Johnny Herbert: Sebastian Vettel's a winner and he’ll keep fighting Lewis Hamilton until the very end

Sebastian Vettel will not have arrived in Austin this weekend with the mindset that this year’s world championship is a done deal.

He and Ferrari have said they believe they can win the last four grands prix of the season and such an outcome is perfectly conceivable.

Mathematically, it looks tough but Sebastian isn’t giving up. There’s no chance he’ll be thinking it’s over — though if Hamilton beats Vettel by more than 16 points it will be. He will go for it to the very end.

We all know how things stand. Lewis Hamilton leads by 59 points, with only 100 still in the offing, but it’s not a given for Lewis. I still believe there are twists and turns to come.

On paper, we would have expected Sebastian to be top of the table and to have dominated the races in Asia before arriving in Texas.

I’m a realist and you’d have to say a fourth world title is looking on the cards for Lewis. But all it takes is, for instance, Max Verstappen and Lewis clashing on the opening corner here and then something going awry with Lewis’s car at the subsequent race.

Sure, it looks unlikely to happen, but we said the same thing last season when Lewis had that DNF in Malaysia out of the blue at a pivotal moment of his championship campaign. There are parallels between last season and this one.

Last year, people were saying unfairly that Nico Rosberg wouldn’t have won the title if it hadn’t been for Lewis’s bad luck.

You could say the same thing this season but I never bought that argument last time and I don’t this time around. Nico is the deserving 2016 champion and, if Lewis takes the title, then he’s the deserving champion this year.