Raikkonen's Progress

Just a few days after Renault team principal Eric Boullier admitted that he had been approached by Kimi Raikkonen's management team regarding a seat with the team in 2011, the Finn took his first ever outright rally win last weekend. Now it was nothing to get too excited by - the Rallye Vosgien is an amateur affair, and anyone who knows roughly what he is doing shouldn't have too much trouble winning it if they have a works Citroen WRC at their disposal. But winning the event was, to be fair, not really the point. The rally was held in the countryside surrounding Strasbourg - the same part of the world in which the forthcoming Rallye France will take place. With the Citroen Junior Team having used up all 15 of its allotted test days for the year, this was the best way to provide the still inexperienced Raikkonen with some asphalt mileage ahead of the event.

After the best part of a year on the stages, though, how is Kimi's second career in rallying going? It all rather depends on what your expectations were. Some of the more excitable elements of the motorsports press seemed to think that he might be in the running for podiums on asphalt by the end of the year - and that is looking very unlikely. This, though, always struck me as something of a long shot. Rallying is really quite different to circuit racing, and but for a couple of outings in a Fiat Punto S2000 last year, the 2007 F1 World Champion had no real experience of the stages before this season. If David Coulthard and Ralf Schumacher have struggled adapting to DTM tin-tops, Raikkonen has faced an altogether tougher challenge. It's a little like the difference between a grass court specialist tennis player playing on clay, and a tennis pro being handed a badminton racket and trying to win the world title, if you will.

Let's not forget that Sebastien Loeb didn't find things any easier when he tried to go the other way. He might have looked impressive in testing for Toro Rosso and Red Bull a couple of years back, but it's always hard to know how much to read into testing times - a light fuel load and a new set of tyres can make any driver who knows roughly what they are doing look quick. When Loeb tested a GP2 car against the rest of the GP2 field last year (reportedly as a prelude to an aborted race debut with Toro Rosso at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix) he was last and two seconds off the pace. Not so slow as to be embarrassing, but equally, it was clear that he was no match for circuit drivers who have spent years doing nothing else. And if you were going to pick one rally driver out as having the kind of style that might translate to the circuit, it would be the ultra-precise Sebastien Loeb.

With his first points finish, for 8th, in Jordan, Raikkonen became only the second driver in history to score points in both the World Rally Championship and the Formula 1 World Championship. He's got a little way before he matches Carlos Reutemann's podium finish in a Peugeot 205 T16 on the 1985 Argentine Rally, but it's worth bearing in mind that the Argentine former F1 driver finished a whole half hour behind the winner. That said, had the World Rally Championship existed in the late 60s, all-rounder Vic Elford would have got in there first, he did win the Monte Carlo Rally in 1968 and scored a handful of F1 points finishes.

Both Raikkonen's points finishes and Reutemann's podium point to a fundamental difference between World Championship rallying and Formula 1. Aside from a few front runners, there is not typically the same strength in depth in a WRC event that there is at a Grand Prix. At the moment, there are perhaps as few as six really fast serious professionals competing full time in the WRC: Sebastien Loeb, Dani Sordo, Sebastien Ogier, Petter Solberg, Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala. Behind them are a clutch of competent, experienced paying amateurs and semi-professionals: Federico Villagra, Matthew Wilson (there mainly because his father runs the Ford team), Henning Solberg, Mads Ostberg et cetera. It is as if, in Formula 1, behind the front runners like Hamilton, Alonso, Vettel, Kubica et al, the rest of the field was made up of a bunch of also-rans from the back half of the current GP2 and Renault World Series fields who happened to have the cash to pay for the ride.

It's always been true to some extent of rallying, but with only two manufacturers in the sport at the present, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is little strength in depth in the WRC at the moment. And it's hard to know what to make of the fact that Raikkonen has generally been able, just about to hang on to the back of this group in recent rallies. A sign that he's learning quickly, or merely that he's being flattered by a weak WRC field? Only in Bulgaria, where the Fords seemed to be really struggling, was Raikkonen trading times with the likes of Latvala and Hirvonen, rather than Wilson and Villagra.

I do rather wonder whether, by jumping straight into a WRC machine for a full season, Raikkonen is trying to run before he can walk. He might perhaps have learned more by spending a low key year in the Intercontinental Rally Challenge , learning his new trade at the wheel of something a little less powerful, away from the public eye. It's not as if the WRC is entirely devoid of talent either, with many of the drivers who might ten years ago have led one of the lesser manufacturer teams instead to be found there: Jan Kopecky, Kris Meeke, Juho Hanninen and, on occasion, fellow ex-F1 racer Stephane Sarrazin.

As it is, I'm beginning to wonder whether he has hit something of a brick wall - if after picking up the basics in winter testing, he's no longer really able to improve his game. Certainly, it does not appear, looking at his stage times, that he's really going any quicker than he was at the beginning of the season. His times tend to ebb and flow from around 2 to as much as 7% off the ultimate pace, just as they did on the opening rally in Sweden back in February. It's as if the car and the very different events - what, after all, does what a driver learns in Sweden do to help him in Jordan, or in Bulgaria and Japan - mean that he's not really able to learn much. Maybe it's expecting too much of him too soon - and we should be thinking in terms of a multi-year programme in which the results only really begin to come in his second or third season. After all, it took drivers like Solberg and Hirvonen some time to really get onto the pace, and for all that Raikkonen seems to have had a lot of accidents this year, I don't think he's actually had as many as Colin McRae did in his first full year in the WRC.

But is Raikkonen, who has, after all, come from an F1 world in which he was a champion and one of the recognised top drivers, patient enough to spend several seasons learning the black arts of rallying when he's already given over more than a decade of his life to perfecting the art of circuit racing? And even if he does intend to, when the novelty factor wears off, will Citroen and Red Bull be particularly interested in paying for him to do so? That just might be what is behind the rather unexpected noises about Raikkonen and Renault. For the reasons Joe Saward outlined in a perceptive article on his blog last week, I'm not convinced such a deal would make much sense for either Raikkonen or Renault. Renault can rely on Kubica for the inspired pace, and would perhaps be better served by a cheap, competent number 2 (Nick Heidfeld springs to mind) while Raikkonen looked washed up at the end of 2009 and if received wisdom is to be believed, was not overly enamoured of F1 life anyway.

