The Motorsports Ramblings Top 10 - 2009

It's become something of an annual tradition here at Motorsports Ramblings for me to produce an annual top 10 list of the best drivers in F1 each year, in the same vein as that which appears in Autocourse. As usual, my own list, if rather less definitive, is at least available a month or so ahead of theirs. Argue with my selections if you will...

10. Robert Kubica

It seems to me that the Pole has on-years and off-years, in alternation. In 2006, he arrived in the sport in a blaze of publicity, only to disappoint slightly in the admittedly less competitive 2007 BMW. He was my driver of the year in 2008, keeping himself in the title battle until the penultimate race in a BMW Sauber that by rights had no business fighting with Hamilton and Massa, but was strangely disappointing this year. I still think it possible that he's a talent in the same league as Alonso or Hamilton, but it's becoming harder to argue when he ends up being outpaced by Nick Heidfeld, as was the case much of the time this season.

Nonetheless, he makes my list because there were odd days, usually when the BMW was at its most competitive, when Kubica reminded us all why he's still regarded by some of us as worthy of being very special indeed. The BMW might have been reasonably competitive in the last rounds, but it had no business finishing up second in Brazil, and keeping Mark Webber's Red Bull under pressure, in spite of being down on revs owing to overheating concerns. Kubica got absolutely everything out of the car in Singapore to pick up but a single point, and only narrowly missed out on a podium in Belgium. With, admittedly, a lot of help from a fortunately timed safety car, he might even have won the opening race, at Melbourne, had he not collided with Vettel in the dying laps. In the end, he did enough to make my top 10, but there were too many days like his final race at Abu Dhabi, where he was anonymous and a poor second best to Nick Heidfeld, to warrant being placed any higher.

9. Nick Heidfeld

He's not one of the sport's more exciting characters. And he's never going to be World Champion, though if he ever gets himself in the right car, he would probably win races. This year, Nick Heidfeld, in his tenth season in Formula 1, and once again finding himself stuck in a very second-rate car, knuckled down and got about as much as anyone could be expected to from the BMW Sauber F1.09. There was a fair bit of luck involved in his second place at Malaysia, but his drives at Suzuka and Abu Dhabi were indicative of a man who got the very most out of the car. And even if Kubica was having a bit of an off-year, anyone who can outqualify the Pole 7 times and score more points must have been doing something right.

8. Mark Webber

It's taken 7 years, but the perennially unlucky Australian finally got himself into a race-winning car. Unfortunately, he also found himself up against the strongest team mate he has ever faced, and was living with the consequences of a broken leg and shoulder sustained in a winter cycling accident. He rarely looked quite as quick as Sebastian Vettel did, but there were occasions when he was very impressive indeed. His first win was one of the standout drives of the year - refusing to let a drive-through penalty get in the way of converting his Nurburgring pole into victory. He held his nerve, too, when Vettel messed up his starting advantage at Turkey.

All the same, it was an ever so slightly disappointing season from Mark. The last race, at Abu Dhabi, summed up his year. A solid, competent performance, in which he did well to defend his second place from Jenson Button in the late stages, but one in which he never seemed to have the electrifying pace of his young wunderkind of a team mate.


7. Rubens Barrichello

He lost it in the first part of the season. Yes, he had more than his fair share of whatever misfortune was going at Brawn this year, but the blunt truth is that, until the British Grand Prix, he was simply not on Jenson Button's pace. He actually outqualified the Briton 10-7 over the year, but it was his race pace which seemed to be ever so slightly lacking.

He was beaten by Button at Spain and at the Nurburgring, because he simply couldn't turn in the series of near-qualifying laps that Button could. One wonders whether Barrichello, who is by some distance the oldest driver on the grid now, simply lacks the fitness of some of his younger rivals. He certainly seemed to be struggling physically with the g-forces of the tough, anti-clockwise Interlagos circuit, though whether it affected his pace was harder to judge. On the other hand, there were days when Barrichello was spell-binding. Beating Button at his home turf at Silverstone seemed to mark a turning-point and soon after came his first win in five years at Valencia, where he was pushed to the limit by Hamilton and came out ahead. Then there was Monza, where he held his nerve in a tense battle with his team mate to take what might turn out to be his final race victory, and what was certainly one of his finest.

6. Nico Rosberg

Assessing Nico Rosberg's performance this year was incredibly difficult, for the simple reason that it's just not clear how good the car he had underneath him was. Nonetheless, the statistics show that he scored all 34.5 of Williams' points this year. Exactly how much of an achievement this was rather depends on how quick his team mate Kazuki Nakajima was. Was one Williams being propelled further up the grid than it really belonged by a very gifted driver, or was the other underperforming at the hands of a very average one?

We can't know the answer for sure, but what was apparent was that Rosberg, in marked contrast with last year, appeared to do a very solid, consistent job with a car which, on the face of it, was nowhere near the pace of the front-runners, and in so doing, racked enough points to single-handedly run BMW Sauber very close for 6th in the Constructors title battle. In contrast with his 2008 season, there were few mistakes you could point to so it is a shame that his one glaring faux-pas of the season came at Singapore, when his transgressing the white line on the exit from the pits after his first scheduled stop came on the one weekend when he looked in with an outside shot of victory. Up to then, Rosberg fils was doing a very good job of conjuring up memories of his father, pushing a Williams right to the limit around a tight wall-lined street circuit. Next year, he'll be at Brawn, and we might get a firm picture of exactly how quick he really is.

5. Kimi Raikkonen

Kimi Raikkonen only really seemed to come into his own when Felipe Massa was forced out of action by his Hungarian GP qualifying accident, but he rose admirably to the challenge of becoming the clear team leader at Ferrari, and left me wondering whether the supposedly robotic and unemotional Finn was more affected by the team's affection for Felipe Massa than we might have thought.

His second place at Hungary was the beginning of a run of five consecutive podium finishes, in a car which Ferrari engineers seemed to think didn't really belong there. Luca Badoer was clearly out of his depth in the other car, but even so, Giancarlo Fisichella, an experienced racer who had taken a podium with Force India in Belgium, wasn't able to get the Ferrari into the points in his five races with the team. Raikkonen's win in Belgium, in a car which was probably not the best in the field, showcased the man's improvisational genius, taking full advantage of his KERS system to grab the lead before Fisichella's Force India could get away, and then using it to stay there.

The end of the year might have been a bit dispiriting by contrast, but another podium in Brazil might well have been on the cards had he not lost time in the pits after Mark Webber chopped across him and took off his front wing on the opening lap. And the Ferrari team didn't appear to expect a fourth place in Japan, where the car never really looked close to the pace. Apparently he won't be with us next year, and his post-race interviews won't be missed, but his driving, at its inspired best, certainly will be.


4. Fernando Alonso

There was just one podium for the Spanish double champion this year. But let's not forget that he was driving a car so uncompetitive that neither of his team mates, Nelson Piquet Jr or Romain Grosjean could get so much as a sniff of a points finish with. That he got the car on pole at Hungary, and into the top-10 shootout in qualifying 11 times, when his team mates never once made the top 10 run off, showed the difference he was making. That Fernando Alonso finished the year with 26 points on the board was testament to his incredible tenacity, and the simple truth that he is one of the two or three best drivers in the sport right now.

