at least one way - safety.

Some of his proposals - such as the now-abandoned grooved tyres - have been a failure. But most in F1 would agree that, in the wake of Ayrton Senna's death in 1994, Mosley was instrumental in ensuring the sport's survival.

Mosley was instrumental in insulating F1 from calls for it to be banned following Senna's death

It's difficult to imagine now, but in the wake of the cataclysmic weekend at Imola, during which Senna and Austrian novice Roland Ratzenberger were killed, there were calls for the sport to be banned.

I well remember the shocked atmosphere at the next race at Monaco, where - in the very first on-track session following Senna's death - the Austrian Sauber driver Karl Wendlinger crashed horribly and ended up in a coma.

The next morning, the headline on the influential French sports newspaper L'Equipe said simply: "Stop this". And F1 came under scrutiny from politicians all over Europe.

Mosley acted rapidly and decisively. The very next day he announced a series of rule changes aimed at improving safety, some to be introduced immediately, others over the succeeding weeks and months.

It did the trick. The politicians backed off, and F1 breathed a sigh of relief. And Mosley, and other key lieutenants, have to be applauded for never letting up in the quest for further safety improvements ever since.

F1 as a sport is immeasurably safer now than it was then, and it gets safer every year - and for that the sport is in Mosley's debt.

The same is true of every person who drives a car on the roads of Europe today.

Probably Mosley's greatest achievement as FIA president has nothing to do with F1 - he was responsible for the introduction of the now-mandatory Euro NCAP crash tests which all road cars have to pass before they go on sale.

It would be nice to think that the new FIA president will continue the good work where Mosley left off and set about trying to repair the damage of the bad.

Whether he will remains an open question.

People tend to be in two camps when it comes to their assessment of Todt, and they are easily split into people who have worked with him and those who have been his competition.

As Ferrari team boss for 15 years, the Frenchman was an incredibly divisive figure in the F1 paddock, ruthlessly pursuing his team's aims with no regard for what effect it was having on the wider sport.

Todt is inextricably bound to the controversies and questionable ethics of the Michael Schumacher era at Ferrari. He is notorious for his bulldozing manner and ruthlessness, and his marshalling of a team renowned for bending the rules to breaking point and beyond.

A perfect example of this was Ferrari's fixing of the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, when in only the sixth race of a season the team were clearly going to go on to dominate, Todt ordered Rubens Barrichello to hand victory to Schumacher on the final lap.

The decision - and the manner in which the positions were changed - caused uproar, and it was clear in the aftermath that Todt simply did not understand - or did not want to - what the fuss was about.

It is little surprise that people have questioned his fitness to act as the ultimate authority in an organisation that, to maintain credibility, must be seen to be acting objectively in the interests of fairness for all.

Probably the final example of Todt's antagonistic stance before leaving Ferrari was at the Canadian Grand Prix in 2008, when the teams wanted to sign a letter indicating their lack of confidence in Mosley in the wake of his sex scandal, only for Todt to refuse to do so.

That decision may well have been critical in Mosley being able to hold on to his position - and it takes on a new light following the events of this FIA presidential campaign, which has seen Mosley back Todt and aggressively try to undermine his rival Ari Vatanen.

But listen to those who have worked with Todt - whether it be at Ferrari or, before that at Peugeot, where he led successful campaigns in the world rally championship and in sportscars - and a different picture emerges.

They speak of his superb management skills, his willingness to delegate successfully, his loyalty, integrity and - incredibly to those on the outside - his warmth and understanding.

The question is, what kind of FIA president will Todt be? Will he see the F1 teams as he did his employees and act in a supportive and conciliatory manner - or will he act as he did to his rival team bosses and be antagonistic and disruptive.

An FIA president could operate successfully in either manner. Todt has talked about himself as the candidate of "consensus not conflict". F1 will be waiting anxiously to see whether he is true to his word.

It is a bit late to change our plans now, though, so we're going to press ahead. As it happens, four of the five choices are, like next weekend's Abu Dhabi race, the last race of that particular season as well as - unlike Abu Dhabi - a title decider. And all of them are true classics, whichever way you look at it.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to include one of the races we wanted to - the 1997 title decider at Jerez in Spain, when Michael Schumacher infamously tried to take rival Jacques Villeneuve out of the race. The tape we were sent by ITV has had the post-race interviews recorded over the first two-thirds of the race, so it's impossible to cut a proper highlights package of it.

We will look into finding a full version of that race at a later date. In the meantime, we have chosen the final event of 1980, the US Grand Prix East, as its replacement.

In a way, this is appropriate, as - like Abu Dhabi this year - although it was the final race of the season, it was not a title decider. Just as Button has now in 2009, Williams driver Alan Jones clinched the world championship at the previous race, which was in Canada.

Who knows? Now Jenson Button has been freed from the pressure of the championship, perhaps he will produce something similar on 1 November.

That 1980 race also marks an important watershed in F1 history, as it was the last at the superb Watkins Glen road circuit in upstate New York. After that, 'the Glen' lost the race, and various US Grands Prix rotated around a selection of temporary tracks in cities before the race dropped off the calendar altogether after 1991.

Lauda enjoys an embrace with his wife after winning the 1984 title as team-mate Prost looks on

It came back in 2000 at a purpose-built track at the famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but even that has now fallen by the wayside.

One hopes that when F1 finally gets a US GP back on the calendar - as all the teams are determined it will - it will be held at a track as deserving of such an important event as was Watkins Glen.

