Sweden’s Henrik Stenson believes he is one good performance away from becoming European number one for the first time, but England’s Lee Westwood still has his eyes on securing a third such title.
Heading into today’s BMW Masters in Shanghai, the first of four events in the inaugural Final Series, Stenson holds a lead of £362,660 from Northern Ireland’s Graeme McDowell at the top of the Race to Dubai.
But with a first prize of £721,621 on offer at Lake Malaren and a total prize fund of almost £20million in the four events, Westwood, pictured below during his practice round yesterday, has not given up hope of overcoming a deficit of nearly £1million.
“It’s four big weeks coming up starting here at the BMW Masters,” said Stenson, who was second in the Open at Muirfield, third in the US PGA championship at Oak Hill and then won the Deutsche Bank championship and Tour championship to capture the £6.2million bonus for winning the FedEx Cup.
“There’s a lot of points and money up for grabs in these events. It’s only one top finish from any one of the guys or a couple of the guys behind me to catch me or move beyond me in the money list.
“So I’m just going to focus on my game and try to have some good weeks and hopefully I can get one really good week out of these four and that should hopefully give me a shot at the overall title by the time the four weeks have finished. I’m delighted with my season. It was the best even before winning the FedEx Cup. I had all those good finishes and a nice win.
“Of course, winning the Tour championship and winning the FedEx didn’t make it any worse.
“It’s quite nice to sit there at age 37 – I’m not old, old but I’m not young. It’s nice to have my best year at this point.
“I took some inspiration from my buddy Robert Karlsson.
“I think he had his best season winning the Order of Merit when he was around 40.” (actually 39).
Stenson has been struggling with a wrist injury. He said: “It was feeling quite bad for a while there but my physios managed to do some work and the movement came back and most of the pain is gone.
“It wasn’t a nice scenario to get problems with the wrist, starting a big stretch like I am.
“I’ve got my crew out here so they can treat it in the weeks to come and keep it under control, I hope.
“Hopefully it won’t bother me.”
Westwood has also had injury problems to contend with and admits he does not know whether he will be fresh or rusty after five weeks off.
The former world number one said: “At the end of the FedEx Cup series I had a bit of a bad back so I went home for five weeks and did a bit of rehab on that, plenty of gym work and some stretching and that’s back to normal now and I’m able to concentrate on the end of the year.
“It’s a big four tournaments coming up. I’m quite surprised actually. I have only played nine events on the European Tour this year and I still have a chance to win the money list. I am looking forward to it and finishing off strong.
“The focus is to play well in the last four tournaments and see what happens from there.
“They are massive tournaments with big prize funds so a win or a couple of wins can really shoot you up there.
“I think the Final Series is a good idea. They do it on the PGA Tour with the FedEx Cup and I think it’s something the European Tour had to do as well.
“Once everything is finished over there the players that play around the world can focus on this and you are guaranteed good fields for the final few events of the tour.
“Schedules work in different ways now so you can pick times off that are not necessarily right at the end of the year. The tour runs a lot longer in the year and this keeps everybody’s interest high.”