Highlights? Well the pole position in Hungary might have owed a little too much to a rather silly fuel strategy, but the drive to 3rd in Singapore - in a car which his team mate couldn't get off the back row of the grid, was remarkable, at one of the few tracks on the F1 calendar which still gives a driver real scope to overcome the limitations of his machinery. And then there was the incredible wheel-to-wheel battle with Lewis Hamilton, for lap after lap, at Silverstone. So it was all over 15th place? That circuit's all about aerodynamic downforce, and on that day, neither the Renault nor the Mclaren had any. But they are racers and boy, did they race...


3. Sebastian Vettel

It's easy to forget, sometimes, that Sebastian Vettel is just 22, and was in only his second full season of Formula 1. He took four wins on his way to second place in the World Championship this year, and generally outpaced Mark Webber - not something that any of the Australian's previous team mates could ever claim. In so doing, he went a long way to living up to the his reputation as one of the very fastest men in the sport. His win in very difficult conditions in China, after only the bare minimum of running on the Saturday, was one of the drives of the season.

The thing is, but for a series of errors - some large and some small, he might have been able to win the title for Red Bull. The crash at Melbourne cost him at least six points, and the accident in Monaco probably another four. Then there was the first lap mistake while leading in Turkey which probably cost him a second place. Add them up, and you get a total of 12 points. And Button won the title by 11.

To be fair, though, Vettel suffered rather more than his rival from mechanical woes. There were engine failures at both Hungary and Valencia, and more points went begging when he got caught out by the freak rain storm at Malaysia. For a man in only his second season, and even taking account the way Lewis Hamilton has rewritten the form-book in terms of what it is reasonable to expect from young F1 stars, it was nonetheless a very impressive performance from the 22 year old man from Heppenheim. If Adrian Newey and Red Bull can maintain the momentum, I wouldn't bet against Vettel coming back even stronger in 2010.

2. Jenson Button

It could be argued that Jenson Button backed into this year's World Title, cruising and collecting. But let's not forget how it was that he got into a position to be able to do so. In the opening races of the season, when the Brawn enjoyed its greatest margin of superiority over the rest of the field, he was utterly imperious. Thereafter, it was largely a matter of keeping his head down, racking up the points and making sure that he didn't get caught up in silly, needless accidents. In contrast with, for example, Sebastian Vettel, it is very hard to point to any instances where Button threw away points through driver error. Yes, he seemed to struggle in qualifying, and sometimes, for example, at Valencia, this had a serious knock-on effect on his eventual race result, but he did his best to make up for this limitation by carving out a reputation as one of the best overtakers in the business.

His drive to the title in Brazil was typical of this. On his way from 15th to 5th, he dispatched with Nakajima, Grosjean, Buemi and Kobayashi in memorable style, giving the lie to the notion that F1 is entirely impossible. Back at the beginning of the season, too, his first lap moves on Vettel and Hamilton proved crucial in ensuring he eventually finished up winning, ahead of the German. In the end, he misses out on the top spot only because I can't help thinking he made much heavier work than necessary of sewing up the title, after opening up a huge lead in the championship early on. Next year, he faces an even bigger challenge, when he will go up against Lewis Hamilton in equal equipment.

1. Lewis Hamilton

So he only won two races... But frankly, this year's Mclaren was not a race winning car. Team mate Heikki Kovalainen never managed to get it near the podium. Somebody seemed to forget to tell Hamilton though. He picked up two victories, there would almost certainly have been a third had his brakes not failed in Abu Dhabi, and wound up fifth in the World Championship. It looked so unlikely early on in the season, when the Mclaren was the thick end of 2 seconds off the pace.

Yes, his year was not without mistakes. There was the qualifying accident in Monaco that put paid to any chance of his upsetting the formbook on the street circuit he made his own last year, and then there was the last lap crash at Monza whilst making a final effort to overhaul Jenson Button for second place. But this year's Mclaren was a car he had to push right to the limit, and occasionally beyond, if he was going to get a result out of it. Had he been in the running for the world title, and at the wheel of a dominant car, these would have been silly errors, but in the circumstances, they were indicative of a fierce competitive nature that refused to accept meekly the way the cards had fallen for him this year.

He matured too, as a man capable of providing focus and technical direction to a team floundering with a troublesome car. Where some drivers might have let their heads go down or lost interest, Hamilton never appeared to give less than his all. The only real blot on his copybook occurred outside the car. His drive to 3rd place in Melbourne was supremely impressive in a car that had no business being there, but his outright lies to the stewards about whether he had deliberately slowed to let Jarno Trulli past were not befitting of a World Champion, and his attempts to shift the blame onto the team afterwards were without excuse. If the team had instructed him to lie, he was, quite simply, still under a duty to be honest with the stewards. Still, I can't help thinking Britain's newest World Champion could be in for a hell of a tough time next year...

The rest...

First things first. Felipe Massa belongs on this list. Or he would do if I hadn't taken the difficult decision to exclude him in order to make things easier, given that he missed the last 7 of the year's 17 Grands Prix. Until his season-ending accident in Hungary, he had usually been the quicker man at Ferrari and his podium at the Nurburgring, immediately before Hungary, suggests that he might have led the Scuderia's late-season revival of their fortunes.

An argument could be made for inclusion of either of the Toyota drivers in this year's top 10. Jarno Trulli continued his career-long habit of blowing hot and cold. He was on the podium three times during the course of the year, and his drive to second, beating Hamilton, at Suzuka, was as good a drive as anyone managed this year. But then, there were the days like his anonymous run to 12th in Singapore, where his team mate Timo Glock took second. Glock looked steady, and didn't deserve to be pushed aside for the final two races (I never entirely believed the claims that he was unfit to race following his Suzuka practice accident) but appears to be a solid number 2 in the Kovalainen mould, rather than a future star.

Sebastien Buemi acquitted himself reasonably well at Toro Rosso, and finished off Sebastien Bourdais' career in the process, but there was no single stand-out moment that suggested the first Swiss driver since Gregor Foitek is a future star. He does, however, deserve credit for picking up points at a truly treacherous Chinese Grand Prix in only his third race, on a day when many more experienced hands fell off the road. Jaime Alguersuari perhaps did as much as could be expected from an inexperienced teenager thrown in at the deep end mid-season, but I see nothing to indicate he's anything special, and the team might have picked up more points by sticking with Bourdais.

He certainly did better than Romain Grosjean managed at Renault. The Franco-Swiss racer had built up a reputation for being fast but erratic in F3 and GP2. In F1, he merely looked erratic. He simply made too many mistakes. He might be better than he was made to look alongside Alonso, but I doubt he'll get another chance. An unforgiving world, F1... Nelson Piquet Jr. did nothing to suggest he deserved the second chance he got at Renault and his decision to spill the beans about Crashgate following his sacking after Hungary smacked more of vengeance than whistle-blowing.

Giancarlo Fisichella had a final flourish with Force India at the Belgian Grand Prix - we'll pass over the fact, for now, that a driver with greater racecraft might have kept Raikkonen back after the restart, and brought the former Jordan team its first win under Vijay Mallya, but ended his career on a low when he went to Maranello to substitute for Felipe Massa. The less said about Luca Badoer the better. He got the chance of a life-time, too late in the day perhaps, and succeeded only in going from might-have-been to never-was. Fisichella's erstwhile team mate at Force India, Adrian Sutil, was hard to assess. There were times, such as in the wet in China, when he got the car far further up the field than it had any business being, but all too often he got caught up in silly little accidents. And if he was really quick, why was it that he was so comprehensively outpaced by team mate Fisichella at Spa?

