If

Last weekend was the first time since the Formula 1 World Championship was established in 1950 that four drivers went into the final round with a mathematical chance of becoming World Champion. The title battle might have lacked the personal edge and intensity of those between Senna and Prost in the late 80s and early 90s, or even that between Schumacher and Alonso in 2006, but in terms of the sheer number of serious contenders, I can't think of another season which compares.

In the end, it was Sebastian Vettel who walked away with the title. Readers of this blog will know that personally, I had hoped that Mark Webber would win the championship. Partly because he had always struck me as someone who had established a front-line F1 career against the odds, who for years had looked like he would never get the title-contending car I was always convinced his talent merited, and, in part simply because if he were to win the title, it would probably be the last time that the F1 World Champion is older than me.

Vettel, however, was a worthy winner. On balance, the man who most deserved to come away from the desert on Sunday with the winner's trophy. He made mistakes, yes: Clattering into the back of Jenson Button at Spa, eliminating himself in Istanbul when he moved across on Mark Webber, failing to abide by the safety car rules in Hungary. But, equally, he suffered more mechanical misfortune than any of is major title rivals: The engine that lapsed onto 7 cylinders in Bahrain; the faulty wheel bearing that took him out of contention in Australia while he was in a commanding lead; and finally, the engine failure in Korea, which looked to have robbed him of any realistic chance at the title. That he was able to triumph in spite of these set-backs was down in part to the fact that the Red Bull RB6 was the class of the field, but his own prodigious pace was equally significant. The ten pole positions, the times he drove away into the distance leaving everyone else wondering where he had gone – at Albert Park before the car broke, at Suzuka and, appropriately enough, at the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi.

That speed alone, though, might not have been enough for him to have secured the title were it not the unusually high error-rate of all the title contenders this year. As teams and drivers packed up under cover of darkness at Abu Dhabi last Sunday, Hamilton, Alonso and Webber might all have been ruing mistakes made, wondering what might have been. What if... Mark Webber, especially. Unlike the other two, he does not have a championship to his name, and at the age of 34, with what appears from the outside to be a somewhat frosty relationship with his own team, one has to wonder if the best opportunity he is ever likely to have has slipped through his fingers. He may be a couple of years younger than Schumacher was when he won his seventh title at Ferrari in 2004, but Vettel, who is only five years older than Webber's step-son, is only likely to get faster. Webber has to hope that the 2011 Red Bull is every bit as competitive as this year's. And even then, that might not be enough.

The lapse of concentration that saw him crash out of the Korean Grand Prix, throwing away a near certain second place and, given Vettel's retirement, perhaps a fifth victory. Had he won that race, he might well have found the team willing to order Vettel out of his way at Interlagos, and he would now be World Champion. Nor was that his only mistake. There was his almighty accident in Valencia, after he ran into the back of Heikki Kovalainen's much slower Lotus, his scrappy early races in Bahrain and, especially, Australia, from which he really should have scored more points, given the potential of the Red Bull. And leaving the door open for Sebastian Vettel at the start in Malaysia after securing pole.

Lewis Hamilton's Mclaren was not, over the season as a whole, anything like a match for the Red Bulls, and by the end of the year, Ferrari had also appeared to have moved ahead of the Woking team on performance. As such, three wins and fourth in the points table was not a bad result. But he could have had so much more had he been a little more patient at the start at Monza, had he given Mark Webber a little more room while trying to pass at Singapore and had he taken a slightly more measured approach to the wet races in China and Australia, not been panicked into making the wrong calls on tyres. That, in spite of these errors, and notwithstanding the fact that the 2010 Mclaren was probably only the third quickest car this year, he was still in with an outside chance of the championship at the final race, is testament to Hamilton's incredible natural speed. Discussing the merits of the current F1 grid with a friend and former kart-racer earlier in the year, he expressed the view that in terms of sheer pace, Hamilton was on a different level from anyone else on the grid, even Alonso, even Kubica, even Vettel. And there were times, especially those occasions where he was running top three or four while his world champion team mate was struggling to get out of the midfield, when it was hard to disagree. 2010, though, was not to be his year, and just as with his first season, back in 2007, it was his occasional hot-headedness which prevented him claiming a second world title. If he ever learns to tame that impetuous streak, he might dominate the sport in the manner of Michael Schumacher in the first part of the last decade.

It was probably a good thing that, thanks to a rather eccentric pit strategy from Ferrari in Abu Dhabi and the near impossibility of overtaking there (tip for the track owners – get rid of the stupid fiddly bit leading up to the hairpin before the back straight), Fernando Alonso was denied a third title. Had Alonso secured the championship by less than 7 points, then it would be hard to forget the team's barely disguised order to Massa to hand victory to him at Hockenheim, which seemed about as clear a case of team orders as ever I have seen (I don't have a problem with team orders in F1, but by my reading, the rulebook does). Credit where it is due to Alonso, though. When he was nearly 50 points adrift at the mid-way point in the season, he was insistent that he would win the world title this year. At the time it seemed a most implausible claim. With Ferrari struggling to match Renault and Mercedes at Istanbul and Silverstone, never mind Mclaren or Red Bull, and with but one win to his name at that point, it seemed unlikely to say the least. And yet, he would go into the final race with an 8 point lead, knowing that a top 2 finish would secure in the title no matter what. His wins at Monza and at Singapore, under intense pressure, were a good illustration of why many consider him the most complete driver on the grid. Had he and his team not been frightened into an early pit stop that left him staring at Vitaly Petrov's gearbox all evening, his name would by now have joined those of Lauda, Stewart, Senna and Piquet as three-time champions.

