The New Boys

In last week's Autosport, Mark Hughes asked whether the current crop of F1 championship contenders might just be the strongest that the sport has ever known. Such a suggestion will inevitably raise the hackles of the beard stroking senior citizens who insist that nobody's ever really matched Moss, Fangio, Clark or Stewart but I think there just might be something in it. What, though, of the generation that will one day supplant them? Who will eventually do to Messrs Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Button, Kubica and Webber what Prost did to Lauda, Senna to Prost and, had Senna lived, what Schumacher might have done to Senna?

Is there anyone among this year's crop of F1 debutants who might one day be World Champion? It's too early to say, though I suspect that the answer to that question is 'no', but, as the season races headlong towards its halfway point, how are Petrov, Hulkenberg, Kobayashi, Di Grassi, Chandhok and Senna getting on?

The man with both the most difficult job and the best equipment of the bunch is Russian Vitaly Petrov. On the one hand, the Renault is, in Robert Kubica's hands has twice proven good enough for a podium, a car quick enough to enable a promising youngster to show what he is made of. On the other hand, he's having to learn his trade very publicly, and in Robert Kubica he has a team mate who's about as fast as anyone on the grid. And thanks to Lewis Hamilton's performances against Alonso in 2007, the F1 world is less inclined to give new drivers the benefit of the doubt if they are not immediately on the pace than might once have been the case.

At no time has Petrov looked like he would get on terms with Kubica, and while Kubica lies seventh in the driver's championship, Petrov has scored points on just one occasion. He has, though, shown flashes of real pace - scoring points in China and looking very quick there when it rained. Unlike almost everyone on the F1 grid, he didn't spend his entire childhood at the wheel of a go-kart and indeed, before he began racing in GP2 in 2006, he hadn't done much outside of the hermetic world of Russia's Formula Lada. As such, he might have more scope to improve than any of the other debutants. And if not, well, rumour has it he (or his father) is paying a lot of Renault's bills, so he might be given the benefit of the doubt.

Over at Williams, GP2 series champion and former A1GP star Nico Hulkenberg has been rather closer to his team mate's pace than Petrov has ever managed to be. On the other hand, in his 18th season in F1, I'm not convinced that Barrichello is quite the opponent that Kubica is, and thus far, the veteran Brazilian racer has generally had the upper hand. To be fair, it is almost certainly harder for a rookie driver to come in and trounce an experienced team mate in a slow, troublesome car, than in a really well set-up machine like the 2007 Mclaren but I still can't help thinking that if Hulkenberg were really the 'new Schumacher' then he would by now be outpacing his team mate.

That's not to say he might not establish himself as a solid GP driver in the mould of a Heidfeld or a Glock or, for that matter, a Barrichello. After a shaky start to the season, he qualified well at Monaco (though damage picked up at the first corner ensured he got no further than the tunnel come race day), was unlucky but quick at Montreal and was on course for a solid points finish in Valencia until his car packed up on him in the closing stages of the race. If, by the end of the year he's regularly matching Barrichello and if, crucially, he can keep his car out of the tyre walls, he will have done enough to show he belongs in F1, if not necessarily, that he's a future star.

A man who did look to have real star quality when he stepped into the Toyota vacated by Timo Glock at the end last year was Kamui Kobayashi. Immensely combative, what was all the more impressive was that in only his second F1 race, he was outpacing his highly rated team mate Jarno Trulli, and finished up with a very solid sixth place in Abu Dhabi.

This year, though, in a rather uncompetitive Sauber, Kobayashi has done little to remind us of those startling debut races. He's been outqualified 5-4 by veteran Pedro De La Rosa, a man who, at 39, is surely with the team more for his vast experience in car development and his testing skills than for his outright pace. Given that, before he was parachuted into Toyota last year, there had been little in his junior career to suggest he was anything more than a competent journeyman, having hardly troubled the front runners in what was not the most competitive GP2 grid the sport has ever known, dark whispers have circulated that the Toyota he drove in Abu Dhabi might not have been 100% kosher. That, anxious not to see another team pull out of F1, the stewards might have been prepared to look the other way. To my knowledge, there has never been any serious evidence to back up these claims, but equally it's hard to deny that Kobayashi has frequently looked a little out of his depth in F1 this year.