Of the late-season substitutions, Vitantonio Liuzzi fared better than most. He was generally just about shaded by Sutil, but might have scored a podium had his gearbox not broken at Monza. At Singapore he looked out of his depth, but elsewhere, he was pretty respectable, and deserves a proper go, with a bit of winter testing to get him up to speed, next year. Kamui Kobayashi, who, after winning the GP2 Asia series last winter, went nowhere fast in the summer series and looked set for the scrapheap, was mighty impressive when he was given a couple of races in a Toyota. In Brazil, he did a good job of trying to sabotage Button's title hopes, by keeping the Briton behind him for lap after lap, and in the final race, he went one better by passing him on-track during the pit-stops on his way to 6th. It would be a shame if, with Toyota's withdrawal, he has to go back to making sushi in his father's restaurant...

Every Dog Has Its Day - F1 2009 In Review - Part Two

Only Brawn, Red Bull, Mclaren and Ferrari actually won races this year. Yet the strangest thing about this season, in many ways, what marked it out from the 25 or so I've seen before, was that almost all of the remaining six teams on the grid had days when they looked as though they were in contention, and with a fair wind, they might have joined the winners' circle.

Perhaps the strongest of the six was the now departed Toyota team. It is ironic that the German-Japanese squad have had the rug pulled from under them by the parent company just as they were beginning to look like a serious racing team, as opposed to an enormously expensive white elephant. They made a number of very good calls this year. They were one of three teams to hit upon the double-diffuser concept from the start, and this put them in good stead in the early part of the season. They were also the only manufacturer team not to divert time and money into a KERS programme that they couldn't make work. The team locked out the front row at the third round in Bahrain, and I still wonder if they might have been in with a shout of victory of they had played a tactically smarter game - and in particular had they not put the wrong tyres on both cars at the first stop.

For much of the mid-season, the team appeared to slip into anonymity, struggling to make the tyres work and scoring little after Trulli's podium in Turkey. It was perhaps during this long, disappointing summer, the nadir of which came with a truly embarrassing performance at Monaco where neither driver could get sufficient heat into the tyres and one-time Monte Carlo winner Trulli was left ambling round at the back, seconds of the pace, that the decision was taken by the Toyota board to throw in the towel. If so, the late season return to form is all the more ironic. Timo Glock took an impressive second in Singapore after Rosberg and Vettel eliminated themselves from contention with penalties for pitlane offences and, Jarno Trulli, who had been nowhere in Singapore, settled the score at Toyota's home race (albeit on a track owned by Honda) at Suzuka, with another second place. In the end, it was a case of close, but no cigar for the team though. This year, they came closer than they ever have to taking a maiden race victory, but they leave the sport winless.

The same cannot quite be said of BMW-Sauber. Nonetheless, Mario Thiessen's decision to abandon development of the 2008 car to concentrate on a 2009 title assault now looks mightily presumptuous. It was never quite clear what was wrong with the 2009 BMW. There were times when it ran quite respectably. Aided by luck with the timing of the safety car, Robert Kubica looked in with a shot of victory at the opening race in Melbourne before he locked horns with Sebastian Vettel 3 laps from the end. Nick Heidfeld, who showed rather better relative to his much heralded team mate than he had last year, picked up a lucky second place a week later in Malaysia, and did a good job of picking up the minor points in a car that appeared capable of no more. There were days when it appeared Robert Kubica wasn't really interested, although it may only have been that he was less able to adapt to the 09 BMW's foibles than Heidfeld, who has rather greater experience of driving 'difficult' cars. That said, Kubica's drive to second in the Brazilian Grand Prix was one of the highlights of the year for me.

Unlike Toyota, who always struck me as a rather soulless team, devoid of real character, I'll miss BMW. Yes, they were ultimately just the plaything of a large corporation, but they done a good job of turning the Sauber team into a front-running squad, until things went wrong this year. That they didn't do the right thing by the Swiss team, failing to sign the Concord Agreement and selling the assets to shady investment company Qadbak rather than handing it back to Peter Sauber, leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth. A shame, because the building blocks were in place to put together a really first-rate racing team.

Renault, in contrast with Toyota and BMW, appear for now to be sticking with F1. From being, at least in terms of race wins, the most successful of the manufacturer teams last year, they slipped well back down the order in 2009. It is hard to assess exactly how bad the 2009 Renault was, because it was effectively a one-car team. All of the squad's 29 points came from their departing number 1 driver Fernando Alonso. It is hard to know whether this was a case of Alonso dragging the car places it didn't really belong, or whether Romain Grosjean and Nelson Piquet simply weren't getting the job done. Probably it was a mix of the two. There was a pole position in Hungary, achieved by running ridiculously light, and a podium in Singapore, but other than that it was a barren year for the Anglo-French squad. They made the news only when the 'crashgate' story broke in the aftermath of the sacking of Nelson Piquet Jr.

Given the $100m fine that Mclaren got for unauthorised use of Ferrari data by one of its employees a couple of years back, the deliberate arranging of an accident to attempt to fix a Grand Prix seemed to be remarkably lightly punished all told. But then perhaps the FIA decided that now was not the time to start driving teams out of the sport. And arguably the chief beneficiary of the move, Fernando Alonso, got off lightest of all. It seems hard to believe he would have run the strategy he did in Singapore had he not had some inkling what was planned. Flavio Briatore bore the brunt of the FIA's wrath. He'll probably be missed about as much as Toyota F1.

Williams started the year in the best form they have shown for several seasons, another team to benefit from spotting the 'double diffuser' loophole in the 2009 aero-regs from the outset. Sadly, the cards never seemed to fall their way. Potential podiums in both the opening races were lost to the timing of the safety car and a bungled pit stop in Australia, and to the timing of the opening of the heavens in Malaysia. The team flattered to deceive to some extent, usually topping the timesheets in free practice, only to slip back down the order when it counted on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

All the same, the team were probably stronger than their 7th place in the Constructor's Championship might suggest. Only once, at Singapore, did they look as if they might be within striking distance of winning a race, although Lewis Hamilton probably had Rosberg covered even before Rosberg effectively eliminated himself from proceedings by tripping over the white line on the pitlane exit. However, there were other races, notably Brazil and Malaysia, where car and driver looked much stronger than the final points tally suggests. As with Renault, Williams were held back by the fact that, in a tight and competitive field, they relied exclusively on Rosberg to pick up points. Kazuki Nakajima might be better than I thought him to be based on his GP2 performances, and certainly he was much closer to Rosberg on pace than Grosjean or Piquet was to Alonso, but in the end, he just wasn't quite quick enough to merit a place in F1. With Toyota's departure, his F1 career is probably over, unless he can use his connections to get a drive with one of the new teams next year.

The single biggest upset of the year, perhaps the greatest shock of the decade, came when Giancarlo Fisichella grabbed pole at Spa - not by running a silly fuel load - but by plain outpacing everyone else in a Force India. The team formerly known as Jordan were making steady progress towards the back of the field up to that point, sometimes frightening Toyota and BMW on their off-days, but until that weekend in the Ardennes, they had never actually scored any points. Yes, Sutil wasn't far off at Silverstone, and he impressed mightily in the rain in China until he flew off the road a few laps from the end, but the best you could say, really, was that while still backmarkers, they were much less far off the back of the pack.

