Who goes where?

It has reached that point in the year where the focus of many a driver and team is as much on the season coming as on the dog end of the one currently in train. Not so much, perhaps, if you are Red Bull, Ferrari or Mclaren, and are still in the running for this year's championships, but for everyone else, there is the hope that 2011 will be better.

And inevitably that means drivers thinking about whether they can land themselves with a more competitive seat, and teams pondering whether a change of drivers might bring a change of fortunes. It is perhaps no coincidence that the top three teams are retaining exactly the same driver line up for 2011, while it is far from clear that this is the case anywhere further down the grid.

For drivers, the most promising vacancy at the moment is probably the one alongside Robert Kubica at Renault. After a dismal 2009, where even the talents of Fernando Alonso were insufficient to keep them from slipping into midfield mediocrity, the team would appear to be once more on an upward trajectory. Current number 2 driver Vitaly Petrov has not yet been ruled out - and Eric Bouillier has been remarkably frank about what is required of the young Russian, saying that he doesn't need to match Kubica, but he does need to show that he has the potential to get rather closer to him that he is managing at the moment, but one senses that La Regie are sniffing around to see if there are better prospects out there.

I'm not convinced by the wisdom of taking on Kimi Raikkonen, though to be fair, much depends on whether the Finn is feeling a renewed enthusiasm for F1 following his sabbatical in the World Rally Championship, or whether he (or his management) is simply casting around for a way to make money as it looks like Red Bull are becoming disillusioned with the marketing potential of their tie-up at Citroen. However, if the Finn meets with Boullier and convinces him that he's genuinely serious about giving F1 another shot then, providing his pecuniary demands are not excessive, he's probably the fastest man Renault are going to be able to hire. Certainly it will be interesting to see how he compares with Robert Kubica.

More likely though, if Petrov goes, it will be in order to be replaced by one of a number of drivers who would meet Renault's job spec of being a good solid number 2 who can be relied upon to rack up constructors championship points, and who are currently finding their talents wasted in uncompetitive machinery. Timo Glock and Heikki Kovalainen have both shown they are good, serious racing drivers and their talents have been largely wasted with Virgin and Lotus this year. While it's possible those teams might be rather better prepared next year (I've rather more faith in Fernandes' Lotus operation than in the awkward menage-a-trois between Wirth Research, Richard Branson and Manor Motorsport) a Renault seat would still look a more tempting prospect.

Then there's Nick Heidfeld, back for the moment at his spiritual home of Sauber after spending much of the year on the sidelines at Mercedes, hoping that Michael Schumacher might throw in the towel. Again, Renault would be accepting they're not hiring a future mega-star if they took him on, but he's certainly not slow - he's been teamed up with Raikkonen, Webber and Kubica in the past, and held his own against all three of them. Probably a better bet than Sauber, even if Heidfeld disregarded the awkward truth that Peter Sauber's choice of driver to sit alongside Kobayashi next year is likely to be governed by financial constraints rather than driving talent.

The other name that strikes me as a possible for Renault is Force India's Adrian Sutil. The Anglo-Indian team started the year well but have been gradually slipping back towards the rear of the midfield, and it seems to me that if the German rainmaster is to progress then he's going to have to find another ride. Assessing how quick he is has never been easy - he's easily had the beating of Tonio Liuzzi this year, but he didn't always look any quicker than Giancarlo Fisichella, and going back to his debut in the sport at Spyker, it is striking that HRT's Sakon Yamamoto wasn't that far off his pace. He'd be a gamble, but there have been odd hints - particularly when the heavens open - that he's got something special about him.

Although Renault might not be his only option. Of the top teams, Renault is the only one which officially has a vacancy but Martin Brundle mischievously noted that an awful lot of drivers were seen coming and going from the Mercedes motorhome over the Monza weekend earlier in the month. Nico Rosberg is almost certain to be driving for the team again next year, but I can hardly be alone in wondering whether Michael Schumacher will call time on his so far rather uninspired come-back, or should he not jump, whether the team might opt to push him. It would be an ignominious end to a long and tremendously successful career, but time and tide wait for no man...

... And if Mercedes is to remain a German 'super team' then Adrian Sutil might be a good fit. It has been said that a part of the motivation for Mercedes' involvement in the sport has been to increase its appeal to younger car buyers, and if that is their aim then Sutil perhaps makes more sense than Nick Heidfeld (who may be relatively young by any normal definition, but, at 33, is in F1 terms beginning to run out of time). As mentioned above, Timo Glock might also be available and if the team were prepared to pay Williams enough money to get them to release him, Willi Weber's new protege, Nico Hulkenberg would tick all the right marketability boxes, and more importantly, after a rather shaky start, has begun to regularly match and sometimes beat team mate Barrichello. Perhaps not the new Schumacher, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's now faster than the old one is these days.

So far, in considering Renault and Mercedes' options, I've not mentioned any young drivers still seeking to break into F1. The bad news for would-be F1 drivers is that those top teams which might have a vacancy have enough choices from among the established F1 drivers that I'd be surprised if either of them hired a rookie. The truth is that the options for drivers looking to get their first F1 ride in 2011 are looking rather limited.

Toro Rosso and Williams have yet to announce their line-ups for next year, but I wouldn't be especially surprised if both teams retained their current line-ups. Sauber have already announced that Kamui Kobayashi will be driving for them next year, so the vacancies are likely to be made up of the following: The second Sauber, one or possibly both seats at Force India and, perhaps, a seat or two at Lotus or Virgin if someone manages to pinch Kovalainen or Glock.

Scottish DTM driver Paul Di Resta is seemingly considered a shoe-in at Force India, and if hiring a driver who hasn't raced in single seaters since 2006 seems a rather eccentric choice, then it is worth remembering that he is the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries title that year, and that his DTM career has taken off after he regularly started doing incredible things with a second string two-year old Mercedes in his debut season. Whether he's as good, or even better than Vettel, or ultimately turns out to be another driver with a strong junior record who doesn't quite cut it at the very highest level, only time will tell, but as a fellow Edinburgher, I'm glad he's getting a chance.

So who might the other hopefuls be? There's GP2 champion Pastor Maldonado, but after some stories over the summer that he was in talks with Sauber, things seem to have gone very quiet on that front of late. His problem, I suspect, is that he took a very long time to come good in GP2, and has had a wildly inconsistent career that would make him a bit of a gamble. He comes with plenty of cash, but almost certainly not as much as Telmex-backed Sergio Perez, the man whom he beat to the GP2 title. Perez was in only his second season in GP2 (as against Maldonado's 5th!) and the signing of fellow Telmex-backed driver Esteban Gutierrez as a test driver at Sauber suggests that he may have a chance with the Swiss team.

Beyond those two, it's not quite clear who else would be in the running for an F1 seat - Daniel Ricciardo has impressed me with his performances in the Renault World Series but as a Red Bull backed driver, he's unlikely to get a shot next year unless the team lose faith in Alguersuari or Buemi, both of whom have been doing a fairly decent job of late. And in any case, it might make more sense to give Ricciardo the benefit of another year gaining experience in GP2 if, as I reckon is likely, he takes the Renault World Series at his first attempt this year.

Certainly it makes more sense than taking a seat at HRT next year. Whether their struggles with the recalcitrant Dallaras have done anything to further the careers of Bruno Senna, Sakon Yamamoto or Karun Chandhok this year I rather doubt, and the simple truth is that, stuck in such a hopelessly uncompetitive car, there is a limit to what any driver can do. Even beating your team mate might depend as much on the vagaries of the machinery as on any difference between the drivers. Where Lotus look like they will make progress next year and Virgin at least look like they might do so, I see no reason to expect HRT to be any less hopeless than they have been this season. On the other hand, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they weren't on the grid at all. Which might be a blessing in disguise for some young F1 hopefuls.

Rivals

How much to read into testing times? Truth be told, it's probably not wise to make too many assumptions on the basis of fastest laps alone. Remember when, through the winter, the 2005 Honda looked like it was a couple of seconds a lap quicker round Barcelona than anything else? Or when the 2001 Prost was topping the time sheets after an abysmal 2000? In neither case did this turn out to be a reliable guide to what would happen come the season proper. Quite why Honda was so quick in the early months of 2005 I've never been sure, while in 2001, Prost were probably running their car underweight to attract sponsors.

Nonetheless, there's something tantalising and intriguing about the fact that Sebastien Vettel's Red Bull has lapped Jerez nearly a second quicker than anyone else (Hamilton's time can safely be ignored, as it was set using a 2008-spec rear wing). The chances are it was only a single particularly well hooked-up qualifying lap when track conditions happened to be just right. Word has it that it is actually Ferrari and Renault who are quickest right now, with Williams, BMW, Red Bull and Toyota clustered together and snapping at their heels. A big question mark remains over where Mclaren fit into this picture. The fact that they had not until recently been able to run their 2009 rear wing leaves open the question of whether there are fundamental problems with their 2009 car, or whether, as with the early problems with the Renault, too much is being made of too little.