So I hope he stays for another year, at least, in the World Rally Championship. I suspect that, with Sebastien Ogier doing everything to mark himself out as the new Sebastien Loeb at the moment, he will never reach the very pinnacle of rallying. He might have had the innate talent, but I suspect that a man trying to learn what is in a sense an entirely new sport at the age of 31 will never be able to reach quite the same level as someone who has been doing it since his teens. But given time, he might get close. I doubt he will ever go on to be the first man to win the World Rally Championship and the F1 World Championship, but he just might manage to be the first man to win both a WRC event and a Grand Prix. Which would surely be a more worthwhile aim than going back to an F1 world which has moved on in his absence.

Money Talks

A couple of years back, I remember stumbling upon the quite startling claim that the cost of Lewis Hamilton's junior career - from karts to GP2, was on the order of £3mIt's a quite incredible sum of money, and gives some indication of the scale of the obstacles facing a promising teenage karting star who has his eyes set on Grand Prix stardom.

In short, the costs involved in competing in the junior formulae, be it Formula Renault, Formula 3, Formula 2 or GP2, far exceed any sensible estimate of the commercial value to be had in sponsoring a team or driver at that level. A season in British F3, for example, is reputed to cost well north of half a million pounds for a competitive seat, and yet the media coverage and wider public awareness of racing at that level in minimal. Certainly not so great as to be worth spending half a million pounds to have your company's corporate logo emblazoned upon the side of some young gun's car. Millions of potential customers are not going to become aware of your product because it's name is on the side of an F3 car.

So how do racing drivers do it? In many cases, the answer is straightforward - the young racing driver has the backing of vast family wealth. Ever since the earliest days of motor racing, it has been to a significant extent the plaything of the immensely wealthy. In the pre-war days, that might have been the Counts and Lords of the landed aristocracy where these days it is more likely to be the sons of entrepreneurs and city traders. Take for example, Ayrton Senna, the son of a wealthy Brazilian landowner, Niki Lauda, the scion of one of the major movers in the Austrian financial industry, Nelson Piquet, whose father was a senior Government Minister, or, going back further, Stirling Moss, whose father's dental business was sufficiently successful to enable him to buy Stirling a Maserati F1 car to kick-start his career in the sport.

It's not something which has changed. Look at the sponsors adorning the sides of many a young hopeful's F3 or GP2 car and you will see the names of businesses and products with family connections to the driver. Think, for instance, of the Medley Pharmaceuticals logos on anything Xandi Negrao raced, the Conway Engineering stickers on Mike Conway's cars, or the Jelson Builders backing for Stephen Jelley's motorsports exploits. Sometimes it's not quite so obvious, but the backing offered by everyone from Eternit to Highland Spring for David Coulthard's early career is easier to understand when you realise that all these businesses made extensive use of Duncan Coulthard's freight company.

And yet, and yet... Look into the background of the any of the real stars of the last fifteen years or so, Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso, Mika Hakkinen or Lewis Hamilton, and it becomes apparent that they were from ordinary working or middle class families and could never have written their own cheques for GP2 or F3 rides. In fact, it's arguable that Ayrton Senna was the last real star of the sport to have come from a background of serious wealth (though I have to confess to being a little hazy as to Jenson Button's back story).

That's not to say that there haven't been an awful lot of moneyed young men in F1 since then, but for the most part, they haven't been quite at the very front, they haven't been the ones to have won World Championships. The aforementioned Coulthard, for example, won plenty of Grands Prix during his time at Mclaren, but was never quite the match of either Hakkinen or Raikkonen when he was teamed up with them. Is it mere coincidence? Or is it simply that, with rare exceptions like Ayrton Senna, those who grew up in opulent, wealthy surroundings are unlikely to have the killer instinct, the determination, which those who have had to fight tooth and nail just to get themselves into motorsport in the first place?

How did they do it? No two of the motorsport's front runners got there in exactly the same way, but the long and short of it is that all were funded to a significant degree by either an entrepreneurial driver manager with an eye on a share of that driver's future earning potential, or by a team, of more commonly, a motor manufacturer, wanting to have first call on that driver's talents at a future date. Michael Schumacher, the bricklayer's son, was the beneficiary of both - the wealthy hotelier Willi Weber helped him on his way, and then Mercedes, for whose sportscar team he drove, bought him his first F1 drive. Fernando Alonso, whose father was an explosives technician in the quarrying industry, was picked up early by Flavio Briatore, a man who has done remarkably well for himself as a manager of young drivers given his professed lack of interest in the nuts and bolts of the sport.

Kimi Raikkonen had perhaps the most unusual route to the top of the lot, being managed by the father and son team of Steve and Dave Robertson, who talked Peter Sauber into giving the young Finn a drive after just a single season of Formula Renault and a few Formula Ford races, at a time when he was the veteran of only 23 car races. Hamilton, by contrast, was perhaps the best-groomed F1 debutant in the history of the sport. As is well known, he was picked out by Ron Dennis while he was still in his early teens, and a karting star and had the full weight of the Mclaren team behind his junior career. Of the other current F1 front-runners, Mark Webber is another who had help from Briatore, while Sebastian Vettel had backing from both the Red Bull and BMW junior programmes and Robert Kubica was helped by the Renault Young Driver Programme - appropriately enough, as he has now wound up driving for the team this year.

It's fair to say, I think, that not one of those drivers could have paid their own way in their junior racing days, and it is perhaps the widespread existence of junior programmes and mercenary managers prepared to invest their own cash in a driver who has caught their eye, which explains how it is that the current F1 grid has perhaps greater strength in depth than any in the sport's history.

And I wonder if it just might turn out to be the high-water mark. The global recession has forced most of the car manufacturers out of the sport and resulted in the slashing of team budgets. The departure of Toyota and BMW has meant the end of their junior programmes, and surviving teams have little cash spare for that sort of luxury. The economic downturn will have had a double negative impact on anyone hoping to rely on the largesse of a gambling entrepreneur like Weber or the Robertsons - men willing to fund promising but penniless youngsters in exchange for a cut of their future earnings if they make it big. Firstly, such people will be thinner on the ground in the first place, and may have less money, but secondly, the knock-on effect of the economic crash has been to reduce the amount of money sloshing around in F1 and by extension, the kind of salaries that the top drivers can command.

All well and good from one perspective. I can't help feeling that something has gone wrong in the world when the likes of Raikkonen or Schumacher can command tens of millions just for driving cars - no matter how good they may be at it. Unfortunately, though, unless it is accompanied by a fall in the cost of competing in the junior formulae, it could have the effect of making it hard for all but the independently wealthy to raise the kind of cash required to compete in GP2. Given the long odds that any particular youngster will turn out to be the new Schumacher, a significant reduction in the kind of sums that even a new Schumacher could earn might make any young star appear a rather less enticing investment opportunity. And that's before one considers that, increasingly, novice F1 drivers are being expected to bring money to cash-strapped teams, rather than draw a salary. See, for example, Petrov and Renault, or (so it is rumoured) Kobayashi and Sauber, let alone those being lined up to drive for Campos and USF1, should they make the grid at all.