Then Fisichella grabbed pole at Spa, and finished second. He was faster than eventual race winner Kimi Raikkonen too - it was really only the Ferrari's KERS equipment and, to be fair, probably Raikkonen's superior race-craft, which enabled the Italian team to take the victory. To prove it was no fluke, a week later, both Force Indias ran top-5 at Monza too. The VJM002 was clearly well suited to fast, open tracks. To judge by both the car's speed-trap times and it's remarkable fuel efficiency, which was better than that achieved by either of the other Mercedes-powered teams by some margin, it appears that the crucial advantage they had was tremendous aerodynamic efficiency. At tracks like Singapore and Abu Dhabi, where mechanical grip through slow and medium speed corners was crucial, they remained also-rans, but their late-season form was nonetheless a revelation.

Last, and in most respects, least, there was Toro Rosso. There was no repeat of the giant-killing performances of 2008 for the Faenza team, and it was a little hard to believe that they were running the same basic car as the Red Bull team which was in the running for the title. I suspect a large part of the explanation is that they simply didn't have the drivers to get the job done. Sebastian Buemi did a solid, competent job for a 20 year old in his first season, but it was hard to assess how quick he really was. Should he be judged by his pace relative to Sebastien Bourdais, who never seemed to get to grips with F1 at all, and relative to his still less experienced team mate Jaime Alguersuari? Or would a fairer comparison be with the 'A team' Red Bulls?

In what was a very competitive year, it could be argued that Toro Rosso did well to pick up eight points over the course of the season with what is by some distance the smallest team on the grid. Their approach to driver selection continues to baffle me. Jaime Alguersuari might be a British F3 champion, but his performances in the Renault World Series were hardly such as to mark him out as anything particularly special. If racking up points was the objective, then Takuma Sato or Anthony Davidson would surely have made more sense. On the other hand, Alguersuari is Spanish and well-connected, so it's possible than sponsorship concerns may have driven the decision, especially if Red Bull are still intending to sell the team. He did just enough, in my book, to merit a full season next year. In the end, Toro Rosso didn't have a bad season, especially in comparison with the team from which they were born, Minardi. The trouble is, everyone else, even Force India, had a better one...

End Note: Shell got in touch with me recently regarding promotion of a competition offering bloggers and aspiring writers the chance to establish a career as a motoring journalist. Those who know me will be aware that this is strictly a hobby for me - Ten years ago, it might have been right up my street, but these days I'm well settled in a job as a policy-wonk in Government and have seen too many people end up disillusioned when they mix work and pleasure. You, however, might feel differently, and if you do, you might want to take a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXYNn1ZxTc&feature=player_embedded
http://www.writeintogear.co.uk/shellv-power/,

From Zeroes to Heroes - F1 2009 in Review - Part One

Part One - The New Stars and the Old Guard

What a strange, strange year it was. By season's end, we had got used to watching Brawn and Red Bull fighting it out for victories, but this time last year, if you had told me that the constructors and drivers titles would be fought out between a team that had never so much as won a Grand Prix before and one that didn't yet even exist in its current form, I wouldn't have taken you very seriously. And never mind this time last year, on the eve of the F1 season, the Guardian's F1 Season Guide declared that Jenson Button had about as much chance of winning a Grand Prix in the 2009 Brawn as he did with the VW Camper van he keeps at home.

For as long as I have been following the sport, it's been the rule that Grand Prix teams do not suddenly emerge from the wilderness of the lower reaches of the midfield and start challenging for World Championships. They slowly creep towards competitiveness and respectability, over a period of years, as Toleman/Benetton did between 1984 and 1994. Or else they gradually fall into decline, as with Lotus, which went from winning championships in the 1970s to ignominy and, finally, collapse, in the 1990s.

A number of factors came together this year with the result that things were a little different in 2009. Firstly, the most significant rules change since the banning of slick tyres in 1998, in fact perhaps the most significant rewrite of the technical rules since the banning of ground effect before the 1983 season, meant that the inbuilt advantage that the leading teams had from refining the same basic designs over many years - of always starting from a higher base than anyone else - was gone.

Secondly, gone are the days when, aside from a few big teams at the very front - Mclaren, Williams, Ferrari and Benetton/Renault, the rest were mere bit-part players, content to make up the numbers. All ten of the teams on this year's grid are large, serious operations with designs on winning races and even titles. Force India and Toro Rosso are small only relative to the size of such as Toyota and Mclaren. They have large factories and staff numbers well into three figures. A far cry from the days when the back end of the F1 grid was made up of such operations as the tiny AGS, who, in their early days, ran with a staff of just 7, operating from the filling station owned by team principal Henri Julien. The rules change provided a golden opportunity for the likes of previously struggling Honda to steal a march on their more established rivals. Whatever they might claim publicly, they are probably still kicking themselves back in Tokyo that they ducked the challenge.

It begs an intriguing question, though. If Honda had stayed in the game, would they, and Jenson Button, now be World Champions? On the face of it, if Brawn GP could do it, with no winter testing, after having to lay off many of their staff in order to make ends meet, and in spite of the last minute compromises required to shoehorn Mercedes' V8 into a car designed around the Honda power plant, then there is every chance that a full works Honda effort might have dominated in the manner of Ferrari in the early years of the decade, or Mclaren in the late 1980s.

But, but... If the car had been present at the earlier winter tests, might that have given rival teams a heads-up as to the key elements of the design that ensured that in the early races, it was as much as half a second a lap quicker than anything else - in particular their creative interpretation of the rules governing diffusers? After all, Brawn never looked quite the force they had been in the second half of the season, as more and more teams brought their own take on the double-diffuser concept along. And might the last minute change from the Honda V8 - widely reckoned the least powerful engine in 2008, to Mercedes, generally reckoned the strongest unit, have been a net advantage, even allowing for the butchering of the chassis required to fit it in to the Brawn? After all, while the differences between the performances of the engines is probably not great in this rev-restricted, 'performance equalised' era, it might have been enough to blunt Brawn's competitive edge and ensure they were scrabbling around for podiums, rather than winning everything in sight in the opening races of the season. And how much did Rubens Barrichello's vast experience of developing and setting up a car help? More than once, Button is reported to have gone down a cul-de-sac and ended up copying his team mate's set-up wholesale. Word was, before their sudden departure, Honda wanted one Bruno Senna in the car...

We'll never know, but that it all worked out must be no small credit to the genius - for once surely the right word - of Ross Brawn. It is said that he took the Honda job in part because he was miffed at having been passed over for the job of replacing Todt at Ferrari but surely he never thought that it would end in him winning the world title with a car bearing his own name?

It was his arch-rival Adrian Newey's team which ran him closest in the battle for the titles. It's a rivalry which stretches back over nearly 20 years now - Newey's Williams against Brawn's Benettons, Newey's Mclarens versus Brawn's Ferraris, and now Brawn's eponymous team were chased by Newey's Red Bulls. Red Bull were almost certainly another team to benefit from the major rules changes over the winter, even Newey having been unable to overcome the inbuilt head start Ferrari and Mclaren appeared to have under the old rules.

Had the decision regarding the legality of double diffusers gone the other way at the start of the year (remember that? quite a storm at the time as I recall...) I rather suspect that nobody would have got close to the Red Bulls this year. As it was, Newey's car was designed in such a way as to make it very difficult to simply 'bolt a double diffuser' on, and only when they produced the beginnings of a solution at Silverstone did their season really take off. As a generalisation, it appeared that on aerodynamic downforce, there was nothing to touch the Red Bulls by mid-season, but that they still struggled for pace through the slow and medium-speed corners in comparison with Brawn, and perhaps, Mclaren.