All that said, the radical changes to the F1 rulebook have the potential to rewrite the form book to a degree not seen in recent years. No longer are teams chasing incremental performance gains on well-tested concepts. They are, in a sense, starting from scratch. For all that the technical rules are far more restrictive than was once the case, it is probably still just about possible to find that 'unfair advantage'. The introduction of KERS, in particular, just might allow one team to make a leap which results in a car substantially quicker than anyone else's. I hope this doesn't happen because F1 seasons in which only two cars stand any realistic chance of winning races don't tend to be very interesting. Think 1992, 2002, or 2004.

That said, though, it does depend to some extent on which team finds that unfair advantage. The 1988 F1 season remains to my mind one of the classics because, although there were only two cars in the field with any realistic chance of winning races, they were being driven by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost - and Ron Dennis was happy to let them race. In a reversal of the situation in recent years, I'd rather it were Ferrari than Mclaren or Renault. In the Schumacher era, a dominant Ferrari meant the race was a foregone conclusion. It is not entirely clear that Barrichello or Massa were often allowed to race the German, but even if they were, neither was capable of beating him on a regular basis. These days, though, the team have no clear number one and provided that management don't impose one, a battle between Massa and Raikkonen would be most intriguing. By contrast, I can't see Kovalainen putting up a serious fight against Hamilton over a whole season, and as for the idea of Piquet Jr. giving Alonso anything to worry about....

Vettel's testing times got me thinking though.... If one team turns out to be head-and-shoulders above the rest this year, wouldn't it be interesting if it were Red Bull? They've certainly produced one of the prettiest cars on the grid this year (it's a relative thing, they've all got stupidly proportioned wings, but you can't pin the blame on Adrian Newey for that...) but is it just possible that they've also produced the quickest?

Who knows, probably it's nothing more than an idle daydream. But if they have, the battle between F1's long-time nearly man Mark Webber and Grand Prix racing's new golden boy Sebastien Vettel could be as fascinating as the battle which ensued when Fernando Alonso went off to Mclaren as a double champion and suddenly found himself having to work very hard indeed to deal with his rookie team mate Lewis Hamilton.

Mark Webber is perhaps the single great unknown quantity in the sport. He's going into his eighth season now, and still I don't think we know for sure quite how good he is. We know he's quick, but there have been odd hints that he's more than merely quick. That he's one of the sport's true greats - a man who could go mano a mano with Kubica, Hamilton, Alonso or Raikkonen if he only had the equipment worthy of his talents.

After all, he put a Jaguar on the front row at Malaysia in 2003, and this in the days before teams had the option of playing with fuel loads and going for Saturday afternoon glory. At Monaco, in 2006, he looked like for a while like a serious challenger for victory in a Williams Cosworth before the engine let go. Over the last two years, he's outqualified his former title-contending team mate David Coulthard 31-4 at Red Bull. And the Japanese Grand Prix at Fuji in 2007 might be best remembered for Hamilton's great drive in the wet, but Mark Webber was actually catching him in second before he was punted off the road by... Sebastien Vettel.

For all that, it remains open to question whether Webber is really in quite the same class as, say, Hamilton, Alonso or Kubica. Way back when Renault tested both Alonso and Webber, Pat Symonds reckoned that the Spaniard was the quicker driver. His first year at Williams, was rather disappointing too. Yes, the Grove team's relationship with BMW was on the rocks by then, but he didn't really appear to be any quicker than Nick Heidfeld that year. And Heidfeld may be a solid, professional racer, but after 9 seasons in the sport, I've not seen anything to suggest he's from the very top drawer. Added to that is the question of whether the broken leg he sustained in a cycling accident over the winter might have a more lasting impact. It has often been said that no racing driver is ever quite the same after sustaining a serious leg injury, although it didn't seem to stop Michael Schumacher winning five titles after his leg-breaking crash at Silverstone in 1999.

Up against him is the sport's youngest ever winner, Sebastien Vettel. A man whose career has, in some ways, been the very opposite of Webber's. Where Webber has had to fight hard for every opportunity - not usually getting the best cars in his junior formula days, and not making it to Formula One until he was 25, Vettel's path was eased by backing from both Red Bull and BMW, and he made his F1 debut at the age of just 19, standing in for the injured Kubica at Indianapolis. He did a sensible job, came home 8th and in so doing became the youngest man ever to score an F1 point. A tug of love between BMW and Red Bull was resolved in the latter's favour and by the time of the Hungarian Grand Prix, he was a full-time F1 driver for Toro Rosso.

In the second half of 2008, the Toro Rosso proved to be a rather effective weapon, embarrassing the 'works' Red Bull squad, and when the big boys screwed up in the rain in Monza, Vettel seized the opportunity he was presented with both hands and became the youngest Grand Prix winner in the sport's history. It might have relied a little on luck, but Vettel was consistently there or thereabouts in the latter part of the season - only once finishing out of the points in the last seven races.

But how special is he? On the one hand, Toro Rosso is built around the shell of the old Minardi team - and in that light, his haul of one win, one pole and 35 points looks very impressive indeed. But another way of looking at it is that he had, at his disposal, a Ferrari-powered, Adrian Newey designed car, engineered by the hugely experienced Giorgio Ascanelli. Put that way, the Toro Rosso sounds like an impressive package indeed. Sure, he scored an awful lot more points than his team mate Bourdais, but the midfield pack was so tightly bunched last year, that this did not always equate to a significant difference in pace between the two - especially in race conditions. It is worth remembering that, at Monza, Bourdais, after being delayed at the start, was lapping just as quickly as Vettel in the rain.

Both Vettel and Webber have their reputations on the line this year. Each really has to be quicker than the other, or at least as quick as the other. Vettel need to blow away Webber to maintain his status as the sport's coming man, while Webber needs to get the better of his young new team mate if he's not to become yesterday's man before he was ever really today's. Regardless of how competitive this year's Red Bull is, it's going to be an intriguing rivalry between two seemingly apolitical, straightforward men which much at stake. But if Adrian Newey, Geoff Willis and co. have found something special, then it just might turn out to be one of the most fascinating battles the sport has seen. Roll on Australia.

On Beauty

There have been some hideous looking racing cars over the years, but I have to say that the 2009-spec F1 cars have frankly raised the bar to a whole new level. Anyone who might have been hoping that the return to slick tyres and the banning of the aerodynamic ‘flip ups’ and sundry add-ons might result in purer, more elegant looking F1 cars will be sorely disappointed. The new rules have produced the most absurd looking F1 cars I can recall, at least since the late 60s when F1 cars briefly sprouted very tall rear wings, before the governing body clamped down on them as highly dangerous. With their huge front wings and narrow, tall rear wings, they look like nothing so much as poor quality cheap toy models of F1 cars, rather than the real thing – or like photos which have been wrongly resized in Photoshop by someone who has forgot to retain the original picture’s aspect ratio.

It sparked a train of thought though – if 2009’s F1 cars are quite the ugliest there have ever been, what were the prettiest? In recent years, the rules have become ever more constrained and one would be hard-pushed to tell one F1 car apart from another once stripped of their liveries (I know this is true in my case because I failed miserably with Autosport’s Christmas challenge of identifying last year’s cars, sans-paintwork) but that wasn’t true, even as recently as the late 1980s and early 1990s. I always thought that, aesthetically, the trend for raised noses was a negative development, but I do have a soft spot for the first car to adopt this design, the Tyrrell 019. Ken’s anhedral winged machine had an elegance that the solution which the F1 designers all eventually arrived at does not. A year later, Gary Anderson’s Jordan 191 stands out as perhaps the last real F1 design classic. A car born not out of wind tunnel data and scientific research, for the fledgling Jordan team had no access to such things, but out from the inspiration and intuition of designer Gary Anderson. In the years since then, it has been hard to pick

The Jordan 191 was as quick as it was good looking, but sadly, the old adage that if it looks right, it will go right has been disproved on many an occasion. I still rate Michael Tetu’s 1988 Ligier JS31 as one of the most outright stunning racing cars ever to turn a wheel, at least in its early season guise, before it sprouted a rather unsightly airbox. Sadly it was an absolute dog on the track. It’s unusual lines were the result of the designer having opted to run two side-mounted fuel tanks, which perhaps contributed to its wayward handling.