Perversely, then, the effect of big money's disappearance from the sport could end up being to lessen the overall quality of the field, by making it harder from quick youngsters without the backing of family wealth, from ordinary backgrounds, to take on the gilded youth of the world's super-rich. A return, in many ways, to the sport's early days. I hope I'm wrong...

Kimi's New Challenge

Kimi Raikkonen. It even sounds like a rally driver's name. Or perhaps, more accurately, it merely sounds Finnish. The 30 year old one-time Formula One World Championship has become far and away the most high-profile racing driver to switch to the world of rallying. Yes, many racing drivers have had a go at rallying, and some have even proven very quick, but far fewer have made the switch full-time, in the way that Raikkonen has.

And in recent years, about the only single-seater racer to go rallying in a serious way was Frenchman Stephane Sarrazin. Sarrazin did enter a couple of Grands Prix for Minardi in the late 1990s, but could hardly be considered to be a 'name driver' in the way that Raikkonen is. Sarrazin didn't do too badly, either, at least when he competed on tarmac, picking up a best result of 4th in a works Subaru. He was, on the other hand, rather more adept on tarmac than he ever proved to be on gravel or snow and appears to have returned full-time to circuit racing in recent years with the Peugeot sportscar team.

So if Raikkonen were to really establish himself as a front-runner in the World Rally Championship, would he be the first man to establish a serious career both on the circuits and on the special stages? Well, not exactly. Sebastien Loeb has looked reasonably adept in his intermittent outings in sportscars, but he was hardly the first rally driver to switch to circuit racing. Back in the late 1980s, when long-time Audi man and two time world champion found his employer, Audi, were more interested in racing GTO sportscars in the States that taking on Lancia and Toyota in the comparatively tame Group A category, he switched with them, with considerable success.

You have to go further back to find a driver who scored points in both Formula 1 and the World Rally Championship, back to the late 1960s, when all-rounder Vic Elford won the 1968 Monte Carlo Rally and scoring a career best finish of 4th in what was his first F1 race, the French Grand Prix of that year. He won the Daytona 24 Hours that year and would meet with considerable success in sportscar racing at a time when the World Sportscar Championship was a genuine rival to Formula 1.

Go much further back, though, and the distinction between race and rally driver becomes rather hazier. What exactly were the great Italian road races? Was the Targa Florio a race or a rally? And what of the Mille Miglia, which was won by F1 great, Stirling Moss? A race or a rally? He used pace notes and had a co-driver, so, despite the fact that the vehicle they used, the Mercedes 300SLR, was much closer to an F1 car than anything which you might use on a forest stage, it was perhaps more of a rally than a race. Go back a couple of decades further and the distinction becomes all but irrelevant. Stage rallying hadn't yet been invented, but the evocative black and white photographs of Grands Prix of the 1920s and 30s show that many of the road circuits of the era more more resemblance to special stages than to the antiseptic cleanliness of modern F1 tracks. Indeed, there's probably more gravel on some of those circuits than on the asphalt stages of the Rallye Catalunya. In that sense, if Kimi Raikkonen does make a successful transition from F1 to the WRC, he won't so much be the first driver to do it, as merely the first driver to do it in quite some time.

So what are his chances? When he entered the 1000 Lakes Rally in Finland last year in an S2000 Fiat Punto, he put in a very respectable performance, prior to eventually exiting the event in a crash, but then the S2000 machinery is generally considered not to be as difficult to drive as the more powerful WRC Citroen that Raikkonen will be driving next year. And furthermore, it has to be said that the quality of the opposition in the S2000 class in that event was hard to assess. The only man in identical machinery was Anton Alen, who while competent enough, is hardly a star in the way that his Dad was. So it's not easy to know how much can be read into Kimi's ability to get really quite close to his stage times.

In a Citroen C4 WRC, essentially the same machine that Sebastien Loeb won the world title in this year, there will be no hiding place. He has, however, always struck me as a driver who succeeded primarilt because, even in comparison with other racing drivers, he has almost supernatural car control. He doesn't appear to be a man who needs to think his way to driving quickly - if he did, then given that he was not one for spending endless hours poring over data traces, he would probably never have been as successful as he was in F1. As such, his skills might translate more easily to the rally world than would some other Grand Prix drivers. After all, F1 drivers have varied enormously in their ability to cope with the transition to the special stage. Jim Clark was startlingly quick in a Lotus Cortina rally car, fellow Lotus F1 man Graham Hill, on the other hand, never really looked at home in it.

I hope he succeeds, and I'd love to see him give it a few years to really hone his talents. I can't help but think that the rally world selects its drivers from a far shallower, and muddier, pool of talent. There's no equivalent in the rallying world of the extensive junior formula network through which today's leading F1 drivers emerge. And away from the two full works teams, many of those in the quickest equipment (the Citroen junior cars and the Stobart and Munchis Fords) are there because they can raise cash, or have connections, rather than because they are particularly quick. There's something a little depressing about the fact that Conrad Rautenbach and Matthew Wilson have regular full-time drives, while Guy Wilkes, Jan Kopecky and Per-Gunnar Andersen do not. Having an F1 driver after a new challenge throwing a cat among the pigeons can only be a good thing. And if it brings some publicity to a beleaguered and struggling World Championship, so much the better.

The Motorsports Ramblings Top 10 - 2009

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

10. Robert Kubica

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

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

9. Nick Heidfeld

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

8. Mark Webber

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

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


7. Rubens Barrichello

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

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

6. Nico Rosberg

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

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

5. Kimi Raikkonen

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

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

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


4. Fernando Alonso

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

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


3. Sebastian Vettel

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

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

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

2. Jenson Button

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

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

1. Lewis Hamilton

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

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

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

The rest...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tales of the Unexpected

That was just possibly the strangest Grand Prix I've ever seen. Not the most exciting. Even at a circuit like Spa Francorchamps, overtaking appears to be all but impossible in the dry in a 2009-spec Formula 1 car, at least once everyone's warmed their tyres up, and the end result was a something of a high speed procession. But what a peculiar procession it was...