Again, though, there have been odd flashes of promise when the cards have fallen his way, or when the Sauber has been dialed into the circuit properly. At Barcelona, which places a premium on aerodynamic efficiency, and where a lack of low speed mechanical grip matters less, it was Kobayashi that got the Sauber into Q3 for the first time all season, and it was Kobayashi, too, who scored the team's first points of the season in Turkey.

His drive of the season, and it just might have saved his drive, came last weekend at Valencia. He qualified badly, but when the safety car came out after Webber's accident, the team rolled the dice and opted to keep him out on the harder tyres while everyone else took the opportunity to make their mandatory stop. He ended up third, and to my surprise (and surely that of most people watching) he stayed there, easily able to keep Jenson Button's Mclaren behind him. When he finally pitted, 5 laps from the end, he fell to 9th, but where everyone else struggled all afternoon to overtake on a circuit hardly conducive to it, Kobayashi, armed with new soft tyres, forced his way past Alonso, and then did for Sebastian Buemi's Toro Rosso at the very last corner to finish 7th. For the first time we saw flashes of that form which so captivated us when he made his debut with Toyota. A mercurial, intermittently brilliant Japanese driver who lacks consistency? A bit of history repeating...

The three drivers making their F1 debuts with the new teams have life much more difficult in one respect, and much easier in another. On the one hand, nobody expects that Karun Chandhok, Bruno Senna and Lucas Di Grassi will be able to achieve anything much in HRTs and Virgins that are the thick end of 5 seconds off the pace. But at the same time, it's hard to see what they can do to make a name for themselves.

Di Grassi is teamed up with Timo Glock, the man who beat him to the GP2 title back in 2007, and once again it has been the German who has generally had the edge, outqualifying his Brazilian team mate 8-1 so far . Di Grassi has often been as much as a second a lap off his team mate's pace. It's not clear, though, whether that's an entirely fair comparison. Virgin Racing is hardly Mclaren or Ferrari. They're not really in a position to field two equally competitive cars, and they've been desperately playing catch-up on the development front ever since they lost most of their winter testing to recurring hydraulic problems. They made life still more difficult for themselves by building a car with too small a fuel tank to go the distance, and developments to address these problems, as well as to improve the performance of the cars, have not always been available at the same time for both drivers. Glock had a long-wheelbase VR01 with its larger fuel tank from Spain onwards, while Di Grassi had to wait until Turkey. I don't know whether the same delay has applied in respect of various aerodynamic updates, but it may be that the gap between the two drivers is not as large as it appears. F1, though, is a harsh world, and as long as Di Grassi is being outpaced by Glock, he's unlikely to get a chance with a more competitive team.

Karun Chandhok and Bruno Senna were previously team mates at ISport in GP2 a couple of years back. Then, as now, it's Ayrton's nephew who has generally had the edge over the son of the former Indian Motorsports Federation, though as with Glock and Di Grassi at Virgin, it is hard to know whether this is a reflection on their relative pace, or simply the luck of the draw with a slow and unreliable car. To be honest, I've never been entirely convinced that either really has what it takes to be in F1, although they've both generally kept out of trouble and the HRT is such a dog that the credentials of those driving it is rather a moot point.

On balance, I don't see anyone among the current crop of rookies who is likely to match the drivers at the front of the field at the moment. That, though, is not necessarily a sign that the sort is in trouble. There are always fallow years: did anyone of any real note emerge between 2003 and 2005? But perhaps I'll be wrong. The second half of the season will give us a clearer idea.

If at First You Don't Succeed... GP2 In Review

When Giorgio Pantano made his F3000 debut, back in 2001, Juan Pablo Montoya was just beginning his Grand Prix career at Williams and Fernando Alonso was a fresh-faced teenager doing remarkable things with a hastily put together Minardi. Lewis Hamilton was still racing karts and F1's newest winner, Sebastien Vettel had not long turned 13 years old. Save for a single, rather disappointing season with the failing Jordan team in 2004, he's been plying his trade in F1's premier feeder category every year since.

Last weekend, at his 7th attempt, he finally lifted the title, and became the GP2 series' fourth champion. Pantano had been competitive throughout his time in F3000 and GP2, but had never quite looked like a potential title winner before. The closest he had come was all the way back in 2002, when he wound up second, behind Sebastien Bourdais though only after Enge was stripped of the title following a positive test for marijuana - a drug which it is hard to imagine could improve a racing driver's performance. The question is, though, did Pantano win because he finally came good, or because the quality of the opposition he faced was rather lower than in years past?