Yet it would be wrong the blame the failure to bring the title back to Maranello entirely on that pit-call. Had Alonso not dropped his car into the barriers at Spa, had he not crashed out on Saturday at Monaco, forcing a back-row start at the one circuit where you really don't want to start at the back of the grid, had he handed back track position to Robert Kubica at Silverstone and avoided the drive-through penalty, he might well have had the title secured long before they got to Abu Dhabi. As with Hamilton and Webber, Alonso could not blame bad fortune alone for his eventual defeat.

Actually, the one man among the title contenders who didn't really make a mistake worthy of the name all year was reigning world champion, Jenson Button. His problem was that, not withstanding those two classy victories in the rain at Albert Park and Shanghai, he simply wasn't quite fast enough. Typically about a couple of tenths down on Hamilton over a single lap, he continued to struggle in qualifying and his race pace, while better, wasn't quite enough to compensate, given how difficult passing is in modern F1. Whether by accident or design, Mclaren appear to have hired the perfect number 2 to Lewis Hamilton. Quicker than Kovalainen ever was, any driver capable of out-pacing Hamilton in the rain, as he did at Shanghai, has a fair mastery of his art, but I expect Button may join the long list of English one-time champions. He rarely took points off the younger Briton and there didn't appear to be any of the tension evident in relations between Webber and Vettel over at Red Bull. One more season at Mclaren then off to enjoy his retirement?

It may have been book-ended by two processions in the Middle East, but the 2010 season turned out to be something of a vintage year. The most open championship battle that I can recall in a quarter century of following the sport. Some classic races along the way, and a new world champion crowned at the age of just 23. If Mercedes and Renault (or Lotus, or Lotus Renault, or whatever they end up being known as) can get their act together next year, 2011 could be even more open.

Summer's End

The seasons have an underlying rhythm to them. After the relaxed carefree weeks of summer turn steadily languid through the heat of August, September marks a return to the reality of work, a sense of knuckling down as the nights draw in and the weather turns more chill. Where once it was going back to school or university, these days for me its the return of Parliament from its summer recess that marks Summer's end. And one event that is inextricably linked with this time of year in my mind is the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

There can surely be no better place to mark the end of European season than the Autodromo Nazionale Monza. Even as it stands today, emasculated by chicanes, it remains the fastest circuit on the F1 calendar, in its own way every bit as much a unique challenge as Monaco. Watching the onboard footage as drivers top 215mph along its long, narrow straights, its one of the few places where Grand Prix racing still looks, well, dangerous. But more to the point, Monza tends to mark the point in the racing season at which it becomes clear who is really in the battle for the World Championship and whose campaign has fallen off the rails. With the end of summer, the destiny of the World Titles tends to come into focus.

Last year, it was their poor performance at Monza that all but guaranteed that Red Bull would not deny Brawn either world title. Going back a few years to 2003, it marked the point at which what had been a five-way title fight boiled down to the three way battle between Raikkonen, Schumacher and Montoya. And, indeed, Schumacher's victory, after a lacklustre summer, turned out to be a portent of the fact that, after the FIA's meddling with the tyre regulations, he and Ferrari would retain their crowns for a fourth successive year.

A fortnight ago, it seemed for a moment, after Messrs Vettel, Alonso and Button all crashed out of contention at Spa, that what had been another five way fight was narrowing down to a straight face-off between Mark Webber and Lewis Hamilton. But then that all changed last weekend. Hamilton, ever the live-wire, walking a narrow line between genius and foolhardiness, let his impetuousness get the better of him on the opening lap and failed to score, while Webber was, if anything, too cautious, and the combination of a poor opening lap which saw him drop from 5th to 9th, and his Red Bull's lack of straightline grunt ensured he could do no better than 6th.

By contrast, the three men who failed to score at Spa all had a pretty decent weekend at Monza. Fernando Alonso, whose title hopes looked all but doomed when he dropped his Ferrari into the barriers on the way to Rivage two weeks earlier, suddenly looks to be right back in the mix following his Monza win. The fact that neither he nor Ferrari have been further punished for the team orders farce at Hockenheim does them no harm either. Suffice to say that should he eventually win the title by less than the 7 points that he took from Massa that day, his rivals would have good reason to feel aggrieved.

Jenson Button had been looking rather overshadowed by team mate Hamilton in recent races. Having got the ball rolling for Mclaren with victory at Melbourne Park and quickly followed thatr up with another win in China, he has in recent races he has looked more and more like Mclaren's unofficial number 2 rather than a serious title prospect. But at Monza, he had his team mate beat even before Lewis broke a steering arm against the back of Massa's Ferrari at La Roggia. Even Sebastian Vettel played himself back into contention to an extent, clawing points back from the men at the head of the points table with his fourth place finish being probably about the best anyone was going to get out of a Red Bull at Monza.

And so as the season departs Europe for its final globe-trotting fling through Singapore, Korea, Japan, Brazil and finally Abu Dhabi, it looks like we once again have a full five-way title fight on our hand. Sebastian Vettel, in 5th, is just 24 points down on leader Mark Webber. And remember with 25 points for a win, in old money, that's a gap of just under 10 points. But which of the five pretenders stands the best chance of coming away with the crown?