That brings us neatly on to our second choice - the Las Vegas Grand Prix in 1981. It was the first of two F1 races on a track constructed, believe it or not, in a car park of the Caesars Palace Hotel. In fact, "constructed" is too complimentary a word - the track layout was simply marked out by concrete blocks.

This unprepossessing site was the scene for a quite remarkable title decider.

Argentine Williams driver Carlos Reutemann headed into the race with a one-point lead over the Brazilian Brabham driver Nelson Piquet, with Frenchman Jacques Laffite, of Ligier, a further five points adrift.

And when Reutemann qualified on pole, with Piquet fifth and Laffite down in 12th, the championship seemed to be his for the taking.

But Reutemann, who is now a leading politician in his home country, was arguably the most enigmatic of all great grand prix drivers.

He finished the first lap in fifth place and, increasingly unhappy with his car, lost a further place to Piquet on lap 17. He then slipped out of the points - which then went down to sixth place - when Alfa Romeo's Mario Andretti passed him a lap later.

In the closing laps, Piquet was visibly on the verge of collapse, his head lolling around in the cockpit as the desert heat got to him, but still nothing could rouse Reutemann and he limped across the line in seventh place. And as Brabham team members spent 15 minutes trying to revive Piquet, Reutemann slipped away almost unnoticed. To this day, he has never satisfactorily explained his performance.

Our next choice, the 1983 South African Grand Prix, also ended with Piquet as champion, but in completely different circumstances.

Unlike Caesars Palace, the old Kyalami was a truly great track, and it was a fitting place for a title showdown.

Alain Prost and Renault were the dominant force in 1983, but as the season came to its climax, the Frenchman cut a haunted figure - insisting to his team even after a win in Austria gave him a 14-point lead with four races to go that they would lose the title if the team did not develop their car.

Sure enough, Prost was right and Renault were wrong. Brabham's performance improved dramatically in the final four races of the season and Prost went into the final race with only a two-point advantage over Piquet. Ferrari's Rene Arnoux was also in with a slim chance, seven points behind his countryman.

Prost's optimism was not increased when Piquet qualified second, behind Ferrari's Patrick Tambay, with the Renault only fifth, and his worst fears were realised when Piquet streaked away into the distance in the opening laps. It was soon obvious the Brazilian would win the race if he needed to.

On lap 35, that need was removed when Prost retired with turbo failure, and Piquet, now requiring only a fourth place, backed off and allowed team-mate Riccardo Patrese to claim the victory.

A few days later, Renault, looking for scapegoat, sacked Prost, a decision that ranks with Honda's abandonment of F1 at the start of this season as one of the worst in F1 history.

For Prost, though, it turned out well, as our next selection, the 1984 Portuguese Grand Prix, proves.

Out of a drive at Renault, Prost was snapped up by McLaren, where he became team-mate to Niki Lauda and formed one of the all-time great partnerships.

McLaren dominated the season and while Prost was nearly always quicker, he also had by far the worse of the luck, and the two men arrived at the final race of the season in Estoril with Lauda leading Prost by three and a half points.

Prost, as expected, won the race easily, and the main interest focused on whether Lauda, who qualified a lowly 11th, could get up to the second place he needed to pip his partner by half a point.

With 20 laps to go, Lauda had hauled himself up to third, still agonisingly short of what he needed and with no apparent prospect of catching the Lotus of Nigel Mansell, which separated the Austrian from his team-mate. But then Mansell retired with brake failure, Lauda was promoted to second, and the title was his.

Consoling a distraught Prost on the podium, Lauda said: "Don't worry, next year you'll win it." And he was right.

The final choice is also an all-McLaren affair. It is the only one of our five not to be the final race of a season - but what a race it was.

McLaren, now with Ayrton Senna as team-mate to Prost, dominated 1988 even more comprehensively than they did 1984 and the two men arrived in Japan for the penultimate race with the Brazilian in with a chance of clinching his first world title.

Senna duly qualified on pole, with Prost alongside, but Senna stalled on the grid. Fortunately for Senna, Suzuka's downhill pit straight enabled him to bump-start the engine, but not before he had dropped to 14th place.

There began one of the great comeback drives. Senna began to scythe through the field and his cause was helped when it started to drizzle on lap 14.

Always brilliant in wet/dry conditions, Senna's advantage over the rest of the field was magnified and by lap 27 he was with his team-mate, passing him as they attempted to lap a train of three backmarkers. Prost hung on for a while, but with the rain coming down increasingly hard Senna was not to be denied.

So there you have it - five great races, four of them all-time great title deciders, and one a great season finale with a title already wrapped up.

As ever, let us know your views on your favourite - and any you think we should have included. Next week, in the run up to Abu Dhabi, we will publish short, five-to-nine minute highlights package of all of them. And for the race we choose to select - a decision that is informed by the views of respondents on this blog - we will show the full half-hour 'Grand Prix' highlights programme from the time as well.

I look forward to reading your responses.

Honda's decision to quit F1 last December following two years of poor results looks in hindsight like one of the worst calls in sporting history.

For the Brawn team that won the drivers' and constructors' world championships at Sao Paulo's Interlagos track on Sunday is the same one that, in Honda's colours, had been propping up the grids in 2007 and 2008.

It is a quite remarkable story - and the word fairytale, which has been banded around a lot since Sunday evening, is a fitting one.

In February, this team was on the verge of extinction and yet eight months later it is on top of the world. Team boss Ross Brawn is one of the coolest characters in sport, but even he was briefly lost for words after the race, choked with the emotion of it all.