For much of the race, the top 3 was made up of drivers from three teams which had not won a race all year. Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen, leading from, of all people, Giancarlo Fisichella's Force India, with Robert Kubica holding 3rd until Vettel finally got the jump on him at the last pit stops. His BMW Sauber at last beginning to come good after a miserable season, on the heels of the parent company's recent decision to withdraw from the sport at the end of the year. It was the performance of Fisichella' s Force India which was, by some distance, hardest to explain.

Ferrari might not have won a race until last Sunday, but they had been on the podium in each of the last 3 races, and with Spa being all but tailor-made for KERS, with the long drags up from la Source to Les Combes at the beginning of the lap, and from Stavelot to the Bus Stop at the other end, Spa has long seemed, along with Monza, the place the Scuderia was most likely to break its 2009 duck. Add to that the fact that Kimi Raikkonen always flies at Spa, and the eventual winner was not so unexpected.

Eventual third place finished Sebastian Vettel might have been odds on to win on Friday morning. The cool temperatures of the Ardennes at the end of August and the importance of aerodynamic efficiency through Pouhon and Fagnes should have played to the strengths of the Red Bull. As it was, the Red Bull never looked quite the devastating machine it had at Silverstone, the last real 'aero' track the F1 circus had visited. But for an awful start which left him stuck behind a number of much slower cars,k though, he might stillhave converted his 8th place on the grid into a win. As it was, he will take some consolation from the fact that with Button and Webber failing to score, he has kept himself in the title fight. He's really going to have to repeat last year's performance at Monza though...

What on earth to make of the performance of the man, and the car, which finished second!? Where did that performance come from? Yes, every now and again, F1 produces a freak result, but usually the explanation is apparent enough to the seasoned observer. The wins for Panis' Ligier at Monaco in 1996 and Johnny Herbert's Stewart at the Nurburgring might look equally unexpected, but they were essentially drivers in midfield cars benefiting in races of very high attrition.

Likewise, Damon Hill's near miss for Arrows at the Hungaroring in 1997 and the freak grid at the US Grand Prix at Phoenix in 1990 (Pierluigi Martini's Minardi on the front row, De Cesaris' Dallara ahead of Senna's Mclaren in 3rd, and Olivier Grouillard's Osella in eighth, perhaps even harder to explain on the face of it) were a consequence of the fact that Bridgestone and Pirelli, respectively, had produced the best rubber on the day at a time when all the serious, front-running teams were on Goodyears.

There is no such simple explanation for Fisi's pace at Spa that I can see. Yes, several of the expected front runners fell by the wayside, but Fisichella had been in front of them all at the time, having grabbed pole. Yes, Fisichella likes Spa, but so do a lot of other drivers. Button, for instance, has often gone very well there, and yet qualified outside the top 10 last weekend. There's no doubting, too, that Force India have been steadily improving this season, but only to the point where they no longer were routinely bringing up the very rear of the field. In the dry, they haven't previously threatened the points?

Why might the car suddenly have been so quick. Well, it's certainly clear that the 2009-spec control Bridgestones are very temperamental tyres, difficult to get into their operating window, and it seems that on that day, at Spa, with its combination of a very abrasive track surface and relatively low temperatures, the Force India was getting the tyres right into their operating window. There might well have been a substantial element of luck in this. With in-season testing banned this year, I'm not sure any of the teams have really been able to get a handle on all the tyres in all conditions.

Add to that, the Force India/Spyker has always tended to run a little better at Spa these last few years than it has at most other circuits. Maybe the team have just stumbled on a set-up trick that works well there. They also reckon that the latest upgrades have significantly improved the high speed aerodynamic downforce. Perhaps they've just produced a better implementation of the double-diffuser concept than anyone else. The radical rules change and the testing ban have tilted things a little back towards ingenuity and chance, and away from exhaustive iterative improvement and megabucks.

Mark Hughes take is that what we are seeing is that the Force India just happens to be supremely well adapted to a low-downforce set-up and this has been the first race all season at which this has really counted for anything. If he's right, they'll be right on it at Monza. Over at Autosport, Tony Dodgins (behind a paywall, but worth the subscription) relays the comments of one observer who wonders if something more sinister is going on - "It's simple, the team on pole has allegedly got some unpaid bills, the team that's second is not certain to carry on in F1 and the team that's third is for sale – so obviously they've all got the special comeback tyres that were meant for Schuey!" It's not been the first time this year that there have been whisperings that some Bridgestones are more equal than others.

Paranoia? Probably. It's always tempting to search for excuses when you aren't doing as well as you hoped and expected. And the idea that either the FIA or FOM are somehow conspiring to nobble some teams with duff tyres, because of their role in FOTA, or because of animus between the team principal and Ecclestone or Mosley is going to be hard to shake, even if its groundless nonsense. On the other hand, I had taken much the same view of suggestions that Nelson Piquet was instructed to crash out of the Singapore Grand Prix last year...

If Hughes is right, and the Force India is simply very good in low downforce trim, then this might just put Giancarlo Fisichella between the horns of a real dilemma over the next few days. There have been persistent rumours that Fisi is being lined up to replace the hapless Badoer in the second Ferrari. In normal circumstances, I don't doubt he would have jumped at the chance to see out the autumn of his career with a few races behind the wheel of the Prancing Horse. An Italian, in a Ferrari, at Monza.... How could he resist?

But wait a minute. Is the Ferrari actually a faster car than the Force India at the moment? And can he really pass up on the chance of winning the team's first race? If I were him, I'd be much more confident of my chances against Adrian Sutil in a Force India, than those of beating Kimi Raikkonen in an unfamiliar Ferrari. A tough call, but a nice problem to have. I hope he takes the chance if Ferrari come knocking, but if I'm honest, that's because I want to see what Tonio Liuzzi can do in a competitive Force India. Assuming, of course, that Spa was more than a freak occurrence.

You Pays Your Money...

Kimi Raikkonen, the highest paid driver on the F1 grid, is reputed to earn upwards of £25 million a year. While it's not quite on a par with the world's highest paid sportsman, Tiger Woods, it's still a staggering sum of money for a few hundred hours of work. It would take someone earning the median annual salary for a full time employee in the UK (such as your correspondent) a millennium to match the taciturn Finn's earnings. Someone on the minimum wage had better pencil in another 1000 years.....

There are plenty people who find the earnings of Raikkonen and, no doubt, other celebrities, obscene. Personally, I don't much care one way or the other. Whether merely driving racing cars, no matter how good you are at it, merits £25m or more a year I rather doubt. But if someone is prepared to pay you an eight figure sum to do something you actually rather enjoy doing anyway, chances are you wouldn't turn down the offer. And, at least unlike the captains of banking and investment, they haven't earned their money by inflicting untold damage on the global economy.