Nonetheless, a team which went into the season never having won a race ended up with 6 wins on the board, and kept themselves in the running for both titles until the penultimate race. They might have run Brawn still closer had they not been hampered by Renault engines which appeared neither as powerful nor as reliable as the Mercedes units in the Brawns. Mateschitz and Newey might ponder too, whether Vettel might have been World Champion had he not thrown away points with silly mistakes in Australia and Monaco. Probably he still wouldn't quite have outscored Button, but who knows...

Behind Red Bull and Brawn came the two teams which had fought a titanic battle for the previous year's championships. That very fight might have been a part of the explanation for their falling short of the absolute pace this year. Such was the intensity of the development war between them last year, that they couldn't direct as much development time to their '09 cars. They still ended up third and fourth in the constructors championship this year, and were the only other teams to win Grands Prix. One wouldn't bet against a reversion to the status quo ante next year.

Mclarenstarted the year in real trouble, perhaps even further from the pace than they had been with the 'problem child' MP4/19 in 2004. There was turmoil off-track too when the storm in a teacup that was 'liegate' threatened to seriously destabilise the team's season. With no testing allowed, and with a car that was going on for 2 seconds off the pace, it could easily have been a truly miserable season for the Woking time. Yet, thanks in part to access to the best simulation tools in the business, and probably in no small part to having maybe the out and out fastest driver on the grid on their books, the team turned things around enough to pick up two Grand Prix victories [add in note on cons. title pos] and in so doing, became the first team to win with a KERS-equipped car.

Mclaren and Ferrari were the only teams to stick with KERS throughout the whole season. Whether the weight penalty and design-compromises forced by the system were such as to negate any performance advantage it offered, or whether it just so happened that the best sorted chassis happened not to be so equipped, was never entirely clear. With an agreement between the teams not to run KERS in 2010, we are unlikely to find out any time soon, but I'd be surprised if we have seen the last of KERS.

There were times when it seemed that Mclaren was suffering for not having a number 2 driver able to get near Hamilton's pace. Rather than settling into the role this year, Kovalainen was if anything less competitive relative to his team mate than he had been last year. While Hamilton was rarely off the podium in the latter part of the season Kovalainen never got on it. Whether he'll keep his job at Mclaren remains to be seen...

The same was true, only more so, of Ferrari after Massa was put out of action by head injuries sustained in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix. While Raikkonen won the Belgian Grand Prix, the Finn seemingly having been put on this earth for the purpose of going quickly round Spa, neither Badoer nor Fisichella succeeded in so much as scoring a point for the team [check]. In contrast with Mclaren, Ferrari didn't seem to improve much over the course of the season. They started the year fighting for the minor points, and broadly, that's how they finished. Whether the car was quicker or slower than it would have been without KERS, the system played a crucial part in securing their only win. There was no doubt that Fisichella's Force India was quicker round Spa, but the KERS button was enough to ensure that, with an identical fuel strategy, there was no way that he could find a way past Raikkonen.

For all that the team seem to lack some of the hard-nosed discipline of the Schumacher/Todt/Brawn era (surely they wouldn't have roped in Luca Badoer) I see no signes of an early-90s style collapse at Ferrari. With Fernando Alonso heading to the Scuderia, and with the focus switching relatively early to the 2010 car - where, though the rules appear to be relatively stable, the ban on refuelling may result in the need for fairly radical changes - one wouldn't bet against a return to form for the Scuderia. And who's most likely to take the fight to them if they do? Well Hamilton looked pretty awesome in qualifying in Abu Dhabi didn't he. ...

(I've split this into two parts owing to sheer length, soreness of fingers and uh, a feeling of idleness. Next week - the departing manufacturers, and the rest...)

Loeb Makes it Six from Six

One week after Jenson Button claimed the F1 title, another World Championship went to the wire down in the forests of Wales last weekend, when Mikko Hirvonen went head to head with Sebastien Loeb for the World Rally Championship. In the end, Hirvonen fell at the final hurdle, dropping out of contention when he damaged the bonnet on his Ford Focus WRC on the penultimate stage, costing him just over a minute. And so Sebastien Loeb extended his record run of consecutive world titles to six.

I had been paying only the scantest of attention to what had been happening in the world of rallying this year - only when the digital TV transmitters were changed and I found myself able to pick up Dave for the first time did I start paying attention again. When I was last taking notice, Sebastien Loeb had won all five of the opening rounds of the World Championship, and I figured that if he could win in the snows of Norway, there wasn't any realistic chance of a challenger emerging over the remainder of the season. Miko Hirvonen had, to be fair, been doing a very good job of keeping Loeb honest in points table terms. In those opening rounds, only in Argentina, when he was put out by an engine failure, was he not on the podium. Nonetheless, if Loeb was winning on tarmac, on gravel, and on snow, there seemed little realistic prospect that Hirvonen would be able to do anything to reel him in during the second half of the season.

It didn't work out that way. Amazingly, Loeb didn't win a rally for nearly six months, and after five straight wins came five straight defeats. It started in Sardinia. In the days when the Rally Italia was an all-tarmac affair, I doubt anyone could have touched Loeb, but as a mixed tarmac-gravel event, Jari-Matti Latvala dominated from the start. Loeb was hampered with punctures and ended up finishing a distant fourth, behind Petter Solberg in a privately entered and rather elderly Citroen Xsara WRC. Then came crashes both in Greece and Poland, a straightforward defeat to Hirvonen in the Finn's home rally, a time penalty which cost him victory in Australia for running unhomologated anti-roll bars, all of which meant that when Loeb reversed put the form book back on its head by winning the Rally Catalunya last month, he was still one point shy of Ford's Hirvonen in the title race.

With six wins to Hirvonen's four, though, Loeb only needed to tie Hirvonen on points in order to retain his crown, and so a potentially thrilling finale was set up. Each had simply to beat the other to win the title. There was no room for team tactics, gamesmanship, or other nonsense of the kind which rather seems to have infected rallying of late. Normally, in a straight fight, it would be a very brave man who bet against Loeb, and I've never seen Hirvonen as being in quite the same class to be honest. But, but... If there was anywhere, Finland aside, where Hirvonen might be able to beat Loeb in a straight fight, it must surely be the sodden, muddy, foggy forests of Wales. Loeb has made no secret of the fact that he's never felt entirely at home on such stages, whereas for Hirvonen they are perhaps the closest thing on the WRC calendar this year to the forest stages of Finland which he dominated in August.

In the end, Loeb led from start to finish, but his winning margin of over a minute was a deceptive. While he went into the final day with a 30 second lead, Loeb found himself under attack from Hirvonen over the final stages, and with two stages to go, the Ford driver had cut his advantage down to 18s. Then, trying perhaps a mite too hard, Hirvonen landed heavily on a jump, damaged his radiator, and lost the best part of a minute on the stage when he had to stop to allow his co-driver to rip the offending piece of bodywork from the car. And so the way was clear for Loeb to go one better than Michael Schumacher and score his sixth consecutive World Title.

Unfortunately for Loeb, I doubt his achievements can be seen as being of quite the same order as those of Schumacher. The sad truth is that the state of rallying in the latter part of the decade has been such that Loeb has faced relatively little in the way of real opposition. Since Subaru first went off the rails and then withdrew from the WRC, Loeb's only competition has come from the Ford team, and usually only from one of its drivers at a time. The lack of more than a handful of works drives means that this year, there have never really been more than three or four contenders for victory (four only if you believe than Dani Sordo would be allowed to beat Loeb, even if he were capable). When one compares the current state of the WRC with the time when the likes of Makinen, McRae, Sainz, Burns, Gronholm and yes, at the very end of this era, a young Loeb, were going for the title it's sad just how far it has fallen.