The answer, I suspect, is a mix of the two. Giorgio Pantano was undoubtedly, for the balance of the season, the quickest driver in the field. The fact that he was driving for Racing Engineering, a team which, until now, have not been true front-runners. His four feature race wins illustrate the point that, over the course of the season, nobody was as consistently quick as Pantano. But for misfortune in Spa and Valencia and a silly mistake exiting the pits at the final round at Monza, Pantano could easily have won 7 of the 11 Saturday afternoon races this year. He still continued to make those unforced errors though - at Spa, at Monza, at Valencia and at Monaco he cost himself points with moments of madness. If he were a young gun of 21 or 22, that might be understandable, but at nearly 30, it seems to point to a more fundamental limitation in Pantano as a driver.



Champion at the 7th attempt. Giorgio Pantano.


So who was he up against? Well, the answer to that question perhaps explains the degree of cynicism, at least among those who might otherwise sign up a GP2 champion for F1, that remains about Pantano. In fact, the only man to win more than one feature race all season was Brazilian Lucas Di Grassi, who joined the championship only at the fourth round, after Ben Hanley and Campos Racing had parted ways. After a 2007 season with ART in which Di Grassi proved slightly disappointing, he went some way to repairing his reputation, looking like a serious title contender for a while, despite missing the opening six races. On balance, he was my choice for driver of the season, not least because his team, Campos, were hardly among the front-runners in the past. While Pantano peppered his season with a number of small errors (including the mistake at Spa which cost Di Grassi any remaining chance of the title) it is hard to point to any similar mistakes on Di Grassi's part.

Of course, the man who did take the title fight to the final round was Ayrton's nephew, Bruno Senna. He's talked of as the man most likely to move up to F1 next year, though one can't help but feel that his name plays no small part here. Bruno didn't do a bad job in his second season in GP2, but didn't really stand out in the way that Hamilton, Rosberg, Glock or Kovalainen did. There were days when he was imperious - Silverstone in the rain on Sunday morning springs to mind - but in the end, he won but one of the 11 feature races, and was only able to add one sprint race to that tally. Given he was driving for ISport, the reigning champions and arguably the best prepared team on the grid, it seems fair to say that more would be expected of a potential F1 star. That said, unlike more or less everyone else on the grid, he didn't spend his teenage years in karts, and perhaps has more scope for improvement than most of his rivals.



Senna was too inconsistent to take the fight to Pantano.

Before the start of the year, I had predicted that Romain Grosjean would end up running away with the championship. He seemed to have it all. He had dominated the GP2 Asia series, and he was signed up with double champions ART. In the event, it didn't work out that way. The year started badly, with his qualifying down in 11th for the opening race at Barcelona. Come the race, though, he looked far and away the quickest man on the circuit, and despite the fact that the new GP2 cars were clearly not as conducive to overtaking as the old ones, he clawed his way up to 5th. The Sprint race should have been his for the taking, but following a safety car, he screwed up his entry to the final chicane, allowed Kamui Kobayashi a run on him and then practically had the Japanese newcomer off the road in retaking the lead. It was a stupid move which earned him a drive through penalty and cost him a points finish - probably a win. That was just one weekend, but it was somehow reflective of a season which yielded just two wins. He always seemed quick on race day, but his qualifying was erratic and there were just too many mistakes.

So what of the rest? I have to confess to being more than a little surprised to discover the unpredictable Pastor Maldonado had climbed to a comfortable 5th place in the drivers' standings by the season, snapping at the heels of such as Grosjean and Senna in the points tables. Sometimes he was anonymous, and other times, most particularly at Monaco and whenever he found himself on a wet track - his performance in the rain at Spa on Sunday morning springs to mind. Perhaps a sign that, while he may be mentally fragile, his innate car control is of the highest order.


Maldonado came on increasingly strong in the second half of the year.

Sebastien Buemi took over Javier Villa's role as the master of Sunday morning sprint race wins - he picked up 2 wins and another 3 podiums. He's talked about as a potential F1 driver, but in all honesty it's hard to see why he'd be a better bet than Bruno Senna. Arden may not be quite the force that they were when the scooped one F3000 title after another, but they're still a competitive race team, and I wouldn't hire a man who had never even won a GP2 Feature race.