"We all felt the same way," a senior Brawn engineer, who prefers to keep a low public profile, told me on Monday morning. "There is a lot of relief because there have been a lot of dark times."

Bosses Brawn and Nick Fry spent the winter looking for a new owner to buy the team.

"Every day it seemed to be a different story," our Brawn man says. "There would be someone who was said to be interested in buying it, some Mexican billionaire or something, but all the rumours died away. Then Honda came out and said there was no serious buyer, and everyone would be in the depths again.

"Ross was very good. He took people to one side and explained the situation. He'd say: 'I know it's tough, but don't go anywhere if you can avoid it. I think we can sort something out, and I think it's going to be good.'

"But he couldn't tell people what was going on, because he didn't want to get their hopes up only to have them come crashing down."

Through January and February, the employees at the team's base in Brackley had to watch as the other teams tested their new cars. And their frustration was heightened because their simulation data was telling them their car, which they thought might never see a race track, was dynamite.

"Weeks before the car got on the track," the source says, "we were told by one of the aero guys that we would be two seconds quicker than anyone else.

"I knew we'd made a number of big steps over the cars we'd done before, but even so, we'd had two years of dogs, and I thought the bloody aerodynamicists had got their numbers wrong again."

Then, with less than a month before the start of the season, Honda decided that letting the team go under would not be a good idea, and a deal was struck whereby Brawn would buy it out and Honda would provide enough money to go racing for a season, after which Brawn GP would be on their own.

So with three weeks to go before the season opener in Australia, the Brawn GP 001 finally hit the track - and it was true to its creators' predictions.

It was the fastest thing in the field by a mile, and Jenson Button went on to win six of the first seven races, the foundation for the championship he finally clinched on Sunday.

What is less well known, though, is that the car is, in the words of my source, "a botch job".

It was designed for a Honda engine, and it was not until December that the team knew they would be using a Mercedes. That necessitated some pretty crude changes.

"The chassis had the back six inches cut off to fit the engine in - the sort of thing you wouldn't normally do even with a test car," says my source. "And the gearbox was in the wrong place because the crank-centre height is different. There's a massive amount of compromise in the cars."

Those compromises introduced a significant performance deficit into the Brawn car, but it raced like that all year.

That is because the lead time on making a new chassis is several months, and at the time the team would have had to make the decision - in April - the car was dominating.

By the time it had dropped off the pace, and it was obvious the team needed the extra speed that would come with a bespoke chassis and improved weight distribution, it was too late to commission a new design.

Just as incredibly the team, tight on budget, made only three chassis all year - one for Button, one for Rubens Barrichello, and a spare - when a big-money outfit such as McLaren will typically make seven or eight.

That the Brawn was so quick in the circumstances is incredibly impressive.

Having a Mercedes engine rather than the uncompetitive Honda undoubtedly made a big difference. But clearly the team had also made a quantum leap with the car. And that says a lot for the way Ross Brawn, who joined too late to make any impression on the 2008 car, was able to marshal the team's resources better than had been done before.

Brawn has now won nine F1 drivers' titles and eight constructors' championships with three different teams - adding his own to Benetton and Ferrari. Button is the first driver other than Michael Schumacher to be crowned under his guidance. But pinning down exactly what makes the softly spoken 54-year-old Englishman the best technical manager in F1 is surprisingly difficult.

"It's amazing - it's all very subtle," says the Brawn insider. "It's almost like you don't know he's doing it.

"He has meetings, and he talks about how he thinks things should be done in the future and so on, and because his reputation is second to none, you don't question where it's coming from. But he doesn't come into the drawing office very much.

"He doesn't tell everyone what to do, he just leaves us to get on with it. He's not autocratic by any stretch of the imagination. He just gives people the confidence to do what they can do, and removes their concerns as they come up.

"The big thing is having the technical organisation he wants and letting them get on with it. It's a strange thing, because it's the same bunch of people who last year designed a dog."

This season has been far from an easy ride, though.

The early races were marred by the controversy over Brawn's 'double diffuser', which was eventually declared legal - and was never the sole reason for the car's performance.

While that was going on, Brawn had to cut something like 270 jobs to suit his new, more straitened, circumstances - a decision, he admitted on Sunday, which had been very painful.

There were the outbursts by Barrichello when he felt the team were favouring Button - a claim that has been proved unfounded by the evidence of the second half of the season.

Then there was the tricky mid-season period when the team dropped off the pace, and there have been Button's mystifying problems in qualifying that lost him competitiveness on Saturdays compared to his team-mate.

Yet there has never been a sense of crisis, just the same calm, methodical approach that oozes out of every part of Brawn's being.

The brief moment post-race in Brazil when he choked back tears of joy was the only time Brawn has come close to losing control in the 15 years I have known him. And even then he was quickly back to his normal self, predicting that the team would continue to be a force next year.

With Fernando Alonso in what is expected to be a rejuvenated Ferrari, and Lewis Hamilton and McLaren probably back on top form, few would predict a second consecutive title for Brawn and Button - who, incidentally, has still not signed for 2010.

But the team have an unidentified title sponsor already in place, and a Mercedes buy-in on the horizon.

And bearing in mind the travails of Brawn's remarkable journey, and the compromises inherent in their car this year, there is no reason to disagree with the Brawn insider who insists they will at least be "a respectable front-runner".

Considering where they were eight months ago, that speaks wonders for this team and its remarkable boss.

It was not that many of the respondents on this blog felt we had not chosen five good races, more that they thought there were even better grands prix that should have been included.