Let's start with the two men who should be the favourites, Red Bull drivers Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel. There can be little doubting that over the course of the season, the Red Bull has been the quickest car, sometimes, as at Hungary, by an almost embarrassing margin. By rights, Vettel and Webber should have nobody to worry about but each other by now. Except that silly errors from both drivers, mechanical frailty and a fair dose of plain old misfortune has allowed Alonso, Hamilton and Button to gatecrash their party. And now it's no longer so clear that the Red Bull any longer has quite the same advantage it did earlier in the year. It might be too early to conclude that Ferrari and Mclaren have caught them. Monza was perhaps always the weakest track for Red Bull's relatively underpowered but tremendously aerodynamically efficient machine. On the other hand, I'd be surprised if they have quite the advantage they seemed to have on everyone at the Hungaroring.

And it might be crucial that, where the other three are all past or current World Champions, neither Webber nor Vettel yet has a title to their name. And for differing reasons, that will add to the pressure that those two will feel. Vettel is still frightfully young, at only 23, and in only his third full season in F1. While that relative inexperience clearly hasn't slowed him down at all, I can't help thinking that it might help to explain the string of silly errors - the collisions with his team mate at Istanbul and with Button at Spa, the moment of doziness behind the safety car at Hungaroring, which have cost him crucial points. Without those, even allowing for his having had the lion's share of Red Bull's mechanical maladies, he'd be some distance in front in the title race right now.

If Vettel's problem is finding a controlled outlet for the nervous energy of youth, then Webber has the opposite problem. The last-chance urgency of approaching middle age. The sense that, even if Red Bull can produce another title contender in 2011 his young team mate will only get faster and more polished and that 2010 and this represents the best chance he is ever likely to get of becoming Australia's third world champion. He's been remarkably calm in recent races, but I wonder if that very caution might cost him in what is after all a five way fight for the title. He has the points lead, which mean's he's the prey rather than the hunter. Remember how that went to Button's head last year?

Over at Mclaren, Button's role is reversed from last year. Rather than defending a large points lead, he's having to claw back a points deficit to the leading contenders, Hamilton and Webber. Button's problem is that, while he can be as quick as anyone on his day, when he can't get the 2010 Mclaren set up to his liking, he really struggles with it. Remember his failing to make Q3 at Hungary? It seems that when the Mclaren isn't where it should be, it is Hamilton who is much more adept at driving around the problems, and getting the most from it. And the circuits which are coming up, with their great reliance on low speed traction and with little scope for the Mclaren's refined F-Duct to be used to its greatest advantage, are going to play into the hands of a driver who can take a recalcitrant car by the scruff of the neck and wring the most from it. Not something Button has ever been known for. That said, in a five-way battle like this, a big part of winning is about not making mistakes, and of the contenders for the title, nobody has made fewer.

Hamilton has not been quite so error free, but over the year it's hard to ignore the fact that he has been the quicker of the two British World Champions driving for Mclaren this year, and has perhaps got more out of his machinery than anyone else on the grid. If the Mclaren proves quick enough, he would be my tip for the title, but I can't help thinking that Turkey aside, Mclaren have only won races this year when it has poured with rain, or on tracks where out and out straight line speed is more important than downforce. It might rain at Interlagos and Suzuka, but not one of the five remaining tracks on the calendar look like natural Mclaren territory to me. That mistake on the opening lap at Monza might turn out to be very costly indeed.

All this leaves Ferrari and Fernando Alonso. The Spaniard has one big advantage, namely that while all his other rivals have their team mates to worry about, the Scuderia has only one dog left in the fight. Having a number two driver to covertly, and to judge by the German Grand Prix, perhaps overtly, assist Alonso's title challenge might prove decisive. Unlike the other teams, they can afford to use one of their drivers as a guinea pig, and, potentially as a 'hare' or as a 'roadblock', which just might prove to be a crucial advantage. Combine that with the fact that Alonso has more World titles and greater experience of being in title fights than his rivals, while Ferrari are past masters at it, and I wonder if it just might be enough to enable them to overcome the faster but seemingly error-prone Red Bull team.

So, forced to place a bet, I'd say it's going to be between Alonso and Webber, with Hamilton heading the chasing pack. But it really could go any way. And, of course, in terms of individual races, it won't be just these five who will be in contention. While it is still mathematically possible, Nico Rosberg and Robert Kubica stand little chance of walking away with the title, but I wouldn't rule out either for a surprise race win, particularly at Singapore, where both have proven fast before. It's going to be an interesting autumn.

Underwhelmed

I've said before that the secret of happiness, or at least contentment, is low expectations. So perhaps that's why I found the opening round of the 2010 Formula 1 Championship last weekend such a disappointment. I had been expecting a close battle between four world champions, with Red Bull, Ferrari, Mclaren and Mercedes all in the hunt for victory. I had expected Renault, Williams and Sauber to surprise. There was the return of Michael Schumacher after three years away. And I had hoped that the ban on refueling might finally force drivers to fight it out on the track.

As it was, the opening race was pretty dreary. There was, to be fair, the threat of a battle for the lead between Alonso's Ferrari and Vettel's Red Bull, but Vettel's Renault engine gave out before battle was really joined, and the experiences of others, further down the field, suggests that even if Alonso's Ferrari was considerably quicker, he almost certainly wouldn't have been able to find a way past.