As a result, there simply aren't the places for promising young junior drivers to be given
seat time in a pukka WRC car. Yes, there is the second-string Stobart Ford team, and the Citroen Junior Squad, but if these were really concerned with bringing on young talent, rather than generating revenue for the works teams, there would surely be places for Kris Meeke, Jan Kopecky and Per-Gunnar Andersson ahead of such as Henning Solberg, Matthew Wilson, Yvgeny Novikov and Conrad Rautenbach (whose money, it seems, may come from a particularly unsavoury source.)

I half wonder if Sebastien Loeb's apparent dip in form in the middle part of this year was indicative of the fact that even he was beginning to get bored by life in the WRC. He told L'Equipe that he was interested in replacing Sebastien Bourdais at Toro Rosso, and had tested a year old Red Bull fairly competitively the previous Winter. In the end, I suspect that it was only his lack of pace in a GP2 test earlier in the month, where he ended up the slowest of all, that put paid to his hopes of driving in the final round at Abu Dhabi this weekend. On this, I think the FIA were right. Loeb might be one of the most talented drivers in the world, but he has relatively little experience of race driving, and still less of single seater racing. As Luca Badoer demonstrated earlier this year, being decently competitive in an F1 car requires rather more than a basic familiarity with the car, and Loeb would almost certainly have succeeded only in embarassing himself. What the FIA should be concentrating on, is ensuring that the World Rally Championship is competitive enough in future than its stars feel no need for such distractions...

Button: 10th Champion at the 10th Attempt

About the first piece I ever wrote on the subject of motorsport, for the now long-defunct Parc Ferme Magazine, was an article asking whether the young Jenson Button had been catapulted into Formula 1 before he was really ready, and if in the long term, his early stardom might do more harm than good for his career.

It was a long time ago, now that I think about it. I remember having a rather long debate about what I had written with a guest at the launch party for a dotcom start-up I had become involved in - so yes, for all that it doesn't feel that way to me, Jenson Button's been around in F1 long enough that his entry into the sport coincided with the dotcom boom.

Ten years later, Button had become the tenth British driver to win the Formula One World Championship (unlike the aforementioned dotcom, which went the way of all flesh about a year and a half on from the launch party). Whether that was far more than I ever thought he would achieve, or whether he took far longer to nail the title than he might have done, I can't quite make my mind up. So did history prove me wrong when I said he came into the sport too early? Or did my younger self have a point?

Truth be told, Button's first season in Formula 1, at Williams, went rather well, all told. Team mate Ralf Schumacher scored more points, but had the advantage of being in his fourth season in the sport. Button, who had just a single season of F3 to his name before he got the call from Sir Frank, was usually slightly shadowed by the younger Schumacher, but what was interesting were the flashes of exceptional pace that he showed. The third place on the grid at Spa, or his third row start at Suzuka, a circuit he had never been to before in his life (and this, remember, some years before advanced simulation tools would make life rather easier for newcomers).

Then it all went wrong. Jenson got the drive at Williams, at least in part, because the team had precipitously parted with Alex Zanardi, had Ralf Schumacher on long-term contract, and Juan Montoya lined up to join them in a year's time. In short, they needed a driver for one year and one year only - and they hired the relatively unknown Button for because none of the established stars would be interested in such a deal. The next year, he wound up with Benetton, which was in the process of being taken over by Renault, and the 2001 Benetton was possibly the worst machine ever to have come out of the Enstone factory.

And Button floundered. Given a good, quick car, he showed well in 2000, but it seemed he simply lacked the experience to know where to begin with the desperately underpowered 2001 Benetton, which was running the earliest iteration of Renault's extreme-wide-angle V10. In consequence, he was completely outpaced by team mate Giancarlo Fisichella, and his head appeared to go down. His hurried elevation through the junior ranks just hadn't equipped him to deal with a difficult and uncompetitive car.

His relationship with team principal, Flavio Briatore, appeared to be holed below the waterline, though it always struck me that there's something a tad absurd about Briatore writing anyone off as a 'playboy'. Physician heal thyself... He fared much better in 2002, with a now much more competitive Renault (running, for the first time, as a 'Renault' rather than a 'Benetton', though the sale had actually taken place some years earlier) but never quite matched new team mate Jarno Trulli, and when it became clear that the team really wanted to get their impressive young test driver, Fernando Alonso, into one of their cars in 2003, it was Button whose contract was up, and for a time, it seemed if Button, who had arrived in F1 with a bang in 2000, would be leaving with a whimper just three years later.

He was saved by Dave Richards, who had taken the helm at BAR. Bernie Ecclestone had apparently advised against hiring the Briton to partner Jacques Villeneuve but Richards saw things differently and threw Button, still only 23 years old, a career lifeline. Older, and perhaps wiser, than he was when he went to Renault, he seized it with both hands. He was at least as quick, perhaps actually a shade quicker, than his former World Champion team mate, and when the team took on Takuma Sato in deference to engine-supplier Honda, who wanted a quick Japanese driver in one of the cars, it was Villeneuve, rather than Button, who was shown the exit door.

From there on in, Button's fortunes were tied to those of BAR/Honda. In 2004, when Mclaren and Williams stumbled, BAR came good, and Button led the team to second in the constructor's championship, taking ten podium finishes along the way, establishing himself as the clear team leader. 2005 didn't go so well for the team, with a poor early season and exclusion from two Grands Prix for an irregularity in their fuel tank but Button did no harm to his own reputation, scoring two podiums and picking up all but one of the 38 points BAR scored that year. The following year, the team again started slow, with the car proving almost embarassingly off the pace for much of the first part of the season. In a peculiar premonition of what was to come, at Silverstone Honda and Button were so hopeless that the British press all but gave up on Button and switched their focus to a young chap called Hamilton who was doing amazing things with a GP2 car in the support race. In the second half of the year, though, he finally broke his duck and won his first Grand Prix, at his scored more points than either eventual World Champion Fernando Alonso, or runner-up Michael Schumacher. In the process, he established his superiority over a new team mate with rather more of a reputation than Sato, in the form of Ferrari refugee Rubens Barrichello.

With Honda going into their second year as a full works team, with Button having gotten
the monkey off his back in winning his first Grand Prix, it seemed that 2007 might be his year. Instead it was the start of a precipitous decline. Honda's second F1 car was just possibly the most disappointing racing car to appear on the F1 grid this decade. Outpaced by just about every other team on the grid, including Super Aguri, which was essentially nothing more than a bunch of ex-Arrows personnel running the previous year's Honda - designed for Michelin tyres, on Bridgestones, and with drivers passed over by the works operation. In '07, Button actually had some moments of real inspiration, most notably, somehow dragging the car into the top 5 in the rain in China, but as the British press were rather more excited by a young hopeful parachuted straight into Mclaren, it seemed like he had been written off by many as a might-have been.

When Honda produced another clunker in 2008, it seemed Button's will to get the best out of it finally went out of the window. For the first time in the three seasons they had been paired together, it was Barrichello who usually got more out of the hopeless RA108. Then came the news that the Japanese carmaker were pulling the plug, and with almost everyone else having their drivers in place for 2009, it seemed that Jenson Button's F1 career was effectively over. There was the outside possibility of a drive with Red Bull 'B Team' Toro Rosso, but that aside, it looked like the Somerset man was looking at a future in sportscars. With the global economy having tanked, it seemed unlikely that anyone had the resources required to do anything with the remains of Honda, who, after all, hadn't done anything in the previous couple of years to suggest that their unfinished 2009 car would be a particularly competitive proposition.

