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 2007: Back down to earth?

If F3000 never had much success when it came to discovering new talent (just 2 F3000 champions ever went on to win Grands Prix), the early signs are that GP2 may be doing rather better. In the first two years, we've had Nico Rosberg, Heikki Kovalainen and Lewis Hamilton make the jump to F1 with serious teams, and Nelson Piquet Jr is waiting in the wings at Renault.

The question is whether the category can keep up this remarkable run of form as it goes into its third year, the last with the current car, at Bahrain in just over a week's time. Picking out favourites for the title seems a little more difficult than in the first two years. Last year, there were several established front-runners going into their second full season in the category and, in Lewis Hamilton, a standout F3 champion who looked like he might prove a match for any of them. This year, its hard to pick out anyone so obviously promising from among the sophomore drivers (the entry list, by the way is here). Reigning champions ART have two second year drivers, in Michael Ammermueller and Lucas Di Grassi. Both looked competent enough in their first year, given that Di Grassi was not with one of the more highly rated teams and Ammermueller had come straight up from Formula Renault, but neither man has so far done anythint to suggest that they are in the same class as Hamilton or Rosberg.

Luca Filippi, the former Euro F3000 champion is also back for a second year, but while team boss Dave Sears reckons he's quick, and he's topped the timesheets in testing on occasion, he didn't really do anything to suggest he was really from the top drawer last year. Andreas Zuber is back for another season but he is yet another driver who was neither fish nor fowl last year - winning a race on one occasion, but frequently looking utterly anonymous next to team mate Gianmaria Bruni at Trident. The same can be said of series returnee and former Spanish F3 champion Borja Garcia and of the rest Nicolas Lapierre has already failed to grasp too many opportunities and neither Javier Villa nor Jason Tahinci are likely to bother the top half of the grid.

What, then, of the newcomers? British F3 champion Mike Conway and fellow front runner Bruno Senna are both making the step up this season. Conway, in particular, has impressed me in the past when he used to race in Formula Renault, but I can't help but think that neither appeared to be in the same class as 2005 champion Alvaro Parente. What the Portuguese driver would give for a recognisable surname eh? Talking of recognisable surnames, Kazuki Nakajima, son of Satoru, the man who partnered Bruno's late uncle at Lotus some 20 years ago, is among those graduating from the Euroseries this year. He's got a Williams test drive too, though one can't help but feel his Japanese nationality and Williams' Toyota engine deal must have played a part (ironic really, because 20 years back, Williams lost their Honda engine deal in part because of their refusal to employ his Dad). His fellow countryman Kohei Hirate is also making the step up, and is probably marginally the quicker of the two new Japanese drivers (his testing contract is with Toyota...) but one can't help thinking that he hung around for a long while in Euro F3000 without achieving much.

A couple of potentially very quick drivers are making the jump over from the Renault World Series. Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado may be best known for receiving a multi-race ban after running down a marshal at Monaco, but he is quite possibly a much better prospect than Ernesto Viso ever was. Former Spanish F3 champion Andy Soucek is also a driver very much worth watching. Either of these two, who have much greater experience of racing powerful single seaters than most of the debutants, might make a good each way bet for this year's title.

What is perhaps most striking though, is the list of drivers not in this year's championship. There's no place for Euroseries champion Paul Di Resta, nor for his close rival, teenage prodigy Sebastien Vettel. While, for Vettel, a World Series driver and a BMW testing contract doubtless softens that blow, one suspects that Di Resta's drive in a 2 year old Mercedes DTM car alongside fellow Scot, Susan Stoddart might justifiably leave him feeling a little hard done by.

Renault World Series champion Alx Danielsson was talked about as a candidate for the BCN drive, but that never materialised (the seat has now gone to Sino-Dutch driver Ho Pin Tung, who deserves his place more than many on the grid) and Alvaro Parene remains stuck in career limbo. British F3 championship runner-up Oliver Jarvis has had to go off and ply his trade in Japanese F3, and will have to console himself with the thought that this did Adrian Sutil no harm and Spanish F3 championship winner Ricardo Risatti is yet another driver who didn't get the second BCN drive.