To be fair, there have not been many close fought races with plenty overtaking between the leading drivers at Bahrain. With the exception of the first turn, there isn't really anywhere on the Sakhir circuit where a modern F1 car is going to find a way past a healthy rival able to lap within a second or two of the chasing car. It's a problem with the design of modern F1 cars (there was plenty of passing in the supporting GP2 Asia race) and I'm not sure there's an obvious solution to it. Those who talk of banning wings or similar such ideas miss the point that, no matter how you write the rulebook, designers and engineers will always find another way of clawing back the downforce, and quite possibly that new way will involve even more turbulence and dirty air than the current one (although James Allen has an interesting article on his blog questioning whether aerodynamic downforce is the problem anyway). The solution is a rule-set which forces teams to run cars much like the first-generation GP2 cars, but for the reasons above, that's far easier said than done.

All that said, I'm not convinced the new rules, or at least the combination of the new rules and the tyres Bridgedstone provided at Bahrain, have exactly helped matters. The tyres appear durable enough to cope with a one-stop strategy, but only provided the driver is pretty careful with them, doesn't push the rubber too hard, doesn't run too close to the car ahead and, certainly only provided the driver doesn't risk flat-spotting them with a late-braking passing move.

Predictably, there have been calls to address this by adding yet more artifice to the rules - a mandatory two pit-stop rule (as if that had added in any way to the DTM where it has been tried) or even, heaven forfend, introducing wacky-races style short-cuts to the circuit which a driver may use a certain number of times a race to overtake (because such moves would really rank alongside Hakkinen vs Schumacher at Spa in 2000 or Mansell on Senna at Hungary in 1989 as great overtaking manoeuvres...) It strikes me that the answer lies in the other direction - fewer rules rather than more. In particular, let's get rid of the rule that a driver has to stop to change tyres at least once. Imagine how Bahrain might have turned out if Hamilton or Rosberg, mindful of the difficulty of overtaking, decided to gamble on running the whole race on one set of tyres. And imagine how determined a freshly-tyred Alonso might have been to find a way past in the closing laps, after his stop. The one rule change which has really produced closer racing in recent years was the one-set-of-tyres-a-race rule of 2005, where we even had passing at Monaco.

Unfortunately, the new rules were not the only thing that left me feeling a little downheartened, watching the GP on Iplayer on Sunday evening (having just returned from spending the afternoon in A&E, but that needn't detain us here). There were disturbing signs that, far from being the eight-way title fight we might have hoped for, we could be looking at a Ferrari runaway on the scale of 2004. Yes, Vettel got pole, perhaps because Red Bull had mastered the art of running a car on empty tanks for a banzai qualifying run while set up to run on a full tank of fuel at the start, but Alonso's fastest race lap was a whole second quicker than anyone else's.

Certainly, it doesn't appear that Alonso will be under any immediate threat from the man behind nearly half of all Maranello's race victories, Michael Schumacher. His return was another minor disappointment. Dieter Rencken this week ran an article on how age should be no barrier to the German, but something, either age or race-rustiness, must be behind his inability to match team mate Nico Rosberg last weekend. In Martin Brundle's words, he appeared a tenth of a second behind the car, and while he put a brave face on when talking to the press, he must surely be wondering whether, at 41, he isn't getting a bit old for all this now. Perhaps it will be completely different in Australia, but if it isn't, I wonder how long he'll stick around. He didn't come back to F1 to be No. 2 to Nico Rosberg, after all.

More generally, qualifying demonstrated that, after several years in which the gap between the fastest and slowest cars has been steadily narrowing, it appears to have opened right back out again this year. Not only the new teams, which we all knew would be miles from the pace, but the midfield appear to have slipped back. There were no surprises from Williams or Renault, while the only thing that was unexpected about Sauber's performance was how woefully slow they were, after showing promising form in winter testing. Shades of Prost in 2001, one wonders whether they were running light to attract sponsors.

Down at the back, it was amateur hour. The new teams are vastly professional organisations when compared to such past embarassments as Life, Forti and Andrea Moda but nonetheless Karun Chandhok's experience with the new HRT brought back memories of such past disastrous efforts. Turning up to the first race with a car which had literally never turned a wheel, and having Chandhok use qualifying to shake down the second car was desperate, and bordering on dangerous.

As was Virgin's seeming inability to bolt all four wheels to their wagon. To be fair, it's something which has afflicted a number of teams down the years, but it doesn't exactly bode well for a new team. The CFD-designed car did at least appear to be the quickest of the new machines, but it remains every bit as fragile as it looked in testing, and by one-third distance, both Di Grassi and Glock were done for the day.

Mike Gascoygne's Litespeed, sorry, Proton, cough, Lotus, was the best put together and most professionally run of the new cars. That said, it is going to require some serious development work if Tony Fernandes' new team is to do anything more than trundle around at the back of the field, getting lapped a couple of times an afternoon. Certainly, if these three new teams are the brave new face of F1, then I find myself in the rather strange position of feeling nostalgic for Toyota, who may have been soulless but could at least build a half-way competitive F1 car.

So, Australia next. A circuit where overtaking was always something of a rarity anyway....

F1 2010: A Golden Age?

Another new season is almost upon us. It's always a time of excitement and anticipation, when the racing season's big questions remain unanswered, when nobody knows for sure who will be right on the pace, and it is possible to believe that a uniquely close-fought, competitive season awaits us. Sometimes the spell is broken the moment the cars hit the track at the first race, when the dreary reality that somebody, in the first half of the decade it tended to be Ferrari, has built a car which is a second a lap faster than anyone else, and a summer of boring Sunday processions awaits us. But, at the risk of sounding like a screaming Autosport headline, this year just might be very special indeed. Forgive me the lapse into hyperbole, but we just might be right in the middle of a golden age of Formula 1 racing. Hear me out...