The recent economic turmoil engulfing the wider world has not escaped F1, however. No surprise really, given that the car industry has been seriously affected, and given that banks, such as Santander, Royal Bank of Scotland and ING are amongst the sport's major sponsors. With the sport's major backers facing serious financial difficulties, it is more than likely that not a few people within the sport are looking at the sums being paid out to such as Raikkonen, Alonso and Hamilton and wondering how it can continue to be justified.

There have been suggestions that F1 should take the bull by the horns and impose a salary cap on what drivers can earn. I have my doubts about whether a scheme could actually work. Even someone with as little business acumen as myself can see ways around it. Are personal sponsorship deals to be covered by any such arrangement? and if not, what's to stop a team determined to snare a particular driver from 'coming to an arrangement' with regard to team sponsors becoming personal sponsors? Or payments in kind, for example, of winning race cars?

The only way this can work is if it is a deal made between the top teams not to pay more than a certain amount for a driver. Anything imposed by the FIA without the full support of the teams themselves will almost certainly be side-stepped one way or another. All that aside, though, I can't help thinking that the scheme is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The teams who are paying top-dollar for the likes of Raikkonen, Hamilton and so on are not the ones facing the most serious financial difficulties. If the incomes of Ferrari and Mclaren are falling, then doubtless this will be a factor when it comes to renegotiating their drivers' contracts, but the its highly unlikely that either team will fall over simply because of the sums it is paying out to its drivers.

The teams in real financial difficulty - if the rumours are anything to go by - Williams and Force India, would be unaffected by any salary cap on drivers because their drivers aren't earning anything like enough money to be affected by any plausible limit on what drivers can earn. Adrian Sutil, for example, is still at Force India despite a rather lacklustre second season in the sport because he actually brings a lot of money to the team. Williams' Kazuki Nakajima has his seat chiefly because Williams' engine suppliers Toyota were prepared to cut the Didcot team a more favourable deal if they took Satoru's son on.

Formula 1 teams aren't charities, so why are the sport's biggest stars so well rewarded? The answer to this one is rather interesting. With a sport like football, the answer is straightforward. The best players are, by definition, better than their rivals. Having better players than anyone else should, all else being equal, ensure that a team wins more often than not. If you want them to play for your team and not your opponents' squad, then all else being equal, you're probably going to have to pay them more. And there are not really many other options open to a football team manager when it comes to spending the team's cash. Work to improve the stadium might help the club's commercial prospects, and so generate still more money, but it isn't going to make a difference to the performance of the players on the pitch.

Motor racing isn't like that. Spending money on drivers isn't the only way, or even usually the best way, that a team can improve its' performance. Hiring more engineers, investing in improved computer modeling techniques, a new wind-tunnel or any number of other programmes are every bit as likely to make a car faster, and they have the added advantage that, while the advantage that a driver brings leaves the moment your expensive superstar heads out of the door, gains found by your technical team are a long-term investment - they also improve the performance of both cars, and not only the one that your expensive lead driver is in. Ron Dennis once said that one of the reasons Mclaren fell into a slump in the mid-1990s was that it had been spending so much money keeping Ayrton Senna on board that they had allowed investment in other areas to slip. So when Senna left the team at the end of 1993, they began a three year period without a win.

So why, when a team could be making long term investments in its engineering strength, do Mclaren, Ferrari and Renault, to name but 3 teams, spend so much on their number 1 drivers? The answer, in short, is the law of diminishing returns at work. When you have a budget of £40m to run your racing team, an additional £10m will buy far more time if spent on the car than on the driver. When you've got a budget of £250m, that additional £10m isn't going to buy nearly as much improvement in performance as it would for a smaller team. Ferrari or Mclaren would find no shortage of competent professional racing drivers, and probably not a few current F1 drivers, who would be delighted to be offered a drive for them, and who wouldn't care whether they were paid at all. After all, even Ayrton Senna once offered to drive for Williams for free when they were dominating the sport in the early 1990s (he wasn't prepared to extend the same generous offer to Mclaren, it must be said.) The top teams, though, must reckon that the money they would save would, if instead spent on the car, not buy back the time they would lose by replacing an Alonso or a Hamilton with a Sutil or a Piquet Jr.

Fernando Alonso has said he reckons he's worth 6 tenths of a second a lap. One might quibble with the exact figure. Autosport's stats boffins reckoned he was, on average, about 4 tenths of a second a lap quicker than his team mate Nelson Piquet Jr. at Renault last year, and even leaving that aside, there is a more awkward question to be asked. 6 tenths of a second faster than whom? He certainly wasn't 6 tenths faster than Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren the previous year. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that a driver the calibre of Alonso (or Hamilton) is worth a few tenths of a second.

Teams spend vast sums of money chasing a few tenths, and hiring a man with the ability of an Alonso, Hamilton, Kubica or Raikkonen is a more reliable way to find this kind of time than most. Research and development might produce improvements, or it might not. And unlike money spent on the car, it has the added advantage that, if you're in a position to hire the best driver in the field, you not only have that man on your books, you make sure that none of your rivals do. If, for example, Lewis Hamilton is a tenth of a second a lap quicker than anyone else on the grid (I'm not suggesting he is, I'm just illustrating a point), hiring him really buys you 2 tenths - the extra tenth you find, and the tenth your rivals would have had if he were driving their car. One reason Ron Dennis might have felt inclined to take the chance of pairing up Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna in the late 1980s must have been the thought that neither man would be racing against him.

That's not to say that every mega-bucks deal a team has ever done has made sense. One can question whether Kimi Raikkonen was really worth all the money Ferrari have shovelled his way, especially since the much less well-remunerated Felipe Massa outpaced him as often as not last year, or whether the team might have got someone quicker for rather less money. That is debatable, whereas the silly money Toyota paid for Ralf Schumacher back in 2005 was utterly inexplicable, and quite who thought Eddie Irvine was worth his multi-million pound retainer at Jaguar I don't know. In both cases, one suspects this was the result of corporate suits from the automotive world with deep pockets and little real understanding of the sport getting their fingers burnt.

None of this is to say that driver salaries won't fall in the coming years. In the current economic climate, teams are not going to have the kind of money to spend that they once had. In that context, it simply won't make sense to offer eight figure sums to the guys who drive the cars. Like Clive over at F1Insight, I'm not convinced of the need for salary caps, though. The limitations of free markets might have been shown up rather painfully in the real world over the last year or so, but this strikes me as one area where there is no need for intervene. Let the teams decide for themselves what the worth of having a really first-rate driver on the payroll is.