The upshot is that the field of promising young talent is neither as promising nor as talented as it should be, or as it was in the first two years of the category. This might just open the door for one of three drivers I haven't mentioned yet to take the title.

Ex F1 drivers Antonio Pizzonia, Timo Glock and Giorgio Pantano have borken the mould by getting paid drives from teams with corporate sponsors who are keen to wrest the title away from ART. Some have suggested that it is unfair to allow ex-F1 drivers to compete against the up and coming drivers. Personally, I think this is nonsense. Ivan Capelli and Roberto Moreno both won the F3000 series with prior F1 experience, and their presence provides a very useful barometer of the overall talent level of the series. Suffice to say that if the young guns can't beat the likes of Pantano and Pizzonia, they probably don't deserve to be too far up the F1 team bosses' wish lists.

The contrasting motivations of the 3 ex F1 drivers are intriguing in themselves. Pantano has been around seemingly forever, and must surely be keen to win a title of some significance. For him, F1 can surely no longer be a realistic possibility - he was was mediocre in his single season with Jordan, and left that team under something of a cloud.

Pizzonia, by contrast, probably does still harbour F1 ambitions but he is very much in the last chance saloon in this regard. He showed pace on occasion both in his drive at Jaguar and in his one-off races with Williams, but he was far too inconsistent to merit a full time frontline drive. Only a serious show of dominance in GP2 is likely to revive interest among the F1 team bosses, but its just possible that he is capable of it.

Timo Glock, by contrast, is still very much a young hopeful. He showed a fair amount of promise in his one-off drives at Jordan despite being seriously inexperienced at the time, and was pretty quick in the unfancied Rocketsports Champ Car in 2005. Most importantly, though, he was capable of giving the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Nelson Piquet Jr a fright in the ISport GP2 car last year, and he remains with Paul Jackson's team for his second full season of GP2. At the risk of looking very foolish at season's end, he's my tip to become the third GP2 champion. Its just a shame he's not up against the sort of opposition he should be.

GP2 in review - Hamilton at a canter......

If nobody quite knew what to expect in the first season of GP2 last year, then this time our hopes were high. Close fought racing between almost F1-quick single seaters with no electronic trickery or driving aids and most of the best aspiring young would-be F1 drivers at the wheel. With slick tyres this year, they edged still closer to the back of the F1 grid in performance terms - on occasion they might have been in a position to give at least the earliest version of the Aguri F1 car a fright in lap speed terms. In other words - more often than not the most interesting part of the Grand Prix weekend. I think its fair to say that GP2 entirely lived up to these elevated expectations this year.

At the start of the year, I predicted that the title battle would be fought between between Premat, Lapierre, Carroll and Piquet. Which shows how much I know. In my defence, I can only point out that, of the newcomers, I did single out Glock and Hamilton as the series debutants most likely to upset the applecart. Certainly I didn't expect Hamilton to take the championship by the kind of margin that he eventually did.

If the championsip battle was not as close fought as that between Kovalainen and Rosberg last year, the same could not be said of the individual races, some of which were very hotly contested indeed. The battle between Jose Maria Lopez and Timo Glock in the sprint race at Hockenheim stands out in particular, while the last lap of the feature race at Barcelona, where ART team mates Premat and Hamilton fought it out was a graphic illustration of how close it sometimes got.

In all there were 9 different winners in the 22 races this year. For sure, the feature/sprint race split, with the latter being run with semi-reversed grids, probably inflated this number a little (neither Andreas Zuber nor Michael Ammermuller ever really looked like winning a feature race) but there were still 6 different winners in the 11 feature races - not a bad total when compared with F1, or especially with this year's world rally championship.

With 5 wins, three of them in feature races, and a further 9 podium finishes, Hamilton was clearly the dominant force this year, and the way he dominated his second-year team mate, Alexandre Premat (who, after all, was not really any slower than Nico Rosberg last year, merely a little less consistent) indicates that he is something really rather special indeed. Whether or not he gets the Mclaren seat alongside Alonso next year, it seems pretty clear that this is a young man who is going places.