The Return of the King

Firstly there's the decision of 7 times World Champion Michael Schumacher to throw his hat into the ring for one last time. Unquestionably one of the sport's all time greats, I still wonder whether his reach might at last exceed his grasp. He's been three years out of the cockpit, he's still nursing a neck injury from a motorbike crash last year, he's the far side of forty, and, dare I say it, he'll be facing a much stronger field of drivers than he did for most of his career. Even if he does have all, or almost all, of his old pace, whether the 2010 Mercedes will be quite quick enough to enable him to fight with Alonso and Hamilton remains open to question. The 2010 car was developed while the team was Brawn GP, running without significant sponsorship, and it's unlikely they'll be able to repeat the double-diffuser trick that helped them to the 2009 driver's and team's titles.

At the very least, though, Schumacher will have to beat team mate Nico Rosberg. Quite how difficult a task that will be is hard to judge. I've never been entirely sure whether Rosberg was a middling driver flattered by a Williams which was far quicker than anyone realised, or whether the Williams was a pretty mediocre car, flattered by a lead driver who is much faster than we realise. If Schumacher isn't quicker than his team-mate, I wouldn't be surprised to see him walk out before the season's end. Though he might cite the lingering after-effects of his neck injury rather than admit he simply no longer quite has it. And nobody will be hoping harder that Schumacher's comeback falls flat than Mr Heidfeld, sitting in the reserve seat at Mercedes.

The Big Guns

Even if Schumacher's return proves a disappointment, we might scarcely notice, because there seems to be so much else to hold our attention. For starters, after a year spent licking their wounds after the bruising 2008 title fight, testing suggests Mclaren and Ferrari have regrouped and will be right at the front of the field this year. And so we have the mouth-watering prospect of the two best drivers of the post-Schumacher era continuing the battle they began as team mates at Mclaren in 2007, this time as the presumed leaders of the two most successful teams on the grid. If, as Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, it's tempting to draw parallels with the intense battle between Mclaren's Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, who had left Mclaren for Ferrari, in 1990. Though there are many differences between them, on track at least, it's not too much of a stretch to cast Hamilton, yellow helmet and all, in the Senna role, and Alonso as the new Prost. One only hopes it doesn't end in such an ignominious fashion.

Battles of the team mates

Except, of course, it might not be so simple as Alonso versus Hamilton, because each faces a fight with a team mate much more able to take the fight to them than either Kovalainen could at Mclaren or Piquet Jr or Romain Grosjean could while Alonso was at Renault. Hamilton, after all, is paired up with no less a man than the reigning World Champion, Jenson Button. Now I'll be honest, I can't help but remember his trouncing at the hands of Giancarlo Fisichella at Renault in 2001, and his inability to get the better of Jarno Trulli there the following year, and I know he's good, but he's not convinced me he's quite in the same league as the other World Champions in the field. But on the other hand, he's undoubtedly pretty quick, and his smooth, unfussed, economical style might pay dividends now that refuelling has been banned and drivers will have to look after their tyres in the early laps. Certainly compared with the aggressive Hamilton, who has had trouble in the past making his tyres last even without the car being filled with 160kgs of fuel.

Then there's Felipe Massa, recovered from the serious head injury he sustained in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix last year. Another driver I can't quite make my mind up about. Just how good is he? Was Kimi Raikkonen never quite as fast as his early years at Mclaren made him look? Or has Felipe Massa developed into a truly first rate driver, one who deserved more credit for getting the better of Raikkonen than he has so far been given. I don't know, but when he goes up against Alonso this year, that question will be answered, one way or the other. If, as seems possible, the Ferrari F10 is the class of the field, let's hope that Massa is able to give Alonso pause for thought.

Where we left off

If we could be sure that this year would be all about Schumacher vs. Hamilton vs. Alonso vs. Button vs. Massa, that would be quite a prospect. But at the end of last season, the fastest car in the field was not the Mclaren, the Brawn or the Ferrari, but Adrian Newey's Red Bull. The last two races were won by Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber, and the team retain this drive line-up going into 2010. Early indications from testing suggest their advantage might have been wiped out over the winter, and that the new car is too hard on its tyres, but it would be a brave man who discounted Adrian Newey. As for the drivers, last year Vettel had the upper hand, but then Webber was nursing a leg injury for much of the season, and it's hard to know just how much that affected him. Now fully recovered, can he re-establish himself as the team leader? Or with another year under his belt, will Vettel underline his dominance to a greater extent than ever before? My money's on Vettel, and he's got to be at least an outside bet for the World Title - the new Schumacher usurping the old Schumacher, but it's far from a foregone conclusion.

Bubbling under

If that's the likely race winners dealt with, then what of the rest? There are, I think, three teams that could spring a surprise this year, and each has their strengths and weaknesses. Let's start with Williams. The pairing of experienced Rubens Barrichello with GP2 champion and rising young star, Nico Hulkenberg looks a strong one. Of course it does rather depend on exactly how quick Hulkenberg is, but if Barrichello is perhaps not quite as quick as he was, he was still a decently quick performer at Brawn last year, and outside of the big four teams, Williams strikes me as having the best driver line-up. They're also a team which still contains that core which challenged for the title back in 2003. If I have doubts about their potential, then it's simply that I'm not sure quite what they have going for them this year that they didn't last season. Perhaps the new Cosworth engine will be better than last year's Toyota (not such an outlandish possibility, it was ex-Cosworth men moving to Mercedes' engine team that made the Mercedes V8 the class of the field) but they didn't capitalise properly on the advantage of running a double diffuser from the start, And they didn't really figure in 2009. We'll see whether 2010 is any different, I hope it is, having always had a soft-spot for the Grove team.

