As the Formula One circus arrived on the banks of the Bosphorus for Sunday’s Turkish Grand Prix, Bernie Ecclestone, the sport’s commercial rights holder, told The Times that he believes that Fernando Alonso will emerge as champion at the end of this pulsating season.

Ecclestone has been delighted with the reawakening of interest in the sport brought about by the epic battle for superiority at McLaren Mercedes between Lewis Hamilton, the most successful rookie of all time, and Alonso, his Spanish teammate and the youngest two-times world champion in the history of Formula One. But, although Hamilton is seven points ahead of Alonso at the top of the drivers’ championship with six races to go, Ecclestone believes that the Spaniard’s experience – this is his seventh season in Formula One – will prove the difference heading into the finishing stretch.

Ecclestone believes it will be a close-run thing that could go to the final race and he qualified his prediction by comparing Hamilton to Michael Schumacher, the most successful driver of all time. “I don’t know – it’s difficult to know,” Ecclestone said yesterday. “I suppose you would have to say Alonso is favourite because of his experience. But the way the other guy [Hamilton] is performing – if you took his hat off and put bloody Schumacher’s hat on, you’d say Schumacher was driving, wouldn’t you?”

After the extraordinary events during the final stages of qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix three weeks ago, when Hamilton disobeyed team orders and Alonso, apparently with the collusion of the team, retaliated by stopping the British driver from completing his final qualifying run, there have been predictions that the McLaren pair will crash into each other as the championship stakes get higher.

The comparison to the rivalry between Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, who twice drove each other off in 1989 and 1990, has often been made. Ecclestone, however, does not believe matters will come to that. More likely, he argues, is that the tension between them will ebb away as one of them gets ahead. The crunch will come when the driver who finds himself in the supporting role has to play second fiddle to the championship contender.

“If one of them obviously gets into a position where the other one can’t really catch them and he needs a bit of help, maybe that’s what will happen,” Ecclestone said. “If you and I are in

“ the same team against each other, as long as we are still competing we are probably going to be a little bit edgy with each other. But I think when you are obviously clear in front and I can’t do anything about it, then I obviously want to help you. So that’s when you’ll see the test.”

Much as Ecclestone is delighted with the increase in interest and ratings this season, his only wish is that Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa, the Ferrari drivers, who are 20 and 21 points respectively behind Hamilton, were more of a threat. Although both say that they are still fighting for the title – and the free-flowing Istanbul track may well suit the Ferraris – their hopes are looking increasingly forlorn.

“I’d like to see both the McLaren cars stop and Ferrari get some points and have four runners up there [in contention]. You’d have to put your money on McLaren, but you never know,” Ecclestone said.

His comments came as McLaren held what was being viewed as a team rebuilding session after the chaos and anger that ripped through their normally disciplined ranks in Budapest. Neither Alonso nor Hamilton were available for their regular prerace interviews as they and the team held talks at a hotel in downtown Istanbul.

Apart from the problem of managing the competing aspirations of his drivers, Ron Dennis, the embattled McLaren principal, is also facing an FIA Court of Appeal hearing, scheduled for September 13, over the “spy” scandal concerning McLaren’s possession of a large dossier of Ferrari technical information.

Ecclestone, as a member of the World Motor Sport Council, was party to the original decision not to punish McLaren because there was insufficient evidence that they had used the Ferrari data. He believes that the Woking-based team look safe so long as the Italians do not deliver some sort of “killer blow”.

Ecclestone said: “Unless something new comes up, there’s not an awful lot one can do because you’ve got to catch the guy with the shooter in his hands, pulling the trigger.

“They [McLaren] can still be in trouble under the different sections in the rules where they should be in control of what goes on in the company, which is obvious – they could be in trouble there. But the big thing is, people would have to show that they were involved in the theft and they were using the material – that’s where they would be in big trouble.”