To my mind, the numbers are about right in placing Nelson Angelo Piquet best of the rest. Like his father, he seemed happiest when out in front, and never really seemed to have the same racer's instinct as Hamilton. Neither was he as consistently quick, but on the other hand, it was hard to evaluate the competitiveness of his team (Xandi Negrao never really figured in the other Piquet Sports car) and he perhaps didn't have as good a car as ART were able to provide Hamilton with. He also showed impressive speed in the wet at Hungary, winning both races, and wet weather speed is always a sign that there is something special about a driver. He deserves his Renault testing role, now that Heikki Kovalainen has been promoted to the race team for 2007. Whether he has the mental toughness and racer's instinct to be a really first rate F1 driver, on the other hand, remains to be seen.

There remains the tantalising thought that had Giorgio Pantano done all the races, or had Timo Glock started the season with ISport, rather than with BCN, with whom he never really seemed to gel, one of these two ex-Jordan F1 drivers might have given Piquet and Hamilton a serious run for their money. The numbers suggest they probably would not quite have been able to, but Glock, in particular, looked more than a match for anyone in the second half of the season. Certainly it is a mystery why he was quite so slow in the BCN Competition car, and does beg questions about the degree to which team, rather than driver ability, plays a part in a series where the cars are supposed to be identical.

Equally intriguing were the sheer number of occasional one-off outstanding performances that were witnessed over the course of the year. Franck Perera, for instance, might not generally have made much of an impression, scoring just 8 points all season - but he got all 8 of those at Monaco, where he started and finished 2nd, behind Hamilton. There was another front row start for him at the Nurburgring - just enough perhaps, to suggest that the Toyota junior driver might make rather more of an impression if he gets another run next year - but still very much against the run of form. On other occasions, Hiroki Yoshimoto, Tristan Gommendy, Adrian Valles and DPR boys Olivier Pla and Clivio Piccione all showed flashes of real front running pace (Gommendy's front row start at Valencia, Valles' podium at the same, Yoshimoto's performances at Imola and the Nurburgring and the DPR drivers' performance at Monaco. None though, were able to threaten the front runners on anything like a regular basis - though whether this boiled down to inexperience, the limitations of their team, or their own foibles as drivers was very hard to tell. Yoshimoto, though, does look a rather more sensible bet for a Super Aguri drive than either Yamamoto or Ide did.

There were a few notable disappointments this year as well. Arden failed to recapture the form that took them to so many F3000 titles, and perhaps have lost the momentum they had before team owner Christian Horner took up Dietrich Mateschitz's offer to run Red Bull Racing. Of course, it might be the fault of the drivers. I, for one, expected Nicolas Lapierre and fellow Frenchman Alexandre Premat to figure a little more strongly after their dominant winter double act over in A1GP, but Premat was rarely close to his team mate Hamilton, while Lapierre came no closer to actually winning a race than he did last year. He was at least a little closer to the front than he had been last year, though an injury at Monaco put paid to any kind of a serious challenge.

Another man to struggle despite high pre-season hopes was Racing Engineering No1 driver Adam Carroll. In race trim he was as aggressive as ever, but he was often off the pace in qualifying, seemed to be harder on his tyres than just about anyone else in the field (for which he often paid a heavy price in the longer feature races) and, in the first part of the season at least, simply made too many mistakes. Whether the problem lay with Carroll, or Racing Engineering (whose other driver, Jose Villa looked utterly lost after being talked about as the 'new Fernando Alonso' in F3 the year before) was hard to tell. Perhaps it was a combination of the two - Carroll has always struck me as being a 'seat of the pants' kind of racer, and he might have suffered for not having an experienced team mate to help get car set up pointing in the right direction. Champ Cars seems the obvious place for him, if you as me.

Of the rest, Ferdinando Monfardini occasionally impressed, Lucas DiGrassi had a reasonable mid-season run, Felix Porteiro looked like a driver who might shine given a little more experience, and that was about it. Jason Tahinci, Fairuz Fauzy, Sergio Hernandez and Vitaly Petrov, in particular, seemed to represent a waste of a good cockpit.

So, not a bad sophomore year, all in all - the series did a pretty good job of establishing itself as not only the most important European single seater championship outside F1, but as being at least as competitive and suffused with talent as the IRL and Champ Car series. With the big names once again moving on to bigger and supposedly better things, lets hope that 2007 proves as exciting.