Nor was it the only car I can think of which looked fast but turned out to be worse than useless once it turned a wheel. A couple of years before, Gordon Murray stunned the world when he unveiled Brabham’s low-line BT55. It looked quite unlike anything which had preceded it, low-slung, sleek, in short, it looked fast. Unfortunately, it had no traction out of slow corners, and the low-line shape was achieved by mounting the BMW turbo engine on its side, which caused all manner of problems in itself. The following year, Bernie Ecclestone’s men returned with a much more conventional looking car.

Gordon Murray’s basic concept, though, would later be much better executed by the men at Woking. The 1988 Mclaren MP4/4 wasn’t so extreme as the Brabham but it followed the low-line philosophy Murray had pioneered in the BT55, and , unlike the Brabham, proved to be very effective indeed. Whether the MP4/4 deserves to be considered the best F1 car of all time is an open question – it won 15 of the 16 Grands Prix that year, but with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost on the books, and with Honda’s matchless Honda V6 turbo providing the power – it was always going to be quick, wasn’t it? Maybe, although Lotus, who also had use of Honda’s V6 that year, and who had triple world champion Nelson Piquet on the books, might beg to differ…What it does have is a memorable, simple, elegance.

It might have been the most successful car of the period, but to my mind, it wasn’t the best looking of the lot. That honour, to my eye, goes to the following year’s Ferrari 640. The first car that John Barnard designed for Ferrari, it was also the first Formula 1 car to feature a steering-wheel mounted semi-automatic gearbox. For me, it could have been the most mechanically conventional racing car and it would still stand out. It is in all honesty one of only a very few F1 cars, certainly of the last 30 years, which would not look out of place in an art museum.

Sometimes, it is not the shape of a car which makes it memorable, or beautiful, but the livery that does the job. Euroracing’s rather ineffectual Alfa Romeo 184T stood out not so much for its shape as for its green and red Benetton livery and it’s gold wheels. Ferraris, even the most visually unappealing ones, have always had the team’s scarlet colours working in their favour. On the flip side, Alan Jenkins’ pretty little Onyx ORE1 was ruined by the hideous blue and pink ‘Moneytron’ livery it ran in…

To my my mind, the most beautiful racing cars, though, have come not from F1, but from sportscar racing. Not the open-top Spyders which currently bedevil the category (and which were similarly ubiquitous, and just as unattractive, in the late 1970s) but the closed-top sportscar racers of the late 1960s and the Group C era some twenty years later. The Porsche 917 might have been the most memorable of them, but to my mind, the Ferrari 330 P4 was the prettiest. The Alfa Romeo T33 was a strong contender too.

Later on, the Sauber C9, in its Mercedes silver-arrows livery is perhaps as perfect a racing car design as there has ever been. It was devastatingly quick too, dominating sportscar racing in 1989 and 1990. The last, 3.5 atmo engined Group C cars were a little too clearly the product of the wind tunnel rather than the designer’s imagination, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Lola’s T92/10. It was intended as a customer sports prototype, filling the niche left vacant by the Porsche 962, but only two ever ran in the final year of the WSC, and they never stood a chance against the works entries of Toyota and Peugeot.

Rally cars have always been more about brutality than about beauty. The most striking examples, perhaps, come from the Group B era, with the Metro 6R4 and the Peugeot 205T16 standing out as the epitome of this. There have been occasional stunning looking rally cars though. I always had a soft spot for the curves of that orphan child of the Group B era, the Ford RS200. The Lancia 037 was a classic of its time, somehow contriving to take the Lancia Beta as a starting point and yet end up with something truly purposeful.

Asked what he thought of the this year’s Ferrari F60 F1 car, Luca Di Montezemelo joked “The new car looks fairly ugly, rather small, a bit disgusting...” He might have had his tongue in his cheek, but at the same time, I’d be surprised if any of this year’s F1 cars were to make it into a future list of the most beautiful F1 cars.

(I have incorporated links to pictures of the cars mentioned above. I don’t have photographs of most of them myself, and don’t wish to ‘steal’ others’ photos, so I thought this would be the best compromise).

A Comedy of Errors

I've remarked in the past on the eerie similarities between the 2007 title battle and the fight for the 1986 World Championship. The fierce rivalry between two team mates who had the best car. The outsider who went into the final round with little chance of the title, but who ended up snatching it away from those feuding team mates. Maurice Hamilton even got a book out of it.

This year's championship fight, by contrast, reminded me of nothing so much as the 1999 World Championship - the title it seemed nobody wanted to win. The 1999 championship was a fight between Mclaren's Mika Hakkinen and Ferrari's Eddie Irvine. However, such was their wild inconsistency that towards the end of the season, it really looked as though the steady, reliable Heinz-Harald Frentzen in a Jordan Mugen-Honda which was far from truly competitive, might sneak in between them and steal the title. Of course, in the end, Frentzen's Jordan fell too far from the pace, and it was Mclaren's Mika Hakkinen who finally got his act together to win the title.

Substitute Jordan and Frentzen for BMW Sauber and Robert Kubica, Irvine for Massa and Mika Hakkinen for Lewis Hamilton, and we saw a near identical story play out this year. The first of Massa's mistakes came at the very first corner of the first race of the season. Too early onto the throttle on a dusty track, he spun to the back of the field. He would later collide with David Coulthard and lose more time before an engine failure finally put paid to his race. There were more blunders at the next round in Malaysia. Hamilton lost valuable points with a bungled pit stop, but Massa recorded his second straight non-finish when he spun out at turn 8, seemingly frustrated by having been outpaced by team mate Raikkonen.

Massa made amendments in Bahrain, while Hamilton made an utter mess of his race. Starting from the front row, he blew his start and then compounded his error by running into the back of his old rival, Fernando Alonso. It ensured that he would take no points away from the Middle Eastern round. In Canada, Lewis Hamilton made an inexplicable error in the pitlane, slamming into the back of Kimi Raikkonen's Ferrari and eliminating both of them on the spot. A problem with Ferrari's refuelling rig - something which would become something of a signature problem for them - ensured that Massa wasn't really able to capitalise on Hamilton's mistake.

Hamilton got a 10-place penalty in France as a result, and failed to score after compounding his error with a dubious pass on Sebastian Vettel which earned him a drive-through penalty. A week later, it was Hamilton who drove a flawless race in the wet at Silverstone, while Massa looked like he had no business being in F1 at all, spinning four times on his way to finishing 13th and last. His failure to keep Hamilton behind him in the dying laps of the German Grand Prix two weeks on from his Silverstone embarrassment seemed the hallmark of a man who couldn't live with the pressure of being a title contender, but things turned around in Hungary.

Perhaps the finest drive of his career, Massa pulled a move on Hamilton at the start which could, I suppose, be described as Hamiltonesque, and coped well with immense pressure on a track at which Mclaren were expected to dominate, only for his engine to give out just 3 laps from the end. No mistake from Massa here, but Ferrari, for the second time in 2008, cost Massa points with engine problems. Strange, given the two race engine rule and the engine freeze had succeeded in making engine failures exceptionally rare in F1, and, combined with Raikkonen's engine blow-up in Valencia, it was enough to leave some wondering whether Ferrari were gaming the engine-freeze rules which allowed teams to make modifications only for reliability purposes. Massa drove another great race in Valencia, but was lucky not to pay the price for another Ferrari pitlane blunder. He was released into the path of Adrian Sutil at his first stop, but inexplicably was not penalised, with the team being handed only a fine for their mistake. It was the only time I've ever known an unsafe release not to warrant a time penalty, but perhaps after the engine failure in Hungary robbed him of victory, FIA were imposing karma by fiat.

The race in Singapore again saw pitlane mistakes from Ferrari cost Felipe Massa valuable points. He was comfortably the fastest man around the bumpy street circuit, but when the team released him before they'd removed the fuel hose from his car, they cost him an almost certain victory. A subsequent penalty for unsafe release helped to ensure there was no chance he would score any points that weekend.

In Japan, the teams made no mistakes, but both drivers seemed determined to lose the title. Lewis Hamilton, needing only a safe haul of points, made a kamikaze run at Raikkonen into the first corner, scattering the front runners and allowing Robert Kubica into a comfortable lead. Felipe Massa then drove Hamilton off the track trying to fend off the Englishman as he fought his way back up the field. Both men earned drive-through penalties for their antics (the case against Massa was rather more clear-cut, it must be said, but the stewards were a law unto themselves this year) and Massa scraped just 2 points, while Hamilton failed to score at all.

In the end, of course, even a small slip in the final laps of the Brazilian Grand Prix which let Sebastian Vettel through into 5th place was not enough to prevent Lewis Hamilton becoming the youngest world champion in history. Hamilton is undoubtedly a real talent, perhaps the fastest man in the sport right now, but I can't help but feel that he didn't actually drive as well as he did last year. There were times when his pace seemed otherworldly - Silverstone, Monaco and Germany spring to mind, but one can't help but feel he made an awful lot of mistakes this year. Too many to stand a chance of winning the title in any normal season. This year though he was helped by the fact that only Massa and Ferrari were any serious threat to him in terms of pace, and while Massa may have made fewer errors, Ferrari made more, comprehensively blowing the reputation they had built up over the Brawn/Todt/Schumacher years in the process.