I will come back to that argument in a moment, after revealing that the 1982 race at Rio de Janeiro's Jacarepagua circuit is the one we have chosen to highlight this time.

The full 'Grand Prix' highlights programme broadcast on the day of the race is embedded in this blog, and the edited highlights of that race and the four other selections - 1989, 1993, 1994 and 2008 - are linked below it:

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.

Watch short highlights of the 1982 Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1989 Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1993 Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1994 Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 2008 Grand Prix

The highlights will be on satellite and cable in the UK from 1800 BST on Wednesday 14 October until 0800 on Thursday 15 October, then from 2100 on Thursday 15 October until 0800 on Friday 16 October. They will be available on Freeview channel 301 from 2200 on Wednesday 14 October until 0530 on Thursday 15 October and from 1200 on Friday 16 October until 1330.

I gave detailed analysis of the events of each race in my blog last week. The 1982 race was one of my personal favourites, and it also proved the most popular of our five choices among respondents on this blog. I hope you enjoy it, and the other selections.

But while 1982 'won' the popular vote out of the five selections we gave you, it seems that would almost certainly not have been the case had we chosen some of the other undoubtedly great Brazilian Grands Prix there have been in more recent years.

In particular, many of you asked why the incident-packed 2003 race, held in mixed conditions which caught out even the great Michael Schumacher, was left out.

It has to be said that the Brazil edition of this classic races series posed a particularly difficult choice.

The Interlagos circuit's layout lends itself to good racing and, looking back, it seems there have been more exciting Brazilian Grands Prix there than there have been dull ones.

It's not just 2003 either - the 1991, 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2007 races could all have been included in our selection. And some of them, among others, may well be next year.

As I have repeatedly said on this blog, we have been gratified that this classic grands prix series has been so popular and we certainly plan to continue it. The thing is, we have to take many different things into account when we are making these selections.

We absolutely want to raise anticipation of the event coming up, just as we aim to highlight what a rich history Formula 1 has. So we want to give as diverse a selection as possible. I think these five races fit all those criteria.

We have also listened to the complaints of many of you on this blog that you don't like us to pick too many races from the years when ITV owned the F1 rights, 1997-2008.

Although the shorter highlights packages are repeatedly the most popular, many of the more ardent enthusiasts like to watch the long highlights. We are not able to offer longer highlights on ITV races because these edits are very much more labour intensive than ones on races that were originally broadcast on the BBC - and with the whole of sport to cover we cannot justify the extra resources this would take up.

The reason the edits from the ITV era take longer to produce is that it has been decided that we will only use BBC commentary (or commentary by people the BBC have employed) on these edits. So any race following Murray Walker's retirement in 2001 until ITV lost the rights at the end of last season has to be matched with commentary from Radio 5 Live.

Our selection of these five races, and the fact that we have not chosen some of the classic races from the 2000s, was definitely partly influenced by your views on this issue that so many of you have expressed so strongly.

One of you went so far as to say we "bottled it", so we didn't have to listen to the "moans" of those who complain about 'ITV-era' races being selected because if we choose one as the highlighted race - a decision which is influenced by your views - then you don't get a full half-hour (or more) long version.

My answer to this is simple. We don't see it as "moaning" (the respondent's word, not mine). We welcome and listen to your views, as you have seen over this year. But you must also see we have a dilemma here. If we put in races from the 'ITV era' we get complaints that you'd rather see older races so you get the extended highlights. Yet if we leave them out, as in this case, we get people asking why we have ignored great races. You could forgive us if we occasionally felt that we just can't win!

No matter. You may not have 2003 this time - but don't rule it out in the future - but you do have five classic Brazilian Grands Prix to savour.

If this weekend's race in Sao Paulo is as good as any of them - and there is every reason it could be - we are in for another cracking Sunday.

Like Belgium, Italy and Japan before it, Brazil has been a long-time fixture on the Formula 1 calendar, so there has been plenty of time for it to build up a catalogue of great events.

It helps, too, that the Interlagos track in Sao Paulo lends itself to overtaking, with its long pit straight and demanding corners.

Interlagos was the host of the first Brazilian Grand Prix in 1972, but two of our five choices are actually from the race's time at Rio de Janeiro's Jacarepagua track, which hosted the event in 1978 and then from 1981 to 1989, after Interlagos in its original five-mile form was deemed too dangerous.

It featured a starring role from my childhood hero Gilles Villeneuve, who led the first half of the race after starting second on the grid in his Ferrari, putting in one of his trademark never-give-up drives as he battled with rapidly deteriorating tyres.

The great French-Canadian eventually lost his battle with his car's diminishing grip, and spun off at around half-distance, leaving the lead to be disputed between Brabham's Nelson Piquet and Williams's Keke Rosberg.

The 1982 grand prix cars were notorious for the pain they put their drivers through, with their rock-hard suspension and high levels of grip thanks to underbody 'ground effect'.

All the drivers were suffering in the sticky heat of Rio. Piquet's team-mate Riccardo Patrese spun out with exhaustion after 34 of the 63 laps. And just four months after he won his first world title in Las Vegas despite crossing the line in a semi-comatose state, Piquet was in little better shape in his home race.

The Brazilian managed to hold off Rosberg, but the podium ceremony was too much for him. He collapsed and had to be held upright by Rosberg and third-placed finisher Alain Prost of Renault.

The drama was not over, though. F1 was going through one of its most poisonous political battles and, after the race, Piquet and Rosberg's cars were disqualified for being underweight, making Prost the winner. The rules allowed for teams to fill up with 'essential fluids' after the end of the race, and the teams using Cosworth engines, which were out-powered by the turbos of Ferrari and Renault, were using this loophole to run their cars underweight in races.

