Alonso Heads to Formula One Finale in Brazil Fernando Alonso, the Spaniard who is the last man standing between Sebastian Vettel and a third consecutive Formula One championship, stopped in New York on Tuesday on his way to São Paulo for the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix next Sunday. Alonso, who is 13 points behind Vettel, needs at least a top-three finish in his Ferrari along with a bad run by his German rival, who drives for Red Bull, to take what would be his third championship. Alonso would lose a tiebreaker if both drivers finished with equal point totals, so his hope rests on one of the following three scenarios at the Interlagos circuit: he wins, with Vettel no higher than fifth; he's second and Vettel is no better than eighth; or he's third, with Vettel 10th or lower. Formula One cars rarely stay the same from one race to the next, as most of the top teams constantly add improved parts to help gain a little speed. Alonso acknowledged that his team fell behind after a good start in 2012. "We know we did not do the job in part of the season," he said. His last victory was July 22, in Germany, his third of the season. Vettel and Red Bull have since put on a charge; Vettel now has five victories. Alonso said that he expected some new parts to arrive as late as Friday, even if they only help his lap times drop just a few milliseconds. "We will have some developments to make the car go faster, but we can't expect magic changes in things in five days' time," he said, referring to the gap since the last race, Nov. 18 outside Austin, Tex. He finished third that day, one position behind Vettel. Alonso, appearing on behalf of Kaspersky, a Ferrari sponsor that produces online security safeguards, talked about his life in cyberspace. "I tweet about four or five times a day," he said, "but I also use Instagram. Sometimes I like to express myself with a picture rather than with 140 characters. Although "there's a lot of temptation to tweet something from inside the car," he said, he's never done so at the track, a habit that brought a $25,000 fine for Brad Keselowski, the newly crowned Nascar Sprint Cup champion. "We already have a press representative," he said, nodding toward a Ferrari media rep and smiling, "so I would probably be fired." Nonetheless, Alonso said there is a lot to read between the lines of the opposition's tweets, even at 140 characters. "If a tweet is too optimistic, you know they are playing games," he said. And for those who say modern Formula One drivers are too closemouthed, Alonso shared these biographical notes: If the racing thing hadn't panned out, he probably would have begun work installing elevators, a job that his father had lined up for him. He was nervous during his first road test for his driver's license, so he went about 60 miles an hour on the highway when he should have hit 90. "I got a small note from the teacher that I was a bit too slow," he said. And he was so proud of his first car that he used it to commute the entire quarter-mile to school each day, even though he couldn't find a parking spot once he got there.