If the Button story had ended there, what would we have made of him? A talented driver, smooth in the vein of Alain Prost, easy on his equipment, who had a knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who perhaps lacked the killer instinct necessary to be a World Champion. What might he have done at Williams alongside Montoya in the early part of the decade? If Flavio had kept him on instead of Trulli, how might he have fared against Alonso as the Spaniard went for his two titles in 2005 and 2006? Given the chance, we might have wondered, would he have seized it with both hands, or would he have let it slip through his fingers?

Against all expectations, though, 2009 gave us the chance to find out. The Brawn BGP001 was the best racing car Honda never made. Not dominant in the way that the 2002 Ferrari or the 1988 Mclaren was, but on balance, probably the best car on the grid over the course of the season - though a case could be made for Ross Brawn's old nemesis Adrian Newey's Red Bull RB5. And Button hit the ground running like a man who had been leading Grands Prix from the front for his whole life - winning six of the first seven races. It seemed he was taking up where the last man to partner Barrichello in a team run by Brawn left off...

Of course, things were never quite the same after Turkey. Button hasn't won a race since, and some have suggested it was down to nerves, or a loss of form. Well, perhaps, in part. More likely, it was simply a combination of the Brawn's loss of competitiveness relative to Red Bull and Mclaren in particular, and the fact that Button could afford to play the percentage game, nursing a huge lead in the drivers table, while his rivals were forced to go for broke. A few small but costly errors in qualifying aside, he didn't make any real mistakes, and to some extent his relatively paltry points total subsequent to Turkey was down to his inability to get the best out of the tyres over a single qualifying lap and the sheer difficulty of overtaking in a modern F1 car, rather than any greater failing.

There have been mutterings in some quarters that Button somehow isn't a worthy champion, but to my mind that's nonsense. Of the drivers who found themselves at the wheel of potentially race-winning cars, he did a better job over the season than anyone else. And that is what you need to do to be a World Champion. Occasionally, a driver overcomes the odds to win the title in a car not truly worthy of the prize - Alonso in 2006, Schumacher in 1994 and 1995, and Prost in 1986, are, for me, examples of years where the best driver triumphed over a better car. But that's rare and while I'm not sure Button is in quite the same league as Alonso or Hamilton, who for me are still the outstanding talents in the sport right now, that is true of many who have become World Champion down the years. After all, was Barrichello really any closer to him on pace most weekends than he was to Schumacher, back in their days together at Ferrari?

Finally, though, what is the answer to the question I asked at the beginning? Did Button come into the sport too early? Might he have been World Champion many times over by now had his career been better managed? Maybe. But maybe not. Undoubtedly, his lack of experience led him to sully his reputation considerably at Benetton/Renault, and maybe had he spent a couple more years in F3 or F3000, he would have been better equipped to deal with the awful 2001 Benetton. But on the other hand, who's to say that he would ever have gotten his break into the sport in the first place? An F3000 title is no guarantee that you immediately will be picked up by one of the F1 teams - Ask Bjorn Wirdheim, Jorg Muller or Bruno Junquiera. Had Button had the luxury of having his career carefully planned in the way that, say, Lewis Hamilton's was, he might not have chosen to debut as early as 2000. But the vast majority of drivers just have to seize what opportunities come their way. And Button did that in 2000 when he signed for Williams, just as he did this year when he became the 10th Briton to join the pantheon of World Champions.

Waving the Saltire

Trivia Question: Name the small Northern European country whose drivers have racked up five Formula 1 World Titles over the years. If you think the answer is Finland, then you're wrong. Between them, Keke Rosberg, Hakkinen and Raikkonen have racked up four titles, though there remains the possibility that Raikkonen or perhaps even Kovalainen, could add to that total (Rosberg fils races under a German licence and doesn't count).

The correct answer is my adopted home, Scotland, as a recent visit to the National Museum of Scotland, where Jackie Young Stewart's 1973 Tyrrell currently takes pride of place by the entrance, reminded me. Now you can get into an argument as to whether Scotland is really a 'country' in its own right at all (though it's not necessarily a debate I'd recommend starting on the streets of Glasgow or Edinburgh, especially in the evening after the rugby or the football), but there is no doubt that for a decade, between 1963 and 1973, Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart ensured that Scotland was preeminent in the world of Formula 1.



For all that the two men came from the same small part of the world - southern Scotland, they appeared to be very different people. Where Jim is remembered as a quiet, shy man of few words, who let his driving do the talking - a BBC documentary on his career, which aired earlier this year, was titled The Quiet Champion', Jackie was and remains a flamboyant, outspoken personality, never afraid to say what is on his mind. He campaigned hard on driver safety, and an astute businessman, he was perhaps the first to see race driving as a 'career' in the modern sense of the word. What the two men did have in common was that they were the outstanding talents of their age.



Despite its achievements in the F1 world, motorsport has a low profile north of the border. The two big Scottish newspapers, The Scotsman and The Herald, generally provide only the most cursory coverage of the sport (in marked contrast with some London-based broadsheets, perhaps most surprisingly the left-leaning and hardly car-loving Guardian which has, perhaps, the best coverage of the lot). Nor does it much impinge on the popular consciousness. Certainly, in my office, I'm in a minority of one in being more interested in Button vs. Barrichello vs. Vettel than in the Auld Firm rivalry and the latest tribulations of Hearts under its Lithuanian owner. I don't think anyone else regularly tunes in to BBC1 for the F1. And as for any other forms of motorsport....

Part of the explanation, I suspect, lies in the absence of any really successful Scottish racing drivers for the best part of 20 years after Jackie Stewart retired. Yes, Johnny Dumfries won the British F3 championship, but his career never recovered after he found himself partnered with Ayrton Senna at Lotus in 1986, though he did go on to win Le Mans with Jaguar. At a national level, the likes of John Cleland and David Leslie met with considerable success, but for 20 years, no Scottish driver really established himself on the international stage (though I always thought that the late David Leslie had the talent to do so, if not the breaks).

I suspect it doesn't help, either, that there is now only one permanent race track in Scotland - the small though deceptively tricky Knockhill circuit, across the bridge from Edinburgh. At just 1.3m in length, and lacking much in the way of passing places for anything not capable of running door-handle to door-handle it means that, an annual visit by the BTCC circus aside, it rarely plays host to race meets of real significance (though the Scottish Motor Racing Club do put on a good show). Contrast that with the south and midlands of England, with Silverstone, Donington Park, Brands Hatch, Oulton Park and a host of smaller venues and its easy to see why the sport has never caught the public imagination to the same degree up here. At one time, there was the Ingliston circuit on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but that had disappeared by the time I moved here in the mid-1990s and the place is now used only for the Royal Highland Show - rather oddly as it is a good 3 hours train ride from the Highlands...

It can't be down to a lack of successful Scottish racers any longer though. In the early 1990s a trio of youngsters driving for the father-and-son David Leslie Racing operation would go on to make a very significant impact on the sport. First came Allan McNish. Shooting to prominence in the 1990 F3000 championship, his career thereafter spent some time in the doldrums, before he hooked up with Porsche to win Le Mans, and then moved to Toyota to work first with their sportscar programme and eventually with their fledgling F1 effort. This led to a season in F1 in 2002, but things never really worked out there, and he has subsequently established himself as a sportscar racer par excellence, one of the lynchpins of Audi's sportscar programme, winning the ALMS three times and claiming another Le Mans victory in 2008.