Adding to the interest in that race, it featured arguably the best F1 grid in the history of the sport, in terms of the depths of talent on display - with Villeneuve, Prost, Piquet, Rosberg and Patrese joined by Carlos Reutemann, Niki Lauda, John Watson, Didier Pironi, Michele Alboreto, Nigel Mansell, Rene Arnoux, Elio de Angelis and Jacques Laffite. That's more than half the grid filled by multiple grand prix winners, with a fair old smattering of greats as well. How often has that happened?

Our next selection is 1989, also in Rio, and one of Mansell's most remarkable victories.

Berger (left) and Senna collided at the start of the 1989 Brazilian GP, which Nigel Mansell went on to win

Ferrari designer John Barnard pioneered the semi-automatic gearbox with this car, the 640. Within a couple of years, the system, operated through paddles on the back of the steering wheel, was to become de rigueur in F1. But Ferrari had serious development pains with it.

The car had failed to complete more than a handful of laps at a time in pre-season testing. And so convinced was Mansell that it would not last the distance in the heat that he booked an early flight home - which he promptly missed when the Ferrari not only lasted the race, but finished it first as well.

By 1993, the Brazilian Grand Prix was back at a truncated Interlagos. It was only the second race of the season, but already it was clear that Prost, now driving for Williams, was a lock for his fourth world title. The Frenchman took pole position in Brazil, with team-mate Damon Hill second and local hero Ayrton Senna only third.

But the race was far from the expected Williams demonstration run. There was a huge accident at the first corner, which took out Ferrari's Gerhard Berger and the McLaren of Michael Andretti, who was at the start of what turned out to be an ill-starred attempt to break into F1.

Prost did indeed dominate the early laps, but the track was then hit by a typical Sao Paulo downpour and the Frenchman spun off at the first corner, hitting the Minardi of Christian Fittipaldi, who had just gone off in the same place.

That brought out the safety car, which negated the big lead Hill had built up over Senna, who passed the Englishman shortly after the re-start and sent the crowd wild with a win that put him into the lead of the world championship.

The following year's race was equally eventful. It is remembered for two main things.

Firstly, Michael Schumacher laid down a marker for Benetton's domination of the season by outpacing Senna, who suffered the ignominy of spinning in the closing laps trying to keep pace

Secondly, there was a massive accident involving Martin Brundle, Olivier Panis, Jos Verstappen and Eddie Irvine, which resulted in Verstappen's Benetton somersaulting out of the race, his tyre leaving a black rubber mark on Brundle's helmet as he flew over the Englishman's McLaren.

Irvine, who had already made a name for himself as something of a bad boy after getting himself punched by Senna at his debut race in Japan the year before, was banned for three races for causing the crash.

Our final choice is last year's title-deciding race, which surely needs no introduction.

Lewis Hamilton, needing only to finish fifth to clinch the title even if his rival, Felipe Massa of Ferrari won, made heavy weather of his task.

In arguably the most exciting championship climax in F1 history, when Massa crossed the line to win the race, Hamilton was only in sixth place, and in the Ferrari pit they celebrated, thinking their man was the world champion.

But out on the track Hamilton was still striving, and as he exited the last real corner of the track, with only the long blast up the hill to the finish line to go, fifth placed man Timo Glock of Toyota was struggling to find grip on the wet track with his dry-weather tyres.

Hamilton accelerated past him, and into the fifth place he needed to clinch the title.

As ever, we are asking you to give us your views on which race we should feature in the run-up to the race next week. We will pick one race to highlight - a decision that will be informed by your responses to this blog, but not based solely on them.

If that race is from the era when the BBC had the rights to F1 - which in this case means all the choices apart from 2008 - then we will show the full 'Grand Prix' highlights programme that was broadcast at the time.

We'd also welcome your views on the selection itself - by all means point out other races you think we should have included. We can always include these next year.

Assuming F1's traditional giants can both get back to the front, with Alonso at Ferrari going up against Lewis Hamilton at McLaren it sets the best two drivers in the world against each other in the two most famous teams.

Think of James Hunt against Niki Lauda, Alain Prost versus Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher taking on Mika Hakkinen. This is the historical lineage in which Alonso and Hamilton are taking their places, and they have all the qualities required to live up to those expectations.

Alonso's year as Hamilton's team-mate at McLaren in 2007 may have been tempestuous in the extreme, but there is not the personal animosity between the two that there was for a long time between Senna and Prost.

Nor, though, are they exactly the partners in playboy excess that were Hunt and Lauda. Instead, their relationship is based on a deep respect for each other's abilities and a similarly powerful will to win.

Alonso and Hamilton have deep respect for each other's abilities

When they were racing, many people believed that, on a single lap, Hakkinen was actually slightly faster than Schumacher. Equally, few had any doubts that, overall, Schumacher was the more complete driver.

It is not stretching the point to see Alonso in the Schumacher role and Hamilton as Hakkinen - and that's not just because of the cars they will be driving in 2010.

Alonso and Hamilton staged a fascinating battle in 2007. Sometimes Hamilton had the edge on Alonso, sometimes it was the other way around. And they finished the season tied on points, with Hamilton edging second place in the championship behind Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen on results count-back.

On the evidence of that one season, it is incredibly difficult to judge who is the better driver.

There was rarely more than a hair's breadth between them on pace. But, on balance, in the races where it was possible to make a direct comparison, Hamilton was faster than Alonso slightly more often than it was the other way around.