If Williams have the best driver line-up, then it is the other former championship winning team in the group which, to my mind, has the best driver. It is hard to know quite what to make of Renault right now. I suspect that the extent of their decline was masked to a degree by the efforts of Fernando Alonso last year, just as the beginning of the old Lotus team's slide into oblivion was hidden for a time by Senna's genius at the wheel. If that's the case, then the decision to hire BMW-refugee, Robert Kubica might prove to be a very smart one. Certainly, a talented young driver with everything to prove, who's prepared to drive the team forward, just might help them recapture the team's glory years of 2005 and 2006 when, together with Fernando Alonso, they took two World Titles. The team have been 75% sold to a Luxembourg venture capital outfit, have had their former chief designer and team principal barred from Formula 1 for their part in the Singapore crash scandal, have lost most of their sponsors, and are reduced to hiring an unproven Russian with bags of money to fill the second seat. Like Williams, though, they have shown in the past that they are capable of winning races, given the funding and a fair wind. If they don't get their act together, though, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw Kubica in a Red Bull, a Ferrari or a Mercedes in the year ahead.

If Williams and Renault's strengths lie with their drivers but there are doubts about their cars, the reverse may be true of Sauber. The team formerly known as BMW Sauber (and for the minute, now called, somewhat paradoxically, BMW Sauber Ferrari) will have been able to call on the full resources of the BMW car company in designing this year's car, just as Brawn were able to make full use of Honda's largesse to build the car that enabled Ross Brawn's eponymous team to win the title at its only attempt. As a result, it's possible the new Sauber might be very quick indeed, though it's sponsor-less state means it's hard to know quite how much stock to put by its impressive testing times. The trouble is, I'm just not convinced by the driver line-up of newcomer Kamui Kobayashi and 38-year old former Mclaren test driver Pedro De La Rosa. I'm glad Kobayashi has got a slot on the grid. He may not have done much in GP2 (though he was GP2 Asia champion last year) but he showed an impressive combativeness when he was given his late-season cameo at Toyota at the end of last year, in notable contrast with others plunged into the field mid-season. De La Rosa's signing, by contrast, I find harder to understand, unless he's either paying for the ride himself or bringing sponsors with him. During his time at Arrows, and latterly with his occasional appearances for Mclaren, he appeared a competent journeyman, but it would surely have made more sense to keep hold of Nick Heidfeld. A repeat of Brawn's achievements is unlikely, but providing the money doesn't dry up entirely and the drivers are quick enough, they could be regular point-scorers.

Snapping at the heels of the midfield

It's perhaps a little unfair of me not to include Force India in the group above. After all, they very nearly won the Belgian Grand Prix fair and square last year, and both Sutil and last-minute stand-in Vitantonio Liuzzi were right on the pace at Monza too. I can't see them repeating that kind of performance this year, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if, while they don't trouble Ferrari, Mercedes, Mclaren or Red Bull, they do cause headaches for Sauber, Renault and Williams from time to time. Last year, I think they capitalised on the failure of some of the bigger teams to get fully to grips with the new regulations and that advantage will probably be gone in 2010. On the other hand, they have had plenty time to fully adapt the car to the Mercedes engine, after having to hurriedly hack away at a car originally designed around the Ferrari V8 last year, so who knows, more points, at least, should be on the cards, and Liuzzi and Sutil looks a pretty solid line-up for a team which is at best a midfield runner.

The same, I'm afraid, cannot be said of Toro Rosso. With a car based on a development of last year's Red Bull, they should be in a position to make a nuisance of themselves from time to time, but I just can't wo0rk up much enthusiasm for the driver pairing of Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari. It's not that they're particularly bad drivers, but equally I see no sign that either is particularly special although Buemi, at least, had his moments last year. In the long run, provided Red Bull remain involved, I would expect to see one or the other of them given the boot to make way for British F3 champion Daniel Ricciardo, who was rather quick .

And Finally...

The Horse Whisperer might have been going a little far, but I'd be surprised if any of the new teams do more than fight amongst themselves this year. Of the two teams which got a car to the pre-season tests, the revivified Lotus team looks to have a much more reliable, and perhaps slightly quicker car than Virgin Racing. But both look to be the best part of five seconds a lap off the pace of the front-runners at the moment, and no team, even one with the biggest development budget in the world, has ever found five seconds over a single season. In the long term, to judge at least by their choice of drivers and the hiring of Mike Gascoygne, Lotus, despite its origins in the no-mark F3 squad Litespeed, looks like it is the more serious prospect, but I suspect that 2010 could be a trying year for all concerned.

It's harder to know what to make of the team formerly known as Campos (and now going by the rather unfortunate moniker of HRT). It's rather ominous that they were unable to make any of the pre-season tests and their decision as a brand new team to run two newcomers, Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok , is, as Sir Humphrey might have said to Jim Hacker, 'brave'. On the other hand, the car is designed and built by Dallara, who know a thing or two about making racing cars and might be better placed to build an F1 car from scratch than either Virgin or Lotus. If the money's there to do the whole season, they just might surprise us all.

All will become clear next weekend, and, for all that I care little for the tedious, soulless Bahrain Autodrome, one plus side of starting the season in the Middle East is that, in contrast with the more usual Melbourne opener, my sleep patterns won't be disturbed for a second week running after staying up to watch the Oscars last Sunday...