Mark Hughes, in an agreeably contrarian spirit, wrote a piece for Autosport the other week arguing that Massa was the man who deserved the title this year. I'm not entirely convinced. For all that the Ferrari was less reliable than Hamilton's Mclaren, and his team made more errors, I can't help but think any disadvantage Massa suffered from this was more than cancelled out by the fact that the Italian car was, fundamentally, faster.

So, all in all, it was an interesting season, and if neither of the title contenders put in the kind of flawless performances that, for example, Alonso managed when he took the title from Schumacher in 2006, that shouldn't detract from what turned out to be a very hard fought battle between two brilliant, flawed drivers that ended in the most dramatic fashion I've ever seen in all the years I've been following the sport. It was the first time that a championship has changed hands on the last lap of the last race since Jim Clark suffered engine failure on the last lap of the Mexican Grand Prix of 1964, handing the title to John Surtees. Let's hope that the rule changes next year don't ruin what has been one of the most open and competitive seasons F1 has known in a long time.

The 2009 Rules: A Blessing or a KERS?

If last weekend's European Grand Prix made one thing abundantly clear, it is that the sport is in dire need of rules changes to make overtaking if not easy, then at least a little less contrary to the laws of physics than it is at present. Here we were on a brand new track which is wide, features several slow corners at the end of long straights and plenty run-off area to play with should drivers fancy a gamble, and yet still the racing was processional, and nobody seemed able to pass anyone else.

I have heard it said that it is the very fact that the cars are so closely matched in performance that militates against passing at the moment. In the second part of qualifying, where the cars are all on the same fuel load, just 0.9s separated fastest man Sebastian Vettel from 15th placed Nelson Piquet, so there is no doubt that little separates the fast guys from the tail-enders right now, at least over a single lap. I'm not convinced, though, that this lies at the root of the overtaking problem. After all, there was a reasonable amount of passing in the supporting GP2 races. While the gaps in GP2 are larger, I suspect this has much to do with the greater variation in driver ability than anything else. After all, unlike in F1, the cars are all built to exactly the same specification, and while some teams may be better able to set up their cars than others, that surely can't count for as much as having a fundamentally different chassis in the first place.

The reason overtaking has become so difficult in F1 over the last few years has, to my mind, less to do with how closely matched the cars are, as the fact that the current design of F1 cars massively militates against overtaking. The cars are on a knife-edge aerodynamically, immensely sensitive to 'dirty air' coming off the back of a car in front so that following the car in front closely through corners is all but impossible. Braking distances are so short that a pass under braking requires a courage bordering on foolhardiness and in any case, the fuel/tyre stop pattern of the modern Grand Prix is such that a driver is usually better advised to wait until the pit stops to pass the guy in front.

It's a problem which the FIA are finally coming round to recognising, and attempting to address with what is being talked about as the most major shake-up of the F1 rulebook in over 20 years. Years ago, FIA Head Max Mosley might have talked of the need to see F1 as a "game of high speed chess" but at last, perhaps, wiser counsel is beginning to prevail. The question is, have they got it right?

The biggest, and perhaps the most talked about change is the introduction of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) which use energy generated under braking, which would otherwise be wasted, to be used to provide additional power for the car. The rules for KERS are remarkably complicated. The KERS units will be limited by the rules to 60Kw and storage capacity for the device is limited to 400Kj. This means that a driver will be able to call upon an additional 80BHP for about 6 seconds a lap. It could help to promote overtaking, as it can be seen as a kind of "push to pass" button as used in A1GP and in Champ Car last year. The trouble is, that as it can only be used for 6s or so a lap, it is likely that every driver will simply hit the button on the longest straight, where the additional power will give the greatest advantage. Push to pass is, itself, no panacea for the problem of overtaking, but one can't help feel that this is probably not the solution. I have to confess I'm disappointed too that the rules are placing artificial limits on how efficient the device is allowed to be - no matter how much energy the teams may be able to get the devices to reclaim from braking each lap, they will not be allowed to claw back more than 400Kj. How this is supposed to meet the other objective of KERS - spurring improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency - I fail to see.

Much less talked about, but arguably of more significance, moveable aerodynamic devices are being allowed back into the sport (like KERS, it's not in itself a new technology. Mclaren had a KERS system back in 1999 before it was banned and adjustable wings go back to the 1960s). It will be possible for drivers to adjust their front wing angle by up to 6 degrees, a maximum of twice a lap. The idea is apparently to improve overtaking opportunities by enabling drivers to dial in more downforce at the front when in the slipstream, enabling a driver to have more confidence in the car under braking. I can't help thinking that the change might have wider application that that. It would be possible to change the oversteer/understeer characteristics for specific parts of the circuit - perhaps running more front wing angle through the twisty bits at the end of circuits like Hockenheim and Silverstone. It will certainly add an intriguing new variable to car set up. Whether it will help overtaking is another matter...

Perhaps the biggest changes, but also the most difficult to analyse as a layman, are the changes to the aerodynamics rules. Many a race fan has complained about the profusion of aerodynamic extrusions - 'chimneys', 'horns' and 'barge boards' on the grounds that they're aesthetically unappealing. Maybe I simply have a very unusual sense of what is beautiful, but I always rather appreciated them myself. To my mind the designs made the cars look like immensely intricate paeans to the laws of physics - shaped exactly as they were because that was what the wind tunnel insisted upon - no matter how counter-intuitive it looked. It is undeniable, though, that the profusion of 'upper body' aerodynamic pieces has made the cars still more sensitive to running in turbulent air, and I'm perfectly happy to see them go if it is going to mean better racing.

The decision to allow lower ground clearance on front wings, on the other hand, is a positive development both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of improving overtaking. The 50mm ground clearance of the front wings on current F1 cars just looks wrong, and on top of that, drivers report that the change made cars notably more sensitive to running turbulent air (though this is in part because teams tried to claw back the lost downforce by developing ever more complicated upper body aerodynamics - see above...) Presumably, the idea is that by banning said upper-body aero pieces, the lower front wings can be lowered without cornering speeds getting out of control.

At the same time, the rear wings are getting taller and narrower. I rather like the look myself, although Autosport's resident F1 design expert questions whether the effect might be to make the cars less aerodynamically stable and more sensitive to turbulent air (and consequently less able to run closely to the car in front) than they are at present. My degree not being in aeronautics or physics (I was a software man) I don't have the faintest clue whether this is the case or not. I hope the FIA have done their sums right, but it wouldn't be the first time that they hadn't.

What seems like a backward step even to an ignoramus like myself is the decision to reduce the maximum size of the rear diffuser on the 2009 F1 cars. Downforce generated by underbody diffusers is much less affected by turbulent air, and cars which rely to a greater extent on downforce generated by the underside of the car (such as the first generation GP2 car and the Panoz Champ Car raced last year) tend to be consequently much more able to run closely together. I only hope that the change is not sufficient to undo all the good work brought about by other changes to the rules.

Slick tyres will ensure the cars look more like proper single seaters than they do with the silly grooved tyres but whether it will make much difference to the racing is another matter. Drivers such as Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve always insisted, at the time that slicks were kicked out of F1, that the change resulted in the cars having much less 'feel' than they did previously, so I suppose it is possible that their reintroduction will enable drivers to push that little bit closer to the absolute limit without going over it, but that said, guys like Alonso, Kubica or Hamilton don't look to me like they are struggling with the tyres they have at present...

Will it all work? I'm in no better position than anyone else to say, really. I certainly hope it does, because, though F1 was never about constant wheel-to-wheel action in the way that some rose-tinted misty-eyed old guys insist it once was, it was rarely as processional as last weekend's European Grand Prix. And if none of the above works? Guys like Flavio Briatore might agitate for reverse grids or weight penalties or some other such nonsense that benights touring car racing these days.

Me, I've no time for any of that. There should be no penalties for success at the top level of international motorsport, any more than Usain Bolt should have to start a couple of metres back from his rivals at the next Olympics. I do recall, though, a rule change a few years back that led to overtaking at Monaco, only to be carelessly cast aside for reasons unclear. Restricting drivers to one set of tyres per race led to some of the most intensely fought individual races in years. Now there's a control tyre, there seems even less reason not to bring it back. Failing that, how about water sprinklers by the side of the track?

Known Unknowns

That was a breath of fresh air, wasn't it? Whether it was the sight of Fernando Alonso ragging his ill-handling Renault in hot pursuit of Sebastien Bourdais in the closing laps, the rear end hanging out over the kerbs, or Heikki Kovalainen's inspired move on Alonso into turn 13, two laps from the finish, this felt like a race.