Of the rest, Alvaro Parente showed himself, on balance, the most promising of the complete GP2 rookies (i.e. those newcomers who had not raced in GP2 Asia). He won the opening race, which turned out to be the highlight of his season, but intermittently, he ran at or near the front for much of the rest of the season. His greatest weakness seemed to be an inability to get to grips with qualifying on occasion - twice he made the front row, but twice he was as far back as 21st on the grid. Whether the lion's share of the blame lay with him or with SuperNova was never entirely clear. His team mate Andy Soucek's form was similarly up and down. Vitaly Petrov was the season's other Feature race winner, picking up the pieces after Pantano ran out of fuel in Valencia. He looked a much improved driver this year (as indeed his performances in the GP2 Asia series had hinted he might be) and certainly the best racer ever to come out of Russia. Whether he is potential F1 material in another matter.

If the above drivers were the cream of 2008, then there can be little doubt that nobody had a worse year than Luca Filippi. Widely touted (not least on these pages) as a potential title contender with ART, the wealthy Italian never really figured all season. He was unable to get any kind of a handle on Grosjean and parted ways with the team for Arden. There, he was scarcely any more competitive - only at Valencia did he get anywhere near the pace, and there he ended up disgracing himself by running his former team mate off the road and out of the race. If his family put up the money, it is possible he could redeem himself next year, but I would imagine the F1 teams will already have written him off. He ended the season 19th, with just 6 points to his name.


China will have to wait a little longer for a truly first rate race driver. Ho Pin Tung was an also-ran.


If Filippi was desperately underwhelming, Marko Asmer's year was worse still. The Estonian who had dominated the 2007 British F3 championship seemed utterly lost at Fisichella Motorsport when he joined the team mid-season. A BMW tester, he clearly knows roughly what to do with a racing car, and his inability to climb off the back couple of rows of the GP2 grid all year was something of a mystery, at least from the outside looking in. FMS may have looked a bit of a mess this year, but it is worth remembering that Adam Carroll was able to pick up a 2nd row starting position with the team in Turkey.

At the very back were the usual suspects. Christian Bakkerud appeared no more convincing than last year, and after injuring himself at Monaco, he made way for Andy Soucek at SuperNova. Michael Herck looked out of his depth at DPR, and none of the various lost souls who drove the second BCN Competicion car had any real business being in GP2.

I suspect that, in the fullness of time, the 2008 season will not be remembered as a classic year for GP2. In the first three years, the series had at least one - and in 2005, two standout drivers who looked like real F1 material. This year, one couldn't help feeling there was nobody in the Vettel/Hamilton/Kubica class, or even at the level of Rosberg or Glock, come to that. The racing wasn't helped by a new chassis which didn't seem as well suited to wheel-to-wheel racing as the old GP2 car had done, being too sensitive to turbulence and dirty air from a car in front.

2009 might be a different story though. The GP2 series organisers have shown before that they are willing to tweak the chassis rules, and one hopes that they might spend the winter working out how they can improve overtaking in the series. More importantly, though, there are some really promising drivers looking at moving up into the GP2 series next year. Niko Hulkenberg, F3 Euroseries Champion elect and the latest prodigy of one Willy Weber will be one to watch. Oliver Turvey and Sergio Perez, currently battling it out for the British F3 championship, both have tests lined up, and rumour has it that the man who beat Vettel to the 2006 Euroseries Crown, Paul Di Resta, might be returning to single seaters after 2 years marooned in the DTM. 2008 might not have been a classic year, but the average GP2 race was still the best place to see big powerful single seaters really racing. Here's hoping 2009 will produce a crop of real talent.

Two 'til the end?

It has been an odd year for the GP2 series. The first year with the second generation GP2 machine has not provided quite so much of the close, wheel to wheel racing that made the championship's reputation in its first few years. One suspects that Dallara have simply got the trade-off between aerodynamic downforce and mechanical grip wrong with this year's car and that the drivers are encountering the same problems running close together in "dirty air" that the big boys have long been used to in F1. Let's not get it out of proportion, though. There were overtaking manoeuvres at Hungary in the GP2 races last weekend, and that is more than can be said for the Grand Prix after the first 3 laps were in the book.