For a guy in his first season going toe-to-toe with a double world champion, that is incredibly impressive. But weighing against that, Alonso was never comfortable at McLaren.

By mid-season, the relationship between driver and team was already breaking down and after the watershed of the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend - when Hamilton and Alonso tried to double-cross each other in qualifying, after which Alonso had two massive rows with then-team boss Ron Dennis and threatened to expose the team to the FIA in the now-notorious 'spy scandal' - it was clear he was on his way out.

Even so, Alonso beat Hamilton fair and square at the next two races and a significant discrepancy in speed between the two men only emerged at the final two races, when it was clear there was a real danger of Alonso beating Hamilton to the title. And Alonso was not the only person to be suspicious about that.

Many people in F1 believe Alonso, 28, is the most complete driver in the sport - and the evidence of his career so far makes it hard to dispute that. Equally, though, it is clear that Hamilton, 24, has the potential to usurp him, just as he replaced Alonso as the youngest champion in F1 history.

Certainly, the evidence of this season is that the Englishman is beginning to show signs of the wider awareness and racing intelligence that Alonso has displayed for so long.

Now, that battle is going to be staged with the drivers in different cars and teams, with the restrictions that were imposed on them by the requirements of racing for the same organisation removed. It should be a case of sit back and watch the sparks fly.

At the same time, there are a series of intriguing sub-plots to savour.

It is looking increasingly likely that Raikkonen, who has been elbowed out of Ferrari to make way for Alonso, will move back to McLaren as team-mate to Hamilton.

If that happens, it is in itself a fascinating prospect for, on his day, Raikkonen is a match for anybody. It would be a surprise if the Finn beat Hamilton over a season, but there may well be times when the Englishman cannot live with him. And how Hamilton handles that will be a major test for him.

The intra-team fight at Ferrari will also be interesting. When Raikkonen went there in 2007, he was expected to easily beat Felipe Massa, but it didn't quite work out that way. So people will be less willing to make the same assumption about Alonso.

Nevertheless, while Raikkonen regards his job as being to turn up and drive, spending as little time doing anything else as he can get away with, Alonso has more strings to his bow and I, and many others I suspect, expect him to prove too much for the Brazilian.

Finally, there is Robert Kubica's move to Renault to replace Alonso. The Pole is highly regarded in F1, and Ferrari, for one, are known to have their eye on him for the future.

Kubica was a tough rival of Hamilton in karting, and Alonso once described him as the best driver on the grid. So if Renault can regain the form that won them two world titles in 2005-6, Kubica's presence at the front would add another dimension.

There's also the prospect of watching the progress of world champion-elect Jenson Button - arguably the leader of the second string of drivers behind Hamilton, Alonso and Raikkonen - and rising star Sebastian Vettel in a major fight with F1's heavy hitters, if their Brawn and Red Bull teams can maintain the form that has made them front-runners this season.

All in all, the future of F1 looks rosy indeed. On the track, at least.

It has been immensely rewarding to see how enthusiastic and energised all the respondents on this blog have been for the last few editions, which have featured some of the greatest circuits in F1.

This latest edition is no exception.

All five of our selection for classic Japanese Grands Prix fully live up to that title, but 1994 is our worthy winner.

The full Grand Prix highlights programme of the time is embedded below, along with shorter highlights of that race and other four choices - James Hunt's dramatic title win in 1976, the title-deciding collision between Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna in 1989, the all-out duel between Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen in 2000 that ended Ferrari's 21-year wait for a drivers' championship and the stunning 2005 race.

The highlights will be on satellite and cable in the UK from 1200 BST on Wednesday 30 September until 1800 on Friday 2 October. Because of a lack of bandwidth, they will be only be available on Freeview channel 301 from 0300 on Friday 2 October until 0600, which is in between the first two practice sessions from Japan.

WATCH HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 1976 JAPANESE GRAND PRIX
WATCH HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 1989 JAPANESE GRAND PRIX
WATCH HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 1994 JAPANESE GRAND PRIX
WATCH HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 2000 JAPANESE GRAND PRIX
WATCH HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 2005 JAPANESE GRAND PRIX

All are brilliant races in their different ways, but my personal favourite is 2005, details of which I went into in my last classic races blog.

In fact, I think there is a strong argument for it being the greatest race of all time. It didn't get much support from you lot, and I suspect that was partly to do with the fact that it is very recent, and partly to do with a bit of tactical voting - you knew you were not going to get long highlights if it 'won'.

The 1994 race, though, was indeed a great event. Damon Hill drove his greatest race to beat Michael Schumacher in the wet on aggregated time after a mid-race stoppage.

The grand prix, held in torrential rain, was in two parts after a stoppage called when Martin Brundle's spinning McLaren hit a marshal who was moving another car and broke his leg.

In those days, unlike now, a drivers' times from the two parts of the race were added together to make his total race time. Schumacher was leading when the race was stopped, but Hill drove brilliantly in the second part to build a bigger advantage, and he won by just over three seconds on aggregate.

Williams co-owner Patrick Head told me last year: "Damon simply outdrove Michael in the wet. And not many people do that."

It was, Hill acknowledges, his greatest ever drive. Last year, I did a long interview with him on his time at Williams, and he talked extensively about that race.

"Something came out of me," he said, "which I'd been trying to get out, which needed the right circumstances, and I think I battled through. I never got to the height I did in Suzuka before, or perhaps even since."

Hill is remarkably introspective, thoughtful and self-analytical for a racing driver - and in the right mood, he is prepared to share that analysis with interviewers. This was one of those moments, and rather than have me bang on about what happened, I'll simply hand over to him. It makes fascinating reading.