Sometimes you can end up feeling jaded, and wonder if the magic has gone. After too many line-astern processions last year, and talk of Ferrari domination this year, I was not as keyed up about the new F1 season as I have been in the past. Hell, I didn't even stay up to watch the race live (though in my defence, I'd just come in from best-man duties at a friend's wedding at 2am, and collapsed straight into bed). What I saw in Melbourne this weekend helped to reawaken my interest, though.

I'm not talking about the accidents. Jonathan Meades may once have opined that the unspoken appeal of all motorsport was gratification of the appetite for crashes, but it ain't so. Rather, what gripped me was that this was a race which was hard fought all the way down the field. Maybe not at the front, but elsewhere down the order, the Ferraris of Massa and Raikkonen had to force their way up through the pack - though both made themselves look rather foolish in the process. Fernando Alonso showed why, whatever you may think of his behaviour last year, he is still a very formidable force, throwing the Renault around like a man born to it. In keeping a double world champion behind him in the closing stages, Sebastien Bourdais demonstrated that, while he may lack the outright pace of young team mate Sebastien Vettel, he's picked up considerable racecraft in his time in Champ Car. So Lewis Hamilton ran away with it serenely at the front? Well, we'll see if he can do it again in Malaysia. I wouldn't put too much money on it.

What the weekend didn't do, however, is answer the many questions all race fans have been asking over the winter. Let's start with the big one. Is Mclaren going to be a match for Ferrari?
It's hard to know, as Ferrari and their drivers made such a dog's breakfast of the Melbourne weekend. First there was Raikkonen's fuel pressure problem in qualifying, which relegated him to 15th on the grid. Then Massa became the first victim of the traction control ban, losing the back end of his Ferrari at the first corner on the opening lap and falling behind even Raikkonen.
Raikkonen made steady progress up the field, only to throw it away by going off at turn 3 not once but twice. And to cap it all, both Ferraris went out with engine failure. Mclaren must feel their chances of stealing back the constructors championship are off to a good start. So we're left with two contradictory fragments. On the one hand, Raikkonen's mid-race pace, and the way he was all over the back of Kovalainen, suggests that had he qualified at the front, he might have disappeared off into the distance. On the other hand, Massa, in the other Ferrari, qualified behind both Mclarens and a BMW. A sign that the new F2008 isn't the car to beat after all? Or that the Brazilian is lost without traction control?

Talking of traction control, is the standard ECU and the loss of traction control and intelligent 'engine braking' going to make a difference to the racing? The initial evidence appears to be positive - there were more mistakes from drivers, and the cars appeared to visibly slide around rather more than they did last year. Appearances may be deceptive, however. Cars may have lacked grip more because of an unusually 'green' track than because of fundamental changes to the cars' electronics. And the driver errors might have had more to do with the intense heat in Melbourne over the weekend and a degree of race-rustiness from the winter break than anything else. The jury, I think, is still out.

If the loss of driver aids appeared to make some guys look rather foolish, then few looked more out of their depth than Nelson Piquet Junior. Is this a sign that the scion of the Piquet family has just been found out - that he isn't really up to F1 standards? Well maybe. But maybe not. He did, of course, qualify only 21st, but even Fernando Alonso could not get the difficult Renault any higher than 13th on the grid. Piquet had the lion's share of the team's problems in practice and got little running in on a track he had never been to before. And let's not forget that Piquet is a man who gave Lewis Hamilton a run for his money in GP2 a couple of years back - which you can't imagine Ricardo Rosset or Gaston Mazzacane having been able to do. It's early days. That said, few really great drivers look so hopelessly out of their depth on their debut...

There's a couple of other newcomers, or near-newcomers over whom question marks still hang. Sebastien Vettel looked mighty in second qualifying, but that was about the last we saw of him. His Toro Rosso never took to the track in Q3, and then he was eliminated on the opening lap in the race. Testing has tended to suggest that he has the measure of the Red Bulls, but then testing tended to suggest that BMW were in trouble. Vettel's pace rather put Sebastien Bourdais in the shade. A shame for the 4 times Champ Car champion who has waited so long for his F1 chance - who looks like he might just have been paired up with the next big thing. Thing is, though, that Bourdais is convinced that he could have been through into Q2 had he not been caught out by the yellow flags during his qualifying run. An excuse, or an explanation? Time will tell, though if Bourdais doesn't want to be written off as a nearly-man, he will have to make an impression quickly.

Where do Williams stand in the scheme of things? Pre-season, the talk had been that they would be leading the chasing pack behind Mclaren and Ferrari, but in Melbourne Rosberg found himself outqualified by both Sauber BMWs and a Toyota. He dealt with the Toyota easily enough in the race, but never quite looked the equal of the BMWs on pace. Was this the result of a Friday practice session lost to car problems, or a sign that the Williams just isn't quite on the pace of the BMWs? Maybe Malaysia will give us a clearer idea.

Then, perhaps most intriguing of all, there's the question of quite where BMW stand in the pecking order. Robert Kubica surprised us all by grabbing a front row slot at Albert Park. It probably would have been pole had he not gone off onto the grass at turn 12 on his fast lap, too. Ah, we nodded sagely...the effect of a light fuel load. Well, sort of. But not that light. Kubica came in for fuel a few laps before pole-man Hamilton did, but then but for his error, he would have been a couple of tenths quicker than him in qualifying too. It does rather point to the possibility that, over a single lap if not over a race distance, the BMW might be right on the pace of Mclaren and Ferrari. Which will certainly make things interesting at some of the tracks where overtaking is more difficult.

I'm left with the impression that Melbourne gave us pointers. We learned what the questions are, but we have not found out what the answers will be. We are in the terrain of Donald Rumsfeld's known unknowns. A good thing we've only a week until Malaysia and a chance to find out more.

The Motorsports Ramblings Top 10 - 2007

It may not be the Autocourse list, but it is a good two months earlier. Argue with my selection all you will, but this represents my best attempt to decide who did the best job in 2007. Without further ado...

10. Heikki Kovalainen

It must have sounded like an enticing prospect. For your debut season, you get last year's World Championship winning car, a year's prior preparation as their official test driver, and Giancarlo Fisichella as your team mate. It didn't quite work out as hoped for the young Finn. There is little doubt that this year's Renault R27 was a pale shadow of its predecessor, and Fisichella is a tougher nut to crack than is popularly assumed (just ask Ralph Firman, Alex Wurz, Felipe Massa or Jenson Button, all of whom came off second best to him).

The low point of his season came at the beginning. While fellow GP2 graduate Lewis Hamilton was grabbing all the plaudits at the front, Kovalainen had a messy race, with a spin and an off-track excursion, and finished a long way off the pace of his team mate. In other words, he looked like a rookie. It didn't immediately get a whole lot better, and indeed some of his early season performances were so poor there was talk of him being shown the door and replaced with Nelson Piquet Jr.

A promising showing in Spain, where for the first time he outraced Fisichella, gave hint that there was potential, but it was in the North American races that Kovalainen began to really turn things around. In Canada he recovered from a poor qualifying performance to finish 4th, ahead of such as Alonso and Raikkonen. A week later in Indianapolis, he ran rings around Fisichella and fought hard with Raikkonen and Heidfeld in the opening stages, eventually coming home 5th. From there on in, he was in a roll, almost invariably outpacing Fisichella and scoring points on all but two occasions. Late on in the season, he put in his most impressive performance to date, keeping the Renault on the island in very tricky conditions to finish an excellent 2nd in Fuji. Wherever he ends up when the Alonso saga shakes out, he's served notice than there's more than one quick Finn in F1.

9. Robert Kubica

Such was the explosive pace which the Pole showed when he burst onto the F1 scene at the end of last year, one could be forgiven for thinking his 2007 season a little disappointing. After all, he didn't quite get onto terms with team mate Nick Heidfeld over the course of the whole season, despite the widespread assumption he would comfortably outpace the German this year. He was genuinely quicker at Melbourne and (most notably) at Magny Cours, but elsewhere he appeared to be ever so slightly overshadowed. On reflection, though, he did about as much as anyone really had any right to expect. He was amongst the drivers who found the control Bridgestone tyres hardest to adapt to, and as someone who skipped GP2, many of the circuits were quite unfamiliar to him. Given these disadvantages, its impressive he ran Heidfeld as close as he did.

A potential surprise win fell by the wayside in China when his hydraulics packed up while leading and fueled to the finish. On the plus side, he could count himself lucky simply to be alive and unscathed after a truly horrific looking accident at 190mph during the Canadian Grand Prix. On balance, a pretty solid performance for a man in his first full season of F1.