Top 10 Drivers - 2008

Behind Clive's list over at F1 Insight, but well ahead of the annual Autocourse list, here is the annual Motor Sports Ramblings top 10 drivers list. It's only a personal view, and I think a case could be made for any of my top 3 drivers as the being the driver of the year. Nonetheless, after much indecision, I have arrived at my list.

10. Rubens Barrichello – You’re in your sixteenth season of Formula 1. You’ve spent six years in a championship winning team, playing second-fiddle to the greatest driver of his generation. Now you find yourself in your third year with Honda, a team which, over the last couple of years, seems to determined to take great leaps backwards. It would be easy for you to become entirely demoralised, to cruise-and-collect on your way to retirement. That, though, is not what Barrichello did.

After two years of being comprehensively outpaced by Jenson Button, Barrichello fought back this year with the outclassed Honda RA108, scoring the lion’s share of the team’s points and more often than not outqualifying the younger Brit. His drive in the wet at Britain brought the team it’s only podium, and while it may have owed much to Ross Brawn’s inspired call on the tyres, it still required a driver to keep it on the road on a day when many others did not. There were times, such as at the Chinese Grand Prix, when Barrichello had the recalcitrant Honda far further up the running order than it had any right to be and, after a couple of seasons when his star appeared to be on the wane, he did much to re-establish his reputation as one of the best drivers in the business this year. In the process, he just might have finished off any chances Jenson Button might ever have had of getting a drive with one of the front-running teams.

9. Jarno Trulli – After 3 years driving alongside an increasingly bored looking Ralf Schumacher, Jarno Trulli could easily have been caught on the hop when he found himself placed alongside a promising young newcomer, GP2 champion Timo Glock. Glock’s performances in the Toyota were impressive, but over the course of the season, it was Trulli who got more out of the car. His standout performance came at Magny Cours, when he out-paced the Mclarens, the BMWs and the Renaults to pick up Toyota’s first podium in over 2 years. Other drivers might have scored unexpected top 3 finishes this year, but Trulli’s was one of the relatively few which were the result of pace rather than luck.

He may continue to have a reputation as a one-lap specialist, but to my mind, that still reflects his phenomenal qualifying abilities, rather than any lack of race pace. If you’re really quick over a single lap, you will find yourself having to keep quicker machinery behind you on race day. So it proved again this year. Only towards the end of the season was the Toyota anything like a front-running car really, yet he more often than not made it through into the top-10 shoot out in qualifying, and outqualified team mate Glock 13-4. He racked up a good number of points too – all important when a team’s FOM money is dependent on its constructors’ championship position. Unless Toyota make a quantum leap forward under the new regulations next year, he’ll probably never be world champion, but there were more than a few flashes of the pace Trulli showed back in 2004 when he gave Alonso an awful lot to think about at Renault before he fell out with the team and his confidence went to pieces.

8. Nick Heidfeld - Ok, so in comparison with his team mate, ‘Quick Nick’ didn’t really live up to his epithet this year, he could be seen as a bit of a disappointment. After all, this was a man who had been de facto team leader last year, but just as Robert Kubica struggled with last year’s oversteery F1.07, so Heidfeld couldn’t extract the most from this year’s car. Only at Spa and Shanghai did he simply look quicker than Kubica.

In light of the press coverage, it would be easy to forget that Heidfeld actually finished the championship with a very impressive haul of 60 points, not many fewer than Kubica and more than Kovalainen was able to score with the more competitive Mclaren. He was on the podium four times (again, more than Kovalainen could manage in the Mclaren) and impressed in the wet at Silverstone on a day when his team mate flew off the road. In Spa he called it absolutely right in coming in for wet tyres 2 laps from the end, against the advice of his team, and while he may not have future world champion written all over him the way his young team mate does, he proved to be a very capable number 2. Last year, I suggested he might make an excellent partner to Hamilton at Mclaren, and what I’ve seen this year leaves me wondering if Mclaren might have picked up the constructors’ championship had they followed my advice.

7. Kimi Raikkonen - It was a disappointing year for the reigning world champion. There can be little doubting that the Ferrari was a potentially title winning car, but for whatever reason, the Finn never really seemed to get on with it. For much of the middle of the season, especially at Hungary, Hockenheim and Valencia, he appeared lacklustre and out of sorts, to the extent that more than a few observers were rather surprised when the Scuderia announced the renewal of his contract.

Raikkonen, though was the victim of more than his fair share of bad fortune this year, not to mention having to contend with a team mate who is almost certainly far better than most of the paddock is willing to give him credit for. He may have struggled to get the best out of the Ferrari over a single lap, but his race pace was, when he was in clear air and got the chance to demonstrate it, frequently very impressive. Hence all those fastest laps. In Sepang, he was outqualified by Massa on a heavier fuel load, but the Brazilian could do nothing about him on race day, and ended up flying off the road in frustration. In Spain he had the measure of Massa, and in Canada, where it seemed Ferrari had no answer for BMW, let alone Mclaren, he was a serious contender for victory before Hamilton ploughed into him in the pits. He dominated the French Grand Prix until a cracked exhaust slowed him, would have won at Spa had it not began to rain just a couple of laps from home, and comprehensively outpaced his team mate at China when the Brazilian was meant to be making his bid for the title. It was a mixed year for the quiet Finn, but that mid-season slump aside, he did a better job than his results might suggest.

6. Mark Webber – Another year in which the Aussie’s undoubted talents were wasted in a sub-standard Red Bull. It must be to his immense frustration that Renault fell so far behind in the horsepower war (you know, the one that is supposedly not being fought) that the works team were more often than not outpaced by the old Minardi guys running their car with a Ferrari engine. Webber made the most of what he had, and picked up an awful lot of 6^th, 7^th and 8^th place finishes. David Coulthard, in the other Red Bull, rarely managed to get the car anywhere near the points. Another man with an unfair reputation as a qualifying specialist, it’s simply easier to transcend the limitations of your machinery over a single lap than over a whole race. All the same, how on earth did he get the RB4 on the front row at Silverstone? He’s doubtless still kicking himself for throwing it off the road on the first lap.