Next up came another Dumfries and Galloway man, David Coulthard. In his early years, he didn't strike me as quite as quick as McNish, but he was the one who progressed easily to F1, first with Williams and then with Mclaren. If he never quite had the last couple of tenths that might have enabled him to add to the five titles picked up by Clark and Stewart, but though he may never have entirely convinced people like myself he was truly from the top drawer, he did win 13 Grands Prix which is more than all but a small handful of racing drivers can claim.

A year or two behind him was Scots-Italian Dario Franchitti. Unable to make the break into Formula 1, he instead went off to ply his trade in the US, first in the then-strong Champ Car Series, and later in the Indy Racing League. In 2007, ten years after his debut, he won the IRL series and the Indianapolis 500. There followed an unsuccessful diversion into NASCAR, but this year he came back to the IRL with Chip Ganassi Racing and secured his second title by winning the final race at Homestead last weekend.

And what was the extent to which all this was followed in Scotland? A brief mention on the evening news and that was it. Chances are, nothing short of a Scottish rival to Lewis Hamilton will change that. Though you never know, maybe a street-race round Glasgow would be just the ticket....

The Incredible Hulk? GP2 In Review

Since its inception, I've been enthusiastic about GP2. Always making time to watch the coverage, first on Eurosport, and then more recently on ITV4. This year, though, I ciuldn't summon up much enthusiasm. Maybe it was the fact that the GP2 coverage had switched from Eurosport with its informative and entertaining team of Martin Haven and Gareth Rees, to the seemingly disinterested and certainly uninteresting bunch at Setanta. By the time Setanta had collapsed and the GP2 coverage had reverted back to its natural home at Eurosport, I'd cancelled my subscription so was reliant on rather patchy (Finnish language) coverage in one of the murkier corners of the internet to keep in touch with F1's leading feeder series, on those occasions when I could be bothered.

Maybe, though, it was just the sense that the 2009 GP2 series felt a bit of an irrelevance. The vast bulk of the field seemed to be made up of drivers who had been around in the series for a while, who had had their opportunities and been found wanting. Lucas Di Grassi was back for, what, his fourth season in GP2 with reigning champions, Racing Engineering, who went from having one of the prettiest liveries on the grid last year in their Repsol colours to one of the most jaw-droppingly awful when they were rebranded 'Fatburner Racing'. And Di Grassi did nothing in his fourth season in the category to suggest he is anything more than a 'nearly was'. His only hope of progressing into F1 must surely lie in how badly the other Renault test-driver is currently doing in the race seat. Talking of which...

...Romain Grosjean had the same kind of opportunity that Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton seized with both hands when he was signed with ART last year. He didn't take it, and while it lookd in the early part of the year that he was going to make amends for that with Barwa-Addax, it didn't work out that way. He was the class of the field in the opening races, though to judge by the fact his closest rival was team mate Vitaly Petrov, that might have owed as much to the old Campos team having got the car right as to anything the driver was doing, but as the season went on, he found himself increasingly being outperformed by Petrov, and after a dominant win in the Monaco Feature Race, he never won again.

Vitaly Petrov is, without doubt, the best driver yet to have come out of Russia. He didn't show badly this year in the GP2, winning a couple of races - feature races at that, but all the same, given that he was in his third full season in the category, nothing he did really screamed out "Future F1 star". He clearly has a lot of money behind him and isn't out of his depth in a powerful single seater, and a such, he might get a ride in one of the new F1 teams, providing at least one or two of them actually make the grid next year. I'd be surprised if he amounts to much when he gets there, though you can never be sure. He was, let's not forget, the man who finished second in the title race behind Nico Hulkenberg.

What of the champion, Hulkenberg? I'm not quite sure what to make of him. There's much to suggest that he might be a real talent. He won the title quite comfortably at his first attempt, though we'll never know for sure quite what might have happened had Grosjean raced the whole season. This was quite impressive, given that he was up against a host of drivers in their second or third year in the category. It will go some way to erasing the still-awkward memory of his lacklustre first attempt at the F3 Euroseries back in 2007. What leaves me a little uncertain about Hulkenberg's ultimate potential is that I never saw any sign of the kind of dominance that Rosberg and Hamilton demonstrated on occasion. A part of me thinks that a driver who is really the class of the field ought to be able to rack up more than 3 feature race wins over the season. On the other hand, Timo Glock didn't manage to, and he's looked at home in F1. And Hulkenberg was a rooki up against an awful lot of sophomores and seniors (the university metaphor seems curiously apt, anyone spending more than 3 years in GP2 is surely wasting his time and someone else's money.) We'll find out soon enough, if as is widely rumoured, he ends up partnering Rubens Barrichello at Williams next year.

For me, the disappointment of the year was the lack of pace from Hulkenberg's ART team mate, Pastor Maldonado. The Venezuelan has been the beneficiary of the state oil company largesse once showered on Ernesto Viso, and in the past had looked quick if rather wild. In the latter part of last year, at Piquet Sports, he seemed to find some consistency to marry to his prodiguous pace. This year, though, that once mighty pace seemed to vanish out of the window. About the one thing that can be said in his favour is that the second ART seat has been something of a poison chalice in recent years. Ask Michael Ammermuller... Or Luca Filippi.

Another man signed to a title winning team who failed to live up to expectations was Giedo Van Der Garde. At the start of the year, in spite of a rather torrid time in the sideshow GP2 Asia Series, I expected the reigning Renault World Series champion to be a serious contender in the ISPort car. As it was he was left scrabbling for reverse-grid wins, and only really hit his stride late on at Monza. Maybe it was simply that ISport have lost their way a bit - Diego Nunes was even less of a factor in the other car.


Of the rest? None really figured. Kamui Kobayashi never looked like repeating the form that took him to the GP2 Asia crown against admittedly hardly stellar opposition. Team mate Jerome D'Ambrosio figured early on in the year, but fell into something of a trough mid-season, from which he never really recovered. Alvaro Parente surprised everyone by winning a Feature Race - at Spa no less, with the team formerly known as BCN, but at 25 is probably already too old to make the break into F1 (though you never know). The likes of Luca Filippi, Roldan Rodriguez and Javier Villa continued to tread water, probably burning the family cash to be there. Davide Valsecchi never really lived up to his promise when he replaced Romain Grosjean at Barwa Addax and down at the back of the field, the lack of strength in depth in this year's GP2 grid was all-too apparent. Ricardo Texeira, Nelson Panciatici and Michael Herck all looked like men with no business racing at this level.

So, not a classic year for the series. If GP2 is to maintain its credibility as a feeder formula for F1, it is crucial that Hulkenberg gets on at Williams, if indeed that is where he winds up. After Grosjean and Piquet Jr, I suspect there may be an ever greater reluctance among F1 team bosses to hire on the basis of a good showing in GP2 alone. More to the point, when Red Bull's large junior programme all but entirely ignores GP2 now (its drivers being placed variously in British F3, Formula 2 and WSR) and when last year's British F3 front runners, Jaime Alguersuari, Oliver Turvey and Brendon Hartley all gave GP2 a miss, one wonders whether there is a risk that Bruno Michel's baby is fast becoming the new F3000