Champion Versus. Champion

The news that reigning World Champion Jenson Button will be joining 2008 World Champion Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren to form an all-British superteam is one of many interesting prospects we can anticipate this season, a year which leaves us with very many intriguing unanswered questions. It's been more than 20 years since a team last fielded two champions alongside each other. That team was Mclaren, when it ran Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost together for a second year in 1989, after the Brazilian had wrapped up his first title.

Perhaps it was the sheer fractiousness of relations between the two champions that year which has subsequently dissuaded any other team from following suit. Certainly, Martin Whitmarsh will be hoping that history does not repeat itself for the team in 2010. It's tempting to draw parallels. I've always seen a hint of Senna in Hamilton's all-out attacking approach, and I don't think that's just my brain playing tricks on me because Lewis has copied Ayrton's distinctive yellow helmet. And as for Jenson, his smooth, unhurried style, his deceptive pace, well, that's more than a little reminiscent of a certain French driver.... In the end, though, for reasons I'll come to later, I don't think Whitmarsh et al should lose too much sleep. As a pairing, Button and Hamilton just doesn't strike me as having quite the same combustible potential as Senna and Prost did.

When Senna was hired by Mclaren in 1988 to partner their double World Champion, Prost, though, he had yet to win the first of his three titles, and was merely a promising youngster who had won six races for a Lotus team which no longer looked to be quite what it once was. You have to go back another few years to 1986 to find the last time a World Champion was hired to drive alongside another. Again, the team in question was Mclaren, and the driver line-up featured the reigning world champion, Prost, and 1982 title-winner Keke Rosberg, seen by some as the outright fastest driver in the world at the time. As it turned out, the Finn proved to be no match for Prost, who snuck between the warring Williams boys, Piquet and Mansell, to win the 1986 title in a car which was not really the equal of the Williams Honda. Rosberg, by contrast, failed even to win a race, never at home with the understeery MP4/2B.

If one wants to be really pedantic, though, one could point out that, at the time at which Mclaren signed Rosberg to drive for them in 1986, Alain Prost had not yet wrapped up the 1985 title. Yes, it seemed unlikely that Michele Alboreto would succeed in denying Prost the title yet again - after coming so close in 1982, 1983 and 1984, but it was not impossible...

No, the last time that a team made a conscious choice to hire two World Champions was all the way back in 1967, when Colin Chapman signed 1962 World Champion Graham Hill to drive alongside Lotus stalwart and double champion Jim Clark. And it's this pairing, which to me, most closely echoes Mclaren's 2009 line-up. Hamilton in the role of the supremely naturally gifted Clark, an integral part of the Mclaren team as Lotus had been built around Clark. Each seen by many as the great talent of their age. And Button? A solid, quick racing driver, comfortable in the spotlight, but whose ultimate ability, whose fitness to sit alongside the sport's real all-time greats, remains a matter of debate. The parallels with Graham Hill, whom many did not see as being in quite the same league as his Scottish contemporaries, Stewart and Clark, are certainly there. Hill and Clark didn't fall out as Prost and Senna did and perhaps in part it was because it was a more relaxed age, but I can't help thinking that fundamentally, they got on because there was no doubt as to who was quicker. And I don't necessarily see the pairing of Button and Hamilton being any different.

When Clark and Hill teamed up in 1967, it was Clark who decisively got the upper hand, winning four Grands Prix that year, while Hill managed but a solitary second place. That doesn't tell the whole picture, though, for the Lotus 49 was a fast but very fragile machine, and Hill got the lion's share of their considerable mechanical misfortune. Nonetheless, while he went on to win the 1968 title, few saw him as being truly a match for Clark.

So will Button get his comeuppance at Mclaren? Maybe. If I was a betting man, I'd certainly be putting my stake on Hamilton to win that intra-team battle. But history doesn't always repeat itself, doesn't always tell the same story. There is, I think, still a chance that Button could up-end the form book and establish himself as Mclaren's lead driver. One thing that could just tilt the odds his way is the ban on refueling. All bar Rubens Barrichello and Michael Schumacher will have to learn for the first time what an F1 car with 180kgs of fuel onboard is like to drive, and an ability to be smooth, gentle on brakes and tyres, will pay dividends. I for one am convinced that Hamilton is an out and out faster driver than Button, but Button has a mechanical sympathy and a smooth, silky style, reminiscent of Prost or De Angelis. Will Hamilton's improvisational aggression prove too much for the tyres with a full fuel load aboard?

Another factor is that Button is coming in, not as a man who won a title five years back like Hill did, but as the current, reigning World Champion, carrying the Number 1 on his car. Among sportsmen competing at this level, it really shouldn't make a difference, but all the same, the extra self-assurance and confidence that comes from knowing that, right now, you are the World Number 1, maybe, just maybe, it can be enough to unsettle Hamilton, to leave him wondering whether he's still Mclaren's number one man. It was interesting to see veteran F1 journalist Maurice Hamilton remark on his twitter feed that Button looked much more comfortable and at home on the stage at the launch of the MP4-25 than Hamilton, and Joe Saward passed on the comment of one reader of his blog that "the body language of Hamilton and Button was interesting...there's no love lost between those two..." Another leap - it's just possible that might have a negative impact on his driving, unsettle him, lead him to over-drive as he did at Silverstone in qualifying in 2008 when Kovalainen, just for once, appeared to have the upper hand.

