Entering the final two races of the 2008 Formula 1 World Championship season – beginning with the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai this weekend – Lewis Hamilton, Felipe Massa and Robert Kubica all still have a chance of lifting the drivers’ laurels…but which one of them will do so?

Who will win this year’s Formula One world championship?

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Nico Rosberg has said that intends to see out his current F1 contract with Williams, despite speculation linking him to rides elsewhere.

Nico Rosberg has all but confirmed that he will be staying with Williams next season, insisting that he still believes that the Grove squad can challenge Formula One’s frontrunners.

Despite having signed a deal late last year that ties him to Williams through to the end of 2009, the German has been at the centre of speculation linking him to a move away from the team at the end of the current campaign. While the prime destination for his services, McLaren, was ruled out when the Woking giant ‘re-signed’ Heikki Kovalainen for 2009, Rosberg’s future remains the focus of rumour with observers suggesting that remaining with Williams will only harm his career.

The 23-year old, however, insists that he is prepared to wait and see, claiming that he is happy to remain with Sir Frank and Patrick Head through to the end of his contract in the belief that Williams can pull itself out of its current slump.

The privateer started 2008 brightly, with Rosberg claiming a maiden F1 podium in the season-opener in Melbourne, but the campaign has been up and down since then, with Williams sinking to seventh in the constructors’ championship – just two points clear of Honda – while Rosberg is tied on individual points with rookie team-mate Kazuki Nakajima in a share of 13th place in the world standings.

“The podium in Australia was great, but that wasn’t the real picture,” he told GPWeek during F1’s summer break, “Since the beginning of the season, we just haven’t had the pace we needed, and we knew that was the case since Malaysia.”

Despite the frustrations of the season, however, Rosberg insists that he is happy at Williams, which he believes is a true ‘racing’ team.

“I feel very comfortable,” he continued, “I feel good, I’ve been with the team for a long time, I get on well with everybody, so it’s very nice. “Everybody feels racing within them, right down from the top with Frank and Patrick, and everybody is pushing to the maximum. They all want to win, [and] that’s something that not all the teams can have. It’s just that the car isn’t fast enough.”

Ferrari’s defending F1 World Champion Kimi Raikkonen comes in for harsh words of criticism following the latest in a line of off-colour performances in the Hungarian Grand Prix last weekend.

Kimi Raikkonen has come in for a scathing attack from the Italian media following another lacklustre performance in the Hungarian Grand Prix last weekend – being described variously as ‘a pale imitation of the driver of the past’ and ‘not the driver Ferrari needs’.

The defending Formula 1 World Champion has now not triumphed in seven races, putting the defence of his hard-won 2007 crown in distinct jeopardy, with both McLaren-Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa seeming to be in considerably better shape than the Finn as the 2008 campaign races towards its conclusion.

Since Raikkonen’s second – and thus far latest – victory of the season in Barcelona all the way back in April, the 28-year-old has notched up just 28 points, compared to the 42, 36 and 30 of title rivals Hamilton, Massa and Robert Kubica respectively.

Though he may have lucked into a rostrum finish with third place in Budapest, the 17-time grand prix winner failed to convince weekend-long, qualifying a lowly sixth and spending the first two-thirds of the race tucked up behind Fernando Alonso’s markedly slower Renault – a fact not lost on the notoriously merciless and fickle Italian press.

‘He seems a pale imitation of the driver of the past,’ blasted national sports newspaper Tuttosport. ‘This Raikkonen is not the driver that Ferrari needs. He needs to ask himself whether he really still has the desire.’

For his part, the erstwhile world championship leader has responded to claims that he is likely to hang up his F1 helmet at the end of the current campaign, second title in the bag or not.

“I never said anything like that,” he stressed. “Somebody made it up.”

There were rather warmer words, meanwhile, for Massa, who – against the odds – dominated the race around the Hungaroring, from his superbly aggressive pass all the way around the outside of pole-sitter Hamilton at the start to his cruel retirement with engine failure whilst in a commanding position a scant three laps from the chequered flag.