It was one of very few mistakes that Webber made all year. His finest drive? His pace in Barcelona was particularly impressive, and staying on the road in horrendous conditions in Monaco ensured his best result of the season but to my mind one of his great, largely unnoticed drives came at Spa. The Renault-engined version of the Red Bull chassis showed little pace, yet Webber nonetheless got himself up to 7^th on the grid, and ran well in the early stages only to be punted off the road by Heikki Kovalainen. From there, he kept his head down and finished an unheralded 8^th. It was a drive typical of his year – getting the most out of an underperforming car in difficult circumstances and largely unnoticed.

5. Sebastian Vettel – The cheerful German youth became the youngest man ever to win a Grand Prix at Monza in September. He couldn’t have done it in finer style either. OK, so the Red Bull is a very forgiving car in the wet, and the Ferrari engine is exactly what you would want for Monza’s long straights, but even so… a Toro Rosso winning from pole position, never seriously challenged? You’d have got long odds on that before the start of the year, and much of the credit must go to Vettel.

He began the season impressively, breaking through unexpectedly into the top 10 run-off in Melbourne, but thereafter, seemed to fade away for a while, retiring from each of the first four races, getting caught up in silly little incidents. Then, in the conditions you would have thought most likely to induce unforced errors, the torrential rain at Monaco, he put in a fine, consistent drive to finish fifth behind Mark Webber. From there, his season began an upswing that really took off in Valencia, when he and the Red Bull looked really at home on the Spanish dockland circuit. There followed good points finishes in Belgium and Singapore, and of course that fairytale win at Monza. Just to show he really knows what he’s doing in the rain, he rounded off the year by nearly snatching the world title from Hamilton’s grasp with a fine drive to 4^th in Brazil. At the start of the year, I wondered whether the wunderkind could live up to the hype. I’m beginning to think he really can.

4. Fernando Alonso – It may have been an on/off year for the Spanish double world champion, but if I were a team boss, I’d still have him at the top of my shopping list, no matter how difficult he might be. He was always quick, the only driver to outqualify his team mate at every race, but at times, especially in the first part of the year, he was rather erratic, losing good points with silly errors in Monaco, Canada and Germany. There were times when he looked like a quick, but overenthusiastic youngster unable to rein in his urge to push a car that wasn’t truly on the pace. Outside the car, in the first part of the season, overenthusiasm was not a problem Renault were faced with. Rumour has it, he skipped team debriefs, unable to summon up the commitment to deal with a car which was far from competitive.

Then Renault turned a corner and the old Fernando Alonso was back. In the last third of the year, Alonso racked up more points than either of the two title challengers, in a car which was far from the fastest in the field. The Singapore win might have owed much to luck, but the same could not be said of his Fuji victory two weeks later. His drive to fourth in a car which team mate Piquet struggled to get into the points was in its own way equally impressive, and he nearly succeeded in his stated ambition of helping Massa beat old rival Hamilton to the title in Brazil with another fine drive in difficult conditions to take 2^nd. There were two Fernando Alonsos this year. The one who looked petulant and unpredictable for much of the first half of the year would barely scrape into this top 10, but the one who beat Michael Schumacher to the world title in 2006 in an inferior car, and who made a reappearance towards the end of the year, would be my driver of the year.

3. Felipe Massa - Despite my long-held scepticism about the little Brazilian, I think I might finally have to concede that Felipe Massa really is the real deal. He clearly established himself as Ferrari’s main title contender, ahead of his World Champion team mate Kimi Raikkonen. There were times when he was absolutely inspired – at Hungary, in Turkey, a track he has really made his own, and most notably at his home race in Brazil where he made his final, desperate bid to wrest the World title from Lewis Hamilton. Other good, solid wins came at Valencia and Bahrain, and for all that he was hardly a worthy winner at Spa, he did at least keep his car on the road, when others did not.

Had his Ferrari been more reliable (there were engine failures in Australia and Hungary and pit-stop bungles in Canada and Singapore) he would have won the world title easily. However, he must shoulder his share of the blame for failing to take the title in what was probably the fastest car in the field. Before the engine failure in Melbourne, there had been not one but two spins, and then two weeks later, he spun out of a safe second place in Malaysia and was a no-score. He looked

positively amateurish in the wet at Silverstone, finishing 13^th and last and there were other races where he just looked lacklustre. He had no answer for Raikkonen’s pace at Spa, Magny Cours or at the vital race in Shanghai. At Fuji, he pushed Hamilton off the road in a clumsy move that left him with a penalty which cost him a possible podium finish, and the way he practically rolled over and invited Hamilton past in the closing laps of the German Grand Prix left not a few of us wondering if the Brazilian was really world champion material. This was undoubtedly the strongest season from the Brazilian yet, and he is almost unrecognisable as the fast but wildly unpredictable youngster who debuted with Sauber in 2002. All the same, I can’t help but wonder whether his best shot at the driver’s title may now lie in the past.

2. Lewis Hamilton – A controversial thought, but was Lewis Hamilton a slightly less complete driver this year than he was last season? Had he actually taken a bit of a step backward, under the increased pressure of being seen as a title contender from the start. He got things off to a great start at Melbourne, with a dominant win, and he did well to recover some points from a Malaysia weekend when everything seemed to wrong for him. Things took a turn for the worse, though, with a scrappy, error-strewn and ultimately point-less weekend at Bahrain. He fumbled his start, and then compounded his error by running into the back of Alonso.

It wasn’t the only time he would throw away points with silly, basic errors. There was his infamous moment of brain fade when he ran into the back of Kimi Raikkonen in the pitlane in Canada, and his entirely unnecessary banzai approach to the first corner at Fuji. Come to that, his failure to hand back a place he had gained unfairly at the expense of Sebastian Vettel in France almost certainly cost him points too. So why do I place him ahead of Massa in my top 10?

In short, because when he was good, he was truly astounding. His comprehensive domination of the British Grand Prix, winning by over a minute in atrocious conditions that would leave many floundering, was to my mind one of the all time great race drives. Two weeks later, he was again in dominant form in Germany, passing Massa on the road on his way to victory (one of very few overtaking manoeuvres between the title contenders which didn’t take place on the opening lap). In the wet at Monaco and – for a while – at Monza, he again showed a degree of car control which none of his rivals seem able to muster. In the end, he gets the nod from me over Felipe Massa because while Massa was frequently impressive, I always had the impression the Ferrari was ultimately the quicker car this year, and yet in spite of this, and in spite of a couple of very dubious stewarding decisions, Hamilton still just came away with the title.