It's probably a forlorn hope for Jenson. Button will doubtless remember what happened the following day in the wet race at the Northamptonshire circuit. Hamilton drove perhaps the single greatest race of his career so far to win comfortably. Kovalainen was nowhere. No, the chances are, if Button wants to win back to back titles, even assuming that Mclaren can produce the car to enable him to do it, he's going to have to raise his game to a level well beyond even what was required to net him last year's championship. It's going to be interesting to see whether he can do it, and if not... If the Mclaren battle turns out to be a walkover... Well, there's a Brazilian guy been flying round Jerez teamed up with a double world champion who really doesn't take well to being beaten by his team mates. That Ferrari line-up looks very intriguing, doesn't it...

A Step Into The Unknown - F1 2009 Preview

Anyone's game?

In the more than 20 years I've been following Formula 1, I honestly can't remember there being so much uncertainty as to who would be at the front going into the first race of the season. For the last couple of years, it has been pretty clear from Winter testing that the battle at the sharp end would be fought out between Ferrari and Mclaren, and so it proved to be. This year, though, there is no such certainty.

Through the Winter,, Ferrari, Toyota, Williams, Red Bull, BMW, the new Brawn GP team, Renault, and even, right at the last gasp at Jerez last week, the seemingly troubled Mclaren, have shown flashes of real pace. The trouble is, it's hard to read too much in testing times. Without knowing who has been running what fuel loads, who have been concentrating on simply getting miles on the new car, and which teams, if any, have been running low-fuel qualifying-simulation 'glory runs' in order to attract headlines and sponsors, it is hard to know what the times tell us.

A real upset?

Perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the winter tests has been just how real the apparently scintillating pace of the new Brawn-Mercedes is. If the stopwatch is to be believed, then they've got a car which is kind to its tyres, and about half a second quicker than anyone else round Jerez and Barcelona. But are they running underweight to attract backers? Ross Brawn says they're not, and to be sure, it doesn't seem the sort of thing that an old hand like Brawn would be doing, but, of course, if they were running light, there would be little sense in admitting as much. And if the car isn't underweight, is it legal. Red Bull have already indicated their intention to protest the team's diffuser and if as Helmut Marko claims, it is really worth half a second a lap, Brawn's chances this year are going to hinge on the outcome of that appeal.

But assuming, for a moment, that Brawn really are the team to beat going into 2009, the battle between Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button could be rather intriguing. Barrichello had six years in a Ferrari, so it can hardly be said he's never been given a chance in a title-winning car. However, throughout that time, he had Michael Schumacher as a team mate, and, leaving aside the fact that Schumacher was probably the single most consummate driver of the last 20 years, it's not clear whether Barrichello was often even allowed to race him. So in a sense, this might be his first real run at the F1 title, in his 17th season in the sport.

When he was first paired up with Jenson Button in 2006, it was the younger Button who had the edge and won Honda's only Grand Prix win (in that incarnation, the previous works Honda team, too, also scored a single GP win with John Surtees back in 1967) but last year, it was Barrichello who, in what we had assumed to be the autumn of his career, generally had the edge in the awful RA108. Truth be told, that's of a piece with Button's career as a whole. Given a good car, he's tended to be quick, but in a bad one, like the 2001 Benetton or last year's Honda, and he tends to lose interest.

If the Brawn really is as quick as it looks, then, aside from being a final ironic coda to the disaster that was Honda's return to F1 as a factory team, the battle between two men who, just a couple of months back looked to be out of work, and who must surely have thought their time at the top of F1 was over could be hard fought indeed.

Massa vs. Raikkonen - the Rematch

It is usually fairly safe to assume that Ferrari will be somewhere towards the front of the pack. Neither the loss of Rory Byrne, Jean Todt and Ross Brawn nor the departure of Schumacher appears to have affected that. The winter testing times have been promising too, and it is probably a fair assumption that they will be somewhere near the front this weekend. What will be interesting to see is whether Felipe Massa will be able to retain the upper hand over his better paid team mate into 2009. He certainly had the edge for much of last year, but then Raikkonen was clearly never entirely at home with the understeery 2008 Ferrari. The reckoning is that the 2009 slick tyres will leave the cars more prone to oversteer, with the rear tyres wearing faster than the fronts, and that could give Kimi the upper hand. The only remaining question is that of whether his motivation is quite what it once was, with a world title in the bag and untold millions in the bank. All said, for all that this year looks very open, I think over the season as a whole, with Mclaren seemingly in trouble, Ferrari stand a good chance of seeing off the pretenders to their crown. Which of their drivers will have the edge, though, is another question entirely.

All according to plan at BMW?

Mario Thiessen, BMW’s master planner, had always pencilled in 2009 as the year that the team formerly known Sauber would make a serious bid for the world title. There were moments last year when it seemed they might hit their target a year early, but Kubica’s brief period at the top of the driver’s table notwithstanding, the team abandoned development of the 2008 machine to concentrate on this year’s car. Will that pay off? It’s too early to tell. On the plus side, they are reputed to be further ahead in the development of KERS than any other team, and have had their 2009 car up and running very early on.

On the other hand, though, the car hasn’t stood out in testing – it’s been decently quick, but not on the same pace as the Ferrari. And if they’re going to lodge a title bid, it’s surely going to have to be with Kubica, which might pose a problem on two fronts. Firstly, as one of the sport’s tallest and heaviest drivers, he’ll be more heavily penalised by the extra weight of KERS than most. Secondly, his lacklustre 2007 season was put down in part to a car too oversteery for his liking – and, of course, received wisdom is that the 2009 cars will tend to oversteer. In spite of all this, I still see Kubica as a dark horse for the world title, especially if the other front-runners run into reliability troubles.

The car in