8. Mark Webber

What is it with Mark Webber? Without fail, the man always seems to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. He spent two years with Williams while they were in the depths of their troubles, and then he goes and moves to Red Bull just in time to end up racing the woefully unreliable RB3. On the plus side, it was at least reasonably quick when it kept going.

On points, David Coulthard actually came out ahead over the season, but that only goes to show how misleading raw points tallies can be when it comes to the performances of drivers further down the field. Look at it this way: Was the Red Bull really a car which you'd expect to make it through the top 10 run-off in qualifying on a regular basis? No? Well Mark Webber got it through on no less than 10 occasions. Coulthard, by contrast, got there just twice. OK, so there was less to separate them in race conditions, but still, with the notable exceptions of China and Bahrain, it was the Australian who had the edge.

Like many a true racer, he was at his absolute best in wet conditions, taking a podium for Red Bull at the Nurburgring and looking like he might challenge for victory at Fuji before being eliminated by Sebastien Vettel - under a safety car, no less. It was emblematic of a season, and a career, which seems to have been dogged by bad luck throughout. One can only hope that in 2008 he'll finally get a chance to show what he can do.

7. Jenson Button

If Mark Webber had a frustrating time of it in 2007, he can perhaps console himself with the thought that at least he wasn't driving a Honda. The Japanese concern has spent years carefully building up a reputation as an engineering-led company with some very well-made cars and bikes, only to go and sabotage itself by establishing a colossally awful F1 team.

This year's RA107 was terrible. So bad, that for much of the season, it was outpaced by a group of ex-Arrows mechanics running last year's Honda with a pair of drivers rejected by the works. Initially, Button seemed to take this rather badly, and he found himself being outpaced by Rubens Barrichello. In reality, he was probably suffering, as many drivers had done, from the swap from Michelins to Bridgestones. Once he got that licked, he drove better than almost anyone. How else to explain how he dragged his car into the points in Magny Cours and Monza, ahead of sundry Williams and Toyotas? If that were not enough, how about sticking the car on the third row in Fuji? With the weather acting as something of a leveller, Button got a rare chance to make full use of his supreme delicacy of touch and demonstrate why some consider him to be in the same sort of class as Raikkonen, Alonso and Hamilton.

A wet/dry track provided another opportunity to show what he could do a week later in China, and he seized it with both hands, taking a 5th place finish which was comfortably the team's best result all season, and which finally hauled them ahead of Super Aguri in the points table. The thought occurs that had Button been in a Super Aguri, he might actually have done better, so lets hope that Honda get their act together in 2008. If they do, Button could really fly in the brave new world of standard ECUs and no traction control.

6. Nick Heidfeld

He's got a reputation for being a touch dull, has Nick Heidfeld. A perception, one might add, which is unlikely to be significantly altered by his decision to sport the weirdest facial hair the sport has seen since the 1970s (when, lets face it, weird facial hair really wasn't all that weird). Still, there must be a few teams pondering upon the advantages of dullness in a lead driver, right now. Especially when its married to the kind of prodigious pace which Heidfeld has demonstrated this year.

Remember how, at the beginning of the season, he expected he would be blown away by Robert Kubica? Didn't happen. Instead, Heidfeld was the one man who could just occasionally gatecrash the Ferrari/Mclaren battle at the front. Recall, for instance, his wonderfully opportunistic move on Alonso for 4th in Bahrain? Remember, too, that he was the one man able to give Hamilton pause for thought in Canada. Not convinced? Here's another stat. On occasions where both the BMW drivers finished, only twice did Kubica beat Heidfeld all season.

I don't know if there is any chance of it happening, but think how convenient it would be for all concerned if Mario Thiessen and Ron Dennis were to organise a Heidfeld/Alonso swap. And if it were to happen, who's to say that Heidfeld wouldn't given Hamilton more of a run for his money than anyone would expect?

5. Nico Rosberg

How good was this year's Williams? We'll never know for sure, but it didn't look very good in the hands of an experienced guy like Alex Wurz. Chances are, Nico Rosberg was making the FW29 look a good deal better than it actually was. Certainly, he seemed determined from the outset to extract every last drop of pace from the 2007 Williams. He signaled his intent with 7th in the Australian Grand Prix, pulling off the race's only pass of any account in the process, at a circuit where such things are supposed to be next to impossible. Two weeks later, he hung gamely on to Felipe Massa's Ferrari in Malaysia until his engine let go. He was damned quick in qualifying at Monaco - a circuit where he has not previously shined - and was let down only by a strategy that really relied on his not getting stuck behind a heavily fueled Nick Heidfeld.

While Alex Wurz was lucky to pick up a bundle of points in a couple of very high-attrition races, Rosberg by contrast had to work very hard for every point he scored, doing what he could against BMWs and Renaults which were usually faster. In the final race, he even went one better, keeping much closer to Fernando Alonso's Mclaren than anyone had any right to expect, and passing both BMWs on the track, on his way to fourth place. I'm not at all sure anyone else achieved so much with so little, this season.

4. Felipe Massa

First, a disclaimer. The performances of the leading 4 drivers were so closely matched this year, that I could make a good case for any of them as my driver of the year. Certainly, had the dice fallen a little differently over the course of the year, we might now have been looking at Brazil's fourth world champion. Think about the times that he lost points needlessly. The gearbox failure in qualifying at Melbourne, the refueling error in qualifying at Hungary, his failure to get off the grid at Silverstone. And that's without even mentioning the two races where he failed to finish at all - thanks to suspension failure at Monza and a silly error on the part of both driver and team in Montreal which led to his disqualification.

In the plus column, Massa was frequently mighty in the first part of the season. We'll never know how much of a threat he might have posed in Melbourne, but based on his pace in the subsequent races, Raikkonen might not have found it easy to secure a win on his Ferrari debut. In Bahrain and Barcelona, he was imperious, comfortably having the measure of his more illustrious team mate. He would probably have equalled Raikkonen's win tally too, had he not had to sacrifice his own desire for a home victory at Interlagos to help his team mate's title ambitions.

So why doesn't he feature higher up my list? Two reasons really. Firstly, once Raikkonen really got to grips with the Ferrari and its Bridgestone rubber, Massa rarely looked quite as quick as his team mate (save of course at Brazil). Over a single qualifying lap, he perhaps still had it, but over a race distance, he seemed to lack that last tenth of a second a lap. The second reason is that he never showed quite the 'fight' of the other three. Sure, he was unlucky with his start position on a number of occasions, but one can't help but feel that Raikkonen, Hamilton or Alonso might have made up more places in Hungary or Melbourne. He was also a tad underwhelming whenever the track was wet, come to that. These are minor niggles though, and like any of the big 4, he would have made a worthy champion.

3. Fernando Alonso

How short was the reign of the man who finally toppled King Schumacher. If you only ever read the British tabloids, you might think that Alonso's year consisted of being blown away by a fresh faced British newcomer and going off in one almighty sulk. Which, of course, would be nonsense (apart, perhaps, from the bit about the sulking).

Yes, there were days when Hamilton appeared to have his team mate beaten on pace, but equally, there were occasions when Alonso was comfortably the quicker of the two. Think of his dominant performances at Malaysia and Monza, for example, or the way he just left his team mate for dust at Spa or Silverstone. Fernando Alonso was also responsible for two of the most astounding passing manouvres of the year - on Massa for the lead of the German Grand Prix and most impressively of all, round the outside of Heidfeld at the Lycee in the French Grand Prix.

The falling out with Mclaren was unedifying, for sure, and his public pronouncements suggested an unhealthy degree of paranoia. On the other hand, though, how much more impressive that a man who was barely on speaking terms with his team, and who had fallen out spectacularly with the boss of the operation could simply tune it all out and drive as he did in Monza and Spa, while at the very eye of the storm.

So why only 3rd? Firstly, I can't help thinking that he made more mistakes than Hamilton or Raikkonen - he just got lucky and didn't pay as heavy a penalty for them. His startline move on Massa at the Spanish Grand Prix was ill-judged and his multifarious Canadian errors smacked of desperation. He looked scrappy at Indianapolis and Bahrain, come to that. It seemed he was far more rattled by Hamilton than was the case the other way round. Secondly, at the very death, in Shanghai and Interlagos, he seemed, well, flat. Had he been at his mighty best in Shanghai, he just might have taken the fight to Raikkonen, and who knows, he could have been a triple world champion by now.

2. Kimi Raikkonen

Let's be clear about one thing. If this list were based only on drivers performances in the latter half of the season, Kimi Raikkonen would be my driver of the year. From Indianapolis onwards, he was on the form of his life. He dominated Grands Prix at Silverstone, Spa and China, looked quicker than Massa in race trim in Turkey and gave Hamilton far more of a fight that might have been expected in Hungary. It was said that the 2007 Ferrari didn't really work well in wet conditions, but this did not seem to trouble Raikkonen at the Japanese Grand Prix, where he thoroughly shaded his team mate. If he needed a little assistance from Massa in Brazil to be sure of the title, well, so be it.