"Nigel [Mansell] was there [as Hill's Williams team-mate]," Hill said. "I was supposed to be the team leader but for some reason I just could not seem to get that indication from the team, not from the team, but from [boss] Frank [Williams].

"I have to say it wasn't the team. The guys I worked with were always terrific. But I think Frank and Patrick never regarded me, at that stage, as being their front-line guy. And that's why they had Nigel there. So I constantly felt they were looking for someone else to deliver. I felt that was really demoralising. I thought that there was obviously something about me which made them doubtful of me.

"And I doubt myself. I constantly doubt myself. I'm constantly giving it out. I don't think I can blame them for that. I wasn't someone who can walk in and have 100% confidence and give off that vibe. Like, say, Michael Schumacher does. So I don't think that was helpful in that situation. I was very internal and introspective. And eventually at Suzuka Patrick gave me a bit of talking to.

"I was getting very intense about the whole thing and I was in a bit of a strop because they were all over Nigel and I thought: 'He can't win the championship! OK, he won it before, but he can't win it now. I can. Why are they making such a big deal about Nigel?' And eventually you just go: 'I don't get it. I don't care. I'm just going to drive.' And I think I released myself from something."

Indeed he did. It was a quite remarkable drive - as were so many of the others in this selection. Enjoy.

Yet again, Brawn and Button had a tricky weekend, qualifying in the middle of the grid, and yet again their major title rivals failed to take advantage of their problems.

Instead, Button drove another excellent race to finish fifth, actually gaining a point on his closest title rival, his team-mate Rubens Barrichello, and losing only one to Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull. With a 15-point advantage over Barrichello and 25 points on Vettel with only three races to go, Button is now an even stronger favourite for the championship than before.

In many ways, Vettel's race summed up the season so far, in that with Button vulnerable and others in a great position to take serious advantage of the Englishman's difficulties, it was Vettel who cracked, and Button who engaged in a successful exercise in damage limitation.

Exacerbating that first error, he then ran wide over a kerb shortly afterwards, badly damaging his car's diffuser and affecting its pace.

Barrichello was less to blame for his failure to make up ground on Button. He did what could be expected of him by qualifying fifth, seven places ahead of his team-mate, but the need to change his gearbox earned him a five-place penalty and put him within range of Button in the race.

From there, Button did what he has done so many times this year - he drove flawlessly and beat his team-mate despite seemingly starting the race in a weaker position.

Button produced another excellent exercise in damage limitation in Singapore

It is this kind of smooth, error-free drive, making the best of the situation, that has been the foundation of Button's season.

At the start of the year, it won him six races out of seven as the other teams set about updating their cars to catch up with the flying Brawns. Since then, he has been on the back foot, but rare has been the race when Button has not got the most out of whatever car he has been given.

In fact, only two grands prix fall into that category. In Valencia, he struggled to seventh as his team-mate won, and at Spa he qualified 14th when Barrichello was fourth, and Button got taken out by Romain Grosjean's Renault on the first lap.

There are those who are beginning to question whether Button deserves the championship, particularly if he does not win another race. They accuse him of basically backing into the title having had a sort of unfair advantage with a superior car in the first third of the season.

I think that is a ridiculous charge, and I'm not the only one. Martin Brundle shares that view, and so does 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve, who had his own mid-season lull in his championship year.

Speaking on the BBC's post-race red button forum, the Canadian said: "It won't (devalue the title if Button doesn't win again), because he had amazing races early in the season and he doesn't get flustered. Maybe he had a dip and drove two tenths slower but nothing gets to him. And it's almost harder when you have a big lead because you start driving defensively."

It should be remembered that while Button had that virtually flawless start to the season, scoring 66 out of a possible 70 points in the first seven races, Barrichello, in the same car, scored 'only' 37, finishing second to Button three times, fourth once, and fifth twice on top of the gearbox failure that caused him to retire in Turkey.

For his part, Vettel has simply made too many mistakes, crashing out in Australia and Monaco, making a first-lap error that cost him the lead - and probably a win - in Turkey, and then those faux-pas in Singapore.

A championship is about putting together the best possible season over all the races, and it is about being in the right car at the right time.

No driver goes through a year without having a bit of a dip - it's just more obvious when someone is leading the championship.

And looked at as a whole, which driver has definitively driven a better season than Button in 2009? Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, possibly, but their cars have not allowed them to be in the title fight this year.

One final point, too. Had F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone got his way earlier this year and been successful in introducing his wins-based championship scoring system, Button would already be world champion.

He has scored six victories. No other driver has more than two, so with three races to go, no driver can now win more races than Button.

Personally, I hope Ecclestone's idea is never adopted, but regardless of the scoring system, it is hard to argue with the driver who has won most races in a season being the most deserving world champion.

As there has only been one Singapore Grand Prix, we took a different approach this time and included in our choice alongside highlights of what is now one of the most notorious F1 events in history four great races from tracks no longer on the calendar - France 1979, Austria 1982, Dallas 1984 and Mexico 1990.

It was always going to be tough to choose between those events, for all are true all-time classics. But I have to admit I was surprised at how you all responded. (In this blog, incidentally, I will also give details of next week's classic Japanese GP choice - but more of that later).

I was expecting France 1979 to be a hands-down winner this time because of the spectacular last three laps of racing between Ferrari legend Gilles Villeneuve and Renault's Rene Arnoux. But actually that race came last in the popular 'vote' which we use to influence - if not decide - which event to make our feature.