In each of the GP2 title race has boiled down to a 2-way fight. In 2005, it was Heikki Kovalainen fighting it out with eventual winner Nico Rosberg. A year later, Nelson Piquet was the Lewis Hamilton's sole serious opponent, and last year, it was Timo Glock and ART's Lucas Di Grassi who were still fighting it out as the series entered it's final rounds. After the Magny Cours race, at which all the other major title contenders self-destructed, I wondered if this year was going to prove an exception and Giorgio Pantano was going to have it all sewn up with several races in hand. Two further feature race wins, at Silverstone and in Hockenheim, appeared to confirm that the title was going to the Italian single-seater veteran.

However, a single disastrous weekend in Hungary, where Pantano fell victim to an over-aggressive piece of defending from Romain Grosjean in the feature race has been enough to enable ISport's Bruno Senna into contention. Bruno Senna appears to be adopting the same steady and consistent approach that wasn't quite enough to bring Di Grassi the title last year. He may have won just one feature race, set against Pantano's impressive four wins from seven, but he has been racking up podiums (not to mention a sprint race win) with such consistency that he is just seven points behind in the title race. Had the dogcatcher at Istanbul been doing his job properly, the gap might be even smaller.

Given that, for the last 3 years, the GP2 champion has ended up graduating to Formula 1, the question must be asked - what are Pantano and Senna's chances of making the step up? Pantano, I'm afraid, I simply can't see being picked up by an F1 team next year. He had his chance in F1 back in 2004, and to be brutally honest, he looked rather out of his depth. He's been racing in GP2 and it's predecessor, F3000, since 2001. His best result remains his second overall behind Sebastien Bourdais, all the way back in 2002. There's no doubt that he's matured into a very competent single seater racer, but after his messy year with Jordan, I doubt he'll get a second chance at F1.

In the case of Bruno Senna, the answer is more complicated. There have been rumours that Toro Rosso is taking a serious look at the Brazilian, not least because of his highly marketable name. To my mind, though, he has been good, rather than exceptional, thus far in GP2. He's been consistent, but on the other hand, he's hardly been the consistent race winner that such as Glock, Hamilton, Kovalainen and Rosberg were in GP2. In normal circumstances, I'd say we'd seen enough of Ayrton's nephew to say he wasn't quite F1 material. In his case, I'm not quite so sure though. Unlike almost all his rivals, he did not spend his teens in karts, and he only began racing in 2004. As such, there's a fair argument that he has more room for future improvement than anyone else at a similar level. Certainly, he has come a long way from the rather underwhelming driver I saw in a Formula BMW race at Knockhill four years back.

So that's the likely title contenders out of the way. What of the rest? At the start of the year, I had predicted that GP2 Asia champion, Romain Grosjean, would take the title. Oh well. Grosjean, to be fair, has looked as quick as anyone this year, especially in race conditions, but has shown this year that there are still a lot of rough edges to be smoothed away if he is to make the step up. In Spain, he qualified poorly but looked quicker in race trim than anyone else - and was the only driver who seemed to be able to overtake with the new higher downforce cars, but he threw away what should have been a sprint race win with a plain stupid move on Kamui Kobayashi. There have been mistakes, too, in Monaco, Magny Cours (though he really should have won the feature race) and the other weekend in Hungary. Lack of attention to yellow flags cost him what would have been a fine feature race win in the wet at Hockenheim. Perhaps, in the knowledge that he is with one of the best teams on the grid, the more he falls behind, the more desperate he gets, and the more he falls behind.

He can at least console himself with the thought that he is not Luca Filippi. The young Italian's lack of pace has been utterly baffling. This is, after all, a man who won races with Super Nova last year, looked quick in the GP2 Asia series with the inexperienced Meritus squad and was signed up in 2008 for ART - the most successful team in the series. Yet he has been nowhere all season - scoring just one point for ART before walking out and moving over to Arden after Silverstone - where he has been no more competitive. About the only comparable mystery has been the way British F3 champion Marko Asmer has looked so utterly out of his depth since he walked into the Fisichella Motorsport drive in France.

What, then, of the rest? It says something about the lack of stand-out drivers in this year's GP2 field that the man who lies 3rd in the title chase is Lucas di Grassi - despite the fact that he missed the first 3 rounds of the championship, only stepping in when Campos and Ben Hanley parted ways. He's done a good job this year - much more so than he did when he was fighting for the title last year with ART in my opinion - but the door to F1 probably shut on him when he didn't make the impact he really should have done last year. Though if Alonso walks out on Renault, their options might be limited...