Mark Hughes once opined of Kimi Raikkonen that "he refuses even to acknowledge the game". He was talking about the constant psychological warfare that seems to be a standard part of Formula 1 at the very top level these these days. Kimi doesn't go in for it, and he doesn't let others throw him off his stride either. When he found himself outpaced by Massa at the beginning of the year, there was no self doubt, nor any petulant suggestion that Ferrari were favouring the Brazilian. He showed no outward sign that this had gotten to him at all. He simply kept his head down and worked on finding the missing tenths of a second. It's an attribute which would have been much appreciated in the Mclaren garage this year, and one which just might have helped him secure the title. Both Hamilton and Alonso made mistakes under pressure this year, pressure which was at least partly of their own creation.

So why's he not at the top of my list? Simple, this is about performance over the whole season and he was really rather lacklustre in the opening part of the year. A man who is supposedly the outright fastest driver in the world really should not be getting beaten by Felipe Massa, and in Malaysia, Bahrain and Spain, he was simply outclassed. He might have had the pace in Monaco, but a rare unforced error in qualifying meant we had no way of of knowing. Still, as I have said before, he's a worthy champion nonetheless, and his comeback drive to win the title must rank amongst the most extraordinary in the sport's history.

1. Lewis Hamilton

The British press have a lot to answer for. Here was a driver of astonishing natural talent, a man with a seemingly innate ability to make an F1 car dance on the very edge of adhesion, and by Brazil I was simply sick to the back teeth of hearing about hm, and quietly hoping that Kimi Raikkonen might wrest the title from his grasp.

It's usually assumed that it takes at least a couple of seasons to get fully to grips with F1. Lewis, armed with the most complete preparation any rookie has ever had, and access to the most advanced simulator in the sport, set about making a mockery of this. By his third race, he was outpacing his double world champion team mate Fernando Alonso and after two victories in North America, the lad from Stevenage had emerged as the odds-on favourite for the World Title.

Over the course of the season, he ticked all the right boxes. He demonstrated tremendous spatial awareness and racecraft at the start of both the Australian and Malaysian Grands Prix, pulled off an excellent move under braking to snatch second from Kimi Raikkonen on Ferrari's home turf at Monza, blocked out intra-team strife to take an assured win in Hungary and proved himself equal to the worst the elements could throw at him in Fuji. All in all, it was the performance of an established Grand Prix great, rather than a fresh faced rookie.

Let's not go overboard with the superlatives. There were certainly times when Alonso made him look rather ordinary, though equally, there were times when he made Alonso look rather foolish. And while it could be suggested that it was misfortune (in the form of a duff gearbox) which cost him the title, he really suffered no greater mechanical misfortune than either of his title rivals, over the course of the season. In the end, it was his one real elementary error, sliding into the gravel trap while coming in to pit at Shanghai, that cost him the Championship. Still, who'd bet against him coming back stronger next year?

The Rest

10 is an arbitrary number. If there was space for a few more, then three or four other drivers would merit consideration. Jarno Trulli's efforts to rag what pace there was out of the 2007 Toyota were impressive on occasion, though more often than not he qualified well only to sink back down the order come race day. Both Super Aguri drivers had their moments. Takuma Sato had the upper hand in the early part of the year, and even passed Fernando Alonso for position during the Canadian Grand Prix - not something anyone would have predicted before the season began. Anthony Davidson generally outpaced the Japanese driver in the latter half of the year, and his qualifying effort in Turkey was one of the standout performances of the year. Adrian Sutil did all that could be expected in the hopeless Spyker, outclassing all his team mates and occasionally dragging the car a touch further up the order than it had any business being (most notably at Spa and at Indianapolis). He went off the road too often to merit inclusion in the top 10 though, and indeed this tendency may preclude his picking up a more worthwhile drive next year.

David Coulthard did a solid job for Red Bull, without ever quite appearing to be on the same level as his team mate. He was impressive in the wet, picking up a couple of 4th places, and coped admirably with a broken gearbox on his way to 5th in Barcelona. Rubens Barrichello, too, did a better job than he was credited for. Unfortunately, he was generally at his best when the Honda was at its worst, and so ended up pointless at the season's conclusion. If, as rumours suggest, this is his last season, it was a sad note on which to end.

Three other old stagers who may be staring retirement in the face are Giancarlo Fisichella, Ralf Schumacher and Alex Wurz. Wurz was a terrible disappointment in the Williams, and jumped before he was pushed. Schumacher achieved little in the Toyota, and was outclassed by Jarno Trulli. Fisichella had a good start to the season with the disappointing Renault, but appeared to lose interest mid-season and rarely figured after the British Grand Prix.

Vitantonio Liuzzi might just have done enough to salvage his F1 career, but his performances at the troubled Toro Rosso team were hard to judge. His team mate, Sebastien Vettel, initially looked out of his depth but came on in leaps and bounds when Toro Rosso finally began to understand the RB3 towards the season's end. He did enough to suggest that the mid-season replacement of the unexceptional Scott Speed was the right move.

Christijan Albers, whom I had been impressed by last year, was rather shown up by the appearance of a talented young team mate, and when the money ran out, he was shown the door at Spyker. Neither Markus Winkelhock nor Sakon Yamamoto made much of an impression either, though the number 2 seat at Spyker was perhaps F1's least desirable drive this year.

Water, Water, Everywhere

Those with a long memory would have known that there was always a good chance that the first race at the heavily revised Fuji Speedway was going to be very, very wet. Back in 1976, the first Japanese Grand Prix had been held in atrocious conditions, which, notoriously, were so bad that title contender Niki Lauda abandoned his car after just a few laps because he thought it too dangerous to continue. A few years later, a round of the World Sportscar Championship went ahead on a track so wet that the big international teams all packed up and refused to race. The local boys, being perhaps more used to the vagaries of the Japanese weather, had the day to themselves.

The 1976 race was a championship decider. This time round, it was not mathematically possible that the title could be settled in the shadow of Mount Fuji, but the result leaves Messrs Alonso and Raikkonen with only little more than a mathematical chance of coming away with the driver's crown. Neither man can really win the world championship, with Hamilton requiring only a pair of 4th places, but Lewis could still lose it, especially if it were to rain in Shanghai and this time it was his Mclaren that went off the road.

Certainly, if he does win the world title, the Japanese Grand Prix will be a pretty fine illustration of why he deserved it. In atrocious conditions, he put in a drive of control and accomplishment while his double world champion team mate went into the wall trying to keep up. As for Ferrari... the tyre fiasco was frankly the perfect illustration of where they have gone wrong this year. The car looked to have the pace, and Raikkonen and Massa both put in solid, aggresive drives in difficult circumstances...but what on earth were they doing starting on Inters? Leaving aside the fact that, had they read their email, they would have known they could not start on those tyres, the rubber was plainly not up to the job anyway. Judging by their performances under the safety car (a spin apiece), they would have ended up going straight off the road had they still been on inters when they began racing. A fantastic opportunity was thrown away by poor team management. How they must be hoping Ross Brawn will elect to return...

Behind all this, or, as often as not, in front, the race provided a rare opportunity for those whose talent exceeds the performance of their car to show what they could do (or, just possibly, to show how good the RB3 is in the wet...). The super-smooth Jenson Button used his famouly delicate inputs to claim a fine 6th spot on the grid in a Honda that frankly has no business being there. Had he not lost his nose early in the race, who knows what he might have achieved.

If Button was disappointed, Mark Webber must have been absolutely livid. The perennially luckless Aussie had his Red Bull in second place and appeared to have the pace to give Hamilton something to think about when rookie Sebastien Vettel ran into him and eliminated them both from proceedings....under a safety car. Vettel was distraught and could be seen crying, head in his hands, after climbing out of his wrecked Toro Rosso. Webber, who was sick into his helmet in the early laps and really not well enough to race, must have felt even more violently ill by the end of the day.

Let's not forget, though, that until that moment, Vettel's own performance was remarkable in its own right. His run to third place (he had led briefly) certainly didn't look like the work of a 20 year old with just six starts to his name in a tail end car. As someone who, up to now, had wondered quite what either Red Bull or BMW saw in Vettel, I feel I got an answer on Sunday. In years to come, we may remember his Fuji performance as his 'Senna in the wet in a Toleman' moment, rather than for the tragic error which brought it to an end.