Of the remaining three events, I have to admit I thought the incredibly close finish between Elio de Angelis and Keke Rosberg at Austria's stunning Osterreichring in 1982 - just 0.05 seconds separated them at the line - would swing the vote. But although it did win favour with quite a number of you, it was left trailing by the final two races - Dallas 1984 and Mexico 1990.

Both were incredibly eventful, as I described in my blog last week, and it is difficult to choose between them - it was pretty much a dead heat as far as your picks were concerned as well.

Personally, if I had to choose one of them, I would go for Mexico 1990, which included Alain Prost's brilliant victory from 13th on the grid and his Ferrari team-mate Nigel Mansell's audacious overtaking manoeuvre around the outside of Gerhard Berger's McLaren at the daunting 150mph Peraltada corner.

Dallas was more of a demolition derby on a disintegrating track surface, with the exceptions of Williams driver Keke Rosberg's cool drive to victory and Arnoux's aggressive climb through the field to finish second for Ferrari.

We have decided in the end to show the full Grand Prix programme of the time for both races, as well as the shorter highlights edits of all five choices. All the highlights will also be available on the BBC red button this week. They will be on satellite and cable from 1700 on Wednesday 23 September until 1300 on Friday 25 September. And they will be available on Freeview channel 301 from 1700 on Wednesday 23 September until 10am on Thursday 24 September.

When you are watching the full Mexico programme, you will notice that it jumps forward quite significantly at one point - and that means you miss eventual winner Prost passing Ferrari team-mate Nigel Mansell, among other things.

This is because the broadcast at the time was planned to start with highlights of the early part of the race before switching to show the end of the race live.

The problem was that the longer the race went on, the more exciting it got, and the restrictions in technology at the time meant making the switch was more difficult than it would be today.

The producer of the programme was Mark Wilkin, now the BBC's F1 editor. Here is his explanation of what happened:

"It became clear while we were playing out the early highlights of the race that the latter stages were going to be really exciting.

"We had an edit of what had happened so far on a tape that was going to air as the excitement was building live. I felt it was more important to be live for the closing laps than it was to show the highlights of the missing laps. That was when Prost got into, I think, second place. And so the programme jumped forward. The explanation offered by James Hunt was 'now we can go live', as I recall.

"Modern technology would make it easier to have seamless coverage even in those circumstances but we simply couldn't shorten anything once it was on air in those days (because it was on a physical tape) so the choice was to miss everything live (and probably incur an overrun) or get live. That meant at least we were live for Mansell's amazing pass of Gerhard Berger around the outside of Peraltada."

Watch short highlights of the 1979 French Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1982 Austrian Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 1990 Mexican Grand Prix
Watch short highlights of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix

Because Singapore and Japan are back-to-back this year, I also have to give you at this point our five choices for classic Japanese Grands Prix. And, in my opinion, so brilliant have so many Japanese races been, that all of these are all-time greats.

The first choice is the inaugural Japanese Grand Prix at Fuji in 1976, the race in which Hunt won his world championship in dramatic circumstances following the decision of title rival Niki Lauda to retire after just two laps because he felt conditions were too dangerous to continue.

The next choice is the famous 1989 race at Suzuka, which culminated in the first of two title-deciding collisions between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost at the race.

Next, it is the 1994 race, when Damon Hill drove his greatest race to beat Michael Schumacher in the wet on aggregated time after a mid-race stoppage to set up the famous title showdown in Adelaide.

We also have the on-the-limit duel in 2000 between Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen at the end of which the German ended Ferrari's 21-year wait for the drivers' world title - and which Schumacher himself has said was probably his toughest ever race.

And finally there is the astonishing 2005 Japanese Grand Prix, which was thrilling from start to finish after the front-runners all started at the back because of rain halfway through qualifying. For some reason, perhaps because Renault's Fernando Alonso had already won that year's championship, this race is less well known than some of the others, so I will give you some more of the back story.

It features brilliant drives from McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen, who won from 17th on the grid after passing Giancarlo Fisichella's Renault on the last lap, and Alonso, who probably would have won from 16th had he not been delayed unfairly by some indecision by the officials over whether he should let backmarker Christian Klien back past him after passing him by missing the chicane.

And the crowning moments of both those performances were two stunning overtaking manoeuvres - Raikkonen's around the outside of Fisichella at Turn One on the last lap and Alonso's around the outside of Michael Schumacher at 130R midway through the race.

Both are among the greatest overtaking manoeuvres in the history of F1.

I've always thought Alonso's was the better move. His speed at the apex of the corner as he completed the pass was 208mph and it takes incredible bravery to overtake a driver as uncompromising as Schumacher in that fashion, knowing that if he does not give way there is going to be an aircraft-style accident from which there is a fair chance at least one of you is not going to come out alive.

Just how much bravery was clear in an interview Alonso gave my friend and colleague Nigel Roebuck later that year. Roebuck asked him about that move and why the Spaniard had plucked up the courage to try it in the knowledge of some of the stunts Schumacher had pulled in the past. Alonso said: "In those situations, I always remember that Michael has two kids."

Great though Alonso's pass was, though, BBC 5 Live pundit and former F1 driver Anthony Davidson told me over a beer in Valencia this year that he thought Raikkonen's was even better, in the sense that Anthony felt Schumacher had no choice but to give way, whereas pulling off what Raikkonen did was technically harder because Fisichella had more chance to resist.

Either way, they were two great moves in a great race, which is just one of five great choices. I look forward to reading your views.