Alvaro Parente, of course, won the first race, but has looked pretty anonymous since then. To be fair to him, it is not clear that SuperNova is capable of making a GP2 car run as quickly as some of their rivals, but his form has been rather erratic. That said, he is in his first season of GP2, and unlike Grosjean, he didn't have the luxury of doing the GP2 Asia series as a warm-up. Discounting those who raced in that series, he's done better than any of the championship's other freshmen. His credibility would, I think, be intact if he could come back and win the series next year.

The same cannot be said of a lot of other drivers having rather up and down seasons. Karun Chandhok has been intermittently fast, but has never really matched the pace of his ISport team mate Senna, suggesting that the world will have to wait a little while longer for a really first-rate Indian driver. Russia, too, would appear not yet to have found it's man. Vitaly Petrov has been decently quick, and had no problem disposin of Hanley, but it took the arrival of Di Grassi to mark Campos out as a race winning team. Javier Villa's progress appears to have reached an abrupt halt and gone into reverse. While his team mate Pantano has been racking up the feature race wins, Villa has not even been able to continue his Sunday sprint-race winning streak. Andreas Zuber has recovered, to a degree, from a massively disappointing and frustrating 2007 season, but hasn't really shown the kind of pace that marks him out as something special. The same can be said, to a considerable extent, of Mike Conway, who has been consistent over at Trident, but has never quite been on front-running pace.

Pastor Maldonado, on the other hand, has been as maddeningly inconsistent as ever. He could be accused of being a one-trick pony, but when that trick is lapping Monaco several tenths quicker than anyone else, it makes you stand up and pay attention. Sadly, he's also had more than his fair share of very silly mistakes, and there have been times when he has really been pretty anonymous. On the other hand, his drive through the field to 5th from the very back at Hungary was one of the stand-out performances of the year.

So not a classic GP2 season, by any means, but it does seem that we are once more set for an intriguing denouement to the championship. My money is on Pantano, but there is little doubting that ISport will be doing everything within their power to win a second driver's championship.

GP2 2008 Preview - Winning down to an ART?

It struck me the other day that there probably really aren't going to be many seats available for young F1 aspirants come the end of the season. OK, so Rubens Barrichello might call it a day and create a vacancy at Honda, and his near-contemporary David Coulthard is tipped to vacate the Red Bull seat after 15 years in the sport - but nobody else really looks like they are coming up on retirement. Of course, it's more than possible that some of this year's grid will be given the heave-ho come season's end - Nakajima and Sutil might justifiably be feeling a little nervous right now - but certainly we are not looking at an awful lot of vacancies appearing. And certainly not at the business end of the grid.

All of which might well be weighing on the minds of this year's GP2 competitors. More and more of late, it is from the GP2 series that drivers have made the leap to Formula 1, and with the demise of Champ Car, not to mention the seemingly waning significance of the Renault World Series, that's the way we can expect it to stay. The odd F1 team might continue to take a chance on an F3 hotshot - as happened with Sebastien Vettel and Adrian Sutil, but for the most part, what opportunities do come up will go to the GP2 front runners.

All of which is one very good reason for F1 fans to keep close tabs on GP2 this year. Not the only good reason, though. The main reason to watch GP2 is that it has consistently provided the most exciting, close-fought single seater racing around. The cars have almost as much power as current Grand Prix cars, a touch less grip, and rely to a much greater extent on under-body aerodynamics to generate downforce, which enables the cars to run much closer together through corners than F1 cars can. The result is that overtaking is a much more regular occurrence than it is either F3 or Grand Prix racing.

Perhaps the most pertinent question, though, is whether there is anyone on this year's GP2 grid who might have what it takes to follow in the footsteps of Rosberg, Kovalainen, Hamilton, Piquet Jr and Glock. On the evidence of the new GP2 Asia winter series, it just might be that ART man Romain Grosjean does have it. Without any previous GP2 experience, he went up against several second and third year drivers and dominated the championship.

In past years, there has always been at least the semblance of a title battle in GP2. Nico Rosberg and Heikki Kovalainen fought it out to the very last round in 2005. Lewis Hamilton always looked the favourite in 2006, but Nelson Piquet Jr. made sure he didn't have it all entirely his own way. Timo Glock was very much the frontrunner last year, but Lucas Di Grassi nonetheless took the title down to the wire - aided by a healthy dose of luck.