The odds on rain in Valencia, where the GP2 series was being decided, must have been rather longer. Nonetheless, that's what they got. I've said before that it would be a travesty if the uninspiring Lucas Di Grassi beat Timo Glock to the title, and I must confess that when I realised the conditions were to be a wet/dry lottery of a race, I wondered if this might be precisely what would happen.

As it is, it was Di Grassi who lost out. Stuck on the wrong tyres at the beginning (as was Glock) he was caught out when he emerged on slick tyres and skated off into retirement in the turn 2 gravel trap. One might call it bad fortune, but in a season where Glock had been plagued with poor luck, it seemed only reasonable.

Timo sealed the title with a win in the Sunday sprint race - his fifth of the season. Had it not been for myriad misfortunes, he might have won twice as many. The big surprise ofthe weekend, though, was that Vitaly Petrov won the feature race - and from the front, outpacing his more experienced team mate in the process. I have to confess I would never have fingered him as a race winner at the beginning of the season. After all, there have been an awful lot of wealthy, but fundamentally pretty useless Russian kids in single seater racing over the last few years (see Victor Maslov, Sergei Zlobin and anyone who ever had anything to do with the Russian A1GP team) and I assumed Petrov was simply the latest of these. You don't win a race on a damp track on slick tyres without being pretty handy though, and Petrov has laid down a marker that he may be a man to watch if he comes back for another season next year. With Mikhail Aleshin showing some form in the Renault World Series, we could at last be seeing something of a breakthrough for the backwater that is Russian motorsport.

If nothing else, the weekend gone has shown that you don't need overtaking working groups, reverse grids, ballast systems, push-to-pass buttons or any of the rest of that nonsense to make single seater racing exciting to watch. You just need a wet track. Now, Bernie.... Howabout scrapping this night race lark in Singapore and demanding that they install some trackside sprinklers instead?

Fuelish Thoughts

Refuelling in Formula 1 is, as far as I'm concerned, a bad thing. I allude to this from time to time, but until now, I don't think I've ever actually gone through my reasoning on this in any kind of coherent way before.

Given that I think the reintroduction of refuelling into Formula 1 in 1994 has been the biggest wrong-turning that the sport has taken in the time that I have been following it, I think this is something of an omission on my part. It strikes me that the three week gap in the Grand Prix calendar is as good a time as any to set the record straight.

An unnecessary risk

You might be well aware that Motorsports Ramblings is perhaps not the biggest fan of the health and safety brigade. I don't like it when drivers die any more than the next person, but motor racing is fundamentally dangerous, and in my view, it can only be made entirely safe via the kinds of compromises, for example to circuit design, which will eventually kill the very essence of the sport.

Nonetheless, I'd like to see refuelling banned because it is potentially very dangerous. Dangerous not just to the drivers, who have, to some extent, made their Faustian pact in pursuing their dream, but to mechanics, journalists, VIPs, and anyone else within the vicinity of the pitlane.

Enabling refuelling to take place during the race requires that each team has fuel-rigs with hundreds of litres of highly flammable liquid stored in the pitlane. Pitlane accidents are rare, but not completely unheard of. Likewise, the requirement to move heavy rigs around in order to refuel a car and get it out of the pitlane again as quickly as possible in a high pressure situation adds its own dangers.

The fact that there has not been a serious accident in the 14 years since refuelling was reintroduced in F1 indicates that the risk is very small. It does not mean that this risk is non-existent. The reason I bring it up is that the potential consequences are so dire. Remember Jos Verstappen's pitlane conflagration at Hockenheim in 1994? That spectacular blaze occured when just a litre of two of spilt fuel ignited on hot bodywork. If an entire fuel rig caught fire, the potential exists for a Le Mans 1955 kind of catastrophe (after all, press offices and corporate hospitality boxes are normally built above the pitlane these days). And in this safety-conscious era, F1 might never recover from such a disaster.

Dumbing down

My second argument is that the existence of refuelling dumbs down Grand Prix racing. Of course, in a sense, it does exactly the opposite - all those complicated strategies require the input of some serious pitlane brainpower and the likes of Pat Symonds and Ross Brawn have amassed a considerable reputation as masterminds of the art of calling the right time to refuel. From the point of view of the driver though, things are simplified. When a driver had to start the race with the fuel he needed to go the entire distance, he would begin with a car some 200kgs heavier than it is in qualifying trim. As such, the car behaves quite differently - it puts more strain on the tyres and brakes, and its handling characteristics will change significantly over the course of a race distance.

These days, a driver no longer needs to think about looking after the tyres or brakes in the early stages of the race, when the car is fat with fuel. Neither need he adapt to the very different handling of a 700kg F1 car on full fuel. Strategic thinking and intelligence are less important - fitness and the ability to run off a series of qualifying-style laps instead become all important. To me, that's less interesting. When I started following F1, the ability of guys like Alain Prost to 'read' a race, and to (in the words of Fangio) master the art of winning the race at the slowest possible speed, was a major part of the sport's appeal.

No passing, please

My most fundamental gripe with refuelling in F1 is that I think it reduces the amount of overtaking we see in the sport. That's overtaking as opposed to position changes. Sure, refuelling promotes position changes, as it provides an opportunity for a quick guy who has qualified poorly to move up through the order without having to find a way past on the track (simple fuel up heavy, sit behind the slower cars in the early laps, then go hot-lapping when everyone else comes in to refuel).

The thing is, pit-based changes of position aren't all that exciting. Overtaking is the lifeblood of the sport, and if a battle for the lead between two front runners can be resolved without them actually swapping places out on the track, I for one feel slightly cheated.

Now it could be argued that refuelling doesn't actually make overtaking any less likely - that's the fault of the laws of physics - or more exactly, the ever greater understanding of how to apply them that F1 designers have acquired over the years - it merely makes it seem that way because with passing ever more difficult on track - its at the fuel stops where places swap.

I don't think that's the whole story. I think refuelling discourages overtaking still further in two specific ways. Firstly, it reduces the temptation for a driver to gamble on an on-track pass. A pass on the road can be a position gained, but there's also a risk that it might all end in an accident. I'm not sure what proportion of crashes in F1 occur during attempted passes, but off the top of my head, I'd expect its quite high. If the only way you're going to find a way past is on the road, its usually still a risk worth taking - but if you're confident you can find a way past in the pitlane when you both come to refuel, why take the chance?

That's not the only way in which the current sprint-stop-sprint format of F1 inhibits overtaking, though. The other one comes back to the 'dumbing down' argument: If there is less variability in how a car handles over the course of a race, there is less chance that different drivers, or different cars, will be quick at different points. When someone whose car handles well on heavy fuel disappears off into a lead only to be reeled in by someone else, whose car is set up more for running on less fuel towards the end of a race, there is a greater probability of overtaking. The current format mitigates against different people being quick at different points of the race - and hence against overtaking.

The same is as true, if not even more true, of tyres (though without refuelling, this becomes more of an issue, because a driver can always decide not to pit for tyres, and sacrifice grip for track position). After all, when was there last overtaking in the race at the front end of the grid in F1 at Monaco? 1975? 1985 maybe?

No, 2005. There was refuelling, of course, but in 2005, drivers had to run the entire race on a single set of tyres. Hence the Renaults of Fernando Alonso and Giancarlo Fisichella were quick in the early stages of the race, but were sitting ducks towards the end. In Alonso's case, for example, this led to the Williamses of both Heidfeld and Webber passing him for position in the closing laps. It was the most entertaining Monaco Grand Prix in years. With refuelling banned, you would not need to ban tyre changes (which, it could be argued, is dangerous, as drivers are encouraged to gamble on pressing on with dangerously damaged rubber) as the 'don't pit for tyres and try to take advantage of track position' strategy would always be open to any driver or team prepared to take the risk.

Nothing gained...

Is there really any argument for retaining refuelling? Something I have missed? Well, if so, I honestly don't know what it could be. It might be argued that refuelling encourages position changes. As I've said already, that may be true, but its not a price worth paying - nobody watches F1 in order to see changes of position in the pitlane. Perhaps the additional 'strategy' element adds a layer of interest to the sport? I'd argue that by homogenising car set ups and removing the gambler's option of running the whole race on a single set of tyres, it does the reverse. And besides, this is meant to be motor racing, not high speed chess. I've even heard know-nothings argue that pit stops are exciting to watch, and refuelling encourages more of them. Perhaps they are, at first sight, but after over 20 years of following the sport, I'm no longer enthralled by them. I want to see more on track action.

Could refuelling be abolished? I'd argue so. It has not become intrinsic to the sport. Sure, the teams might need a couple of year's notice to deal with the expensive business of designing quite considerably different chassis in order to carry twice as much fuel. Mr Mosley, if you're reading this, I know you're prepared to think radically when it comes to the future F1 rules. I've heard suggestions about regenerative braking, hybrid engines, spec-chassis and all the rest. So have a think about it eh...