1. Robert Kubica If one thing is clear, it is that nobody was perfect this year. All the leading drivers made mistakes and had off-days over the course of the season. To my mind, though Poland’s Robert Kubica had fewer than any of his rivals. How else to explain that, in a BMW Sauber that was never any match for Ferrari or Mclaren, and which by the end of the year struggled to stay on terms with Renault or Toyota, he was still in with a mathematical shot at the title after Kimi Raikkonen had fallen by the wayside, with two rounds to go?

He frequently transcended the limits of his car, pitching it onto pole at Bahrain and keeping Kimi Raikkonen honest on the way to a podium finish, and again staying right on the pace of the Ferraris and Mclarens in Spain. The win in Canada might have owed much to luck, but on the other hand, had Lewis Hamilton not been very lucky with his enforced pit-stop early on at Monaco, which just happened to land him on exactly the right strategy for the conditions, Kubica would probably have won round the streets of the Principality. Less noticed, but equally impressive were the occasions on which Kubica dragged a car which was far from truly competitive much further up the order. The Hungarian Grand Prix, where the BMW proved so slow that Nick Heidfeld couldn’t drag it out of Q1, for example. Or Valencia, where again the car looked miles from the pace in the hands of his team mate, but where Kubica got himself amongst the Mclarens and Ferraris while Heidfeld struggled to hold off the Toro Rossos and Renaults.

Kubica’s season wasn’t perfect. He threw away the lead of the World Championship with an (admittedly understandable) mistake in the rain at Silverstone, and he was curiously lacklustre at Spa and at Shanghai, where Heidfeld appeared better able to get to grips with the BMW. To my mind, though, he came much closer to perfection than anyone else this year, and frequently overcame the limitations of a car which was not truly a race winner. If, as everyone expects, Ferrari ditch Massa or Raikkonen at the end of next year, they face an interesting dilemma in choosing between double world champion Alonso and BMW's new Polish star.

The Rest

Of all those who haven’t made the top 10, the most glaring omission, I think is Toyota novice Timo Glock. The German GP2 champion might not have made quite the kind of impact that his forerunner as GP2 Champion did, but after a slightly disappointing start to the season, he came on increasingly strong towards the end. Rarely able to match Trulli in qualifying, he was often as strong come race day, and in Hungary, really wasn’t far behind race winner Kovalainen. He looks to have a strong future in the sport.

Heikki Kovalainen is the only race winner not in my top 10 this year. Again, I think a case can be made for his being in the lower reaches of the top 10, and he certainly had more than his share of bad luck over the course of the year, but the blunt truth is that he finished only seventh in the title race with a car which his team mate was able to take to the title. To be fair, while his Hungarian GP win relied on luck, but for misfortune, he might have won in Turkey and at Fuji. It is also worth remembering that, while he never had the race-pace of Hamilton, he frequently matched Hamilton on fuel-corrected qualifying pace in the first part of the year, which suggests that fundamentally the pace may be there. It will be interesting to see if he can be more of a factor at Mclaren next year.

This year’s Williams was a major disappointment. Nico Rosberg picked up a couple of podiums with it at street circuits, to which it seemed more suited but made too many mistakes this year – notably at Monaco and Canada where he might otherwise have picked up points, and generally failed to transcend the limitations of his car. Sometimes, he struggled even to out-pace rookie team mate Kazuki Nakajima (though to be fair, it is worth pointing to Autosport’s analysis of the difference in outright pace between drivers as measured by fastest lap of the weekend – which put Rosberg further ahead of his team mate than any other driver. Nonetheless, I found him slightly underwhelming this year. Nakajima was not as much of a disappointment as I feared he might have been, and seems to have more pace than his Dad, but did nothing to suggest he will break the mould and become Japan’s first Grand Prix winner.

What of the other men in their first Grand Prix season? Sebastien Bourdais came into F1 with 4 Champ Car titles, and seemed to pick up the lion’s share of Toro Rosso’s bad luck – failing, for instance, to get off the line from the second row in Italy, inexplicably being stripped of his seventh place in Fuji for being run off the road by Felipe Massa and getting losing what would have been a fine fourth place in Spa on the final lap. Contrary to what some have said, he looks to me like he belongs in F1 and deserves another year, though, on the other hand, he doesn’t really look like a future champion.

Nelson Piquet Jr, on the other hand, was a crashing disappointment. In the early part of the season, he was miles from the pace of his team mate, which is perhaps understandable given his team mate was Fernando Alonso. More worryingly for him, though, he made the Renault look like a tail-end car. There were occasional flashes of the kind of talent that enabled him to win the British F3 championship and fight Lewis Hamilton all the way for the GP2 title in 2006, but more often than not he seemed to collapse under the pressure, especially in qualifying, where he seemed unable to access the kind of pace he could sometimes show in free practice. He also went off the road a lot. To be fair though, he kept everything together to pick up a solid second place in Germany when a fortunately timed safety car left him in the pound seats, and even beat Alonso without help from the safety car in France (albeit Alonso was heavily compromised by a fuel strategy seemingly geared around Saturday afternoon glory-hunting.)

Jenson Button must have been frustrated to find himself stuck in a hopelessly uncompetitive Honda for the second year in a row. Perhaps the sheer disappointment goes some way to explaining why, unlike last year, he never seemed able to rise above this, and was generally out-paced by his veteran team mate Barrichello. Honda, for all that they made a complete mess of 2008, might be wondering why they were paying quite so much for their lead driver. His performances were at least generally more impressive than those of David Coulthard whom, I think, stayed around in the sport for a year too long. He never looked like getting on terms with the pace of team mate Mark Webber, and seemed to spend much of the year getting caught up in collisions. By staying out of trouble in Canada, he did however pick up one last podium in a long and generally successful career.

Last, and, to be honest, least, Force India crept close to the pace this year, but still didn’t make the leap required to actually pose any kind of threat to anyone else on the grid. Giancarlo Fisichella, after three years with front-running Renault, somehow maintained enough interest in the job to out-pace Adrian Sutil most of the time, which suggests that the German was rather over-hyped last year. There were odd flashes from both drivers through the year – Giancarlo Fisichella’s 12^th place on the grid at Monza and his solid run in the top 5 for a good part of the Brazilian GP (only for the team to fumble a pit stop) and Adrian Sutil’s impressive but ultimately fruitless drive in the wet at Monaco and (much less noticed) his race at Spa which saw him mixing it with the Hondas and Williams for much of the race. In the end, though, the team must be hoping that their deal with Mercedes will see them turn the corner, because they are fast filling the role left vacant by Minardi as perennial tail-enders. A shame for a team which, as Jordan, made a semi-serious bid for the title just ten years back.