If somebody is going to take the fight to Grosjean, who will it be? My hunch is we may need look no further than his ART team mate Luca Filippi. Filippi endured a rather lacklustre start to his GP2 career with FMS in 2006, but began to look much more convincing last year with SuperNova. Now in his third year, and in one of the very top teams, it's very much make-or-break for the Italian, and the ART intra-team battle could be intriguing indeed.

It's easy to forget that last year, ART didn't actually win the title. ISport's new lineup doesn't really have anyone of Timo Glock's calibre, but Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok are both proven race winners. Senna remains something of an enigma: blindingly quick one weekend, and utterly hopeless and adrift the next. A season's experience and familiarity with the tracks may make the difference, or may not. Karun Chandhok came seemingly from nowhere to score some very impressive winners with the unfancied Durango team last year. If GP2 Asia is any guide, he has the pace, but will really need to work to iron out the errors which cost him a number of good results.

Who else might have it within them to make a challenge for the title? Well, it would seem foolish to write off Arden - they may not ever have won a GP2 title, but they have been consistent front-runners and were the team to beat in the last years of F3000. Lead driver Sebastien Buemi was the man who came closest to Romain Grosjean in the F3 Euroseries last year. In his sporadic GP2 outings last year, he seemed hindered by the fact he was constantly jumping from one single seater series to another, but that might work in his favour this year - as he'll at least know the tracks.

Italian veteran Giorgio Pantano will be back for a fourth year of GP2, and should provide a decent barometer for the overall quality of the field. It seems that the former Jordan Grand Prix driver has the pace to win races, but lacks what is required to challenge for the title. This year, he's paired up with Javier Villa at Racing Engineering. If the field really isn't as strong as in past years, perhaps he'll finally get another single seater title to add to his 2000 German F3 trophy.

I'd be surprised if anyone I haven't already mentioned wins the title this year, but there's plenty more drivers in the field who are worth watching, and might well win races. I've always reckoned Alvaro Parente to have been one of the more cruelly under-rated single seater drivers of the last few years, and the reigning Renault World Series champion finally gets a GP2 shot with SuperNova. The man who ran him close to the title last year, Ben Hanley, is also making the switch and is partnered with Vitaly Petrov, who is doing a fine job of dispelling the notion that Russian single seater drivers are always out of their depth on the world stage.

I was more convinced of Fisichella Motorsport's prospects when they add Andy Soucek on the books. News that his place is to be taken by Roldan Rodriguez doesn't exactly inspire optimism. On the other hand, Adrian Valles has shown well in the GP2 Asia series after a somewhat inconclusive initial period in GP2. Certainly the Force India driver's squad will benefit from the fact that they no longer need waste a seat on Jason Tahinci now that Petrol Ofisi money has been replaced by cash from Force India owner Vijay Mallya's Kingfisher brand.

After a year of anonymity with rather second-rate drivers, Piquet Minardi Sports have been flying in testing with the mercurial Pastor Maldonado and team mate Andreas Zuber, lest we forget, was really not all that far behind Timo Glock on outright pace when they were team mates at ISport last year. All the same, the Austrian driver must know that, going into his third year, he really has to get the job done this year if he is to stand a chance of progressing.

Others worth watching? Well Kamui Kobayashi does rather blow hot and cold, but he picked up two wins in the GP2 Asia series, so might be a good bet for a sprint race win or two. Team mate Jerome D'Ambrosio looked initially out of his depth in the Asia series, but he won the Formula Master championship against a very full field last year, and Former British F3 champion Mike Conway has switched to Trident Racing, and while his 2007 season yielded little in the way of results, he wasn't so very far off the pace of his old team mate Filippi in race conditions. Another man I wouldn't expect to be in the running for the title, but who might well win races. He was devastatingly quick at Silverstone last year - and this time round, he knows all the tracks.

In summary, while I can't help thinking the title race may not be as close as in past years, there's enough good, serious runners to ensure that the GP2 series will be worth watching. I'll certainly be tuning in to the racing this weekend. A final piece of news (at least for those of you in the UK) - good or bad, depending on how you look at it - is that ITV now have the rights to the GP2 series and will be broadcasting on ITV4. For those, like me, who came to love the commentary provided by Martin Haven and Gareth Rees on Eurosport, this is a shame in a way. But on the other hand, ITV has much greater potential reach, and it would be good to see the championship pick up the kind of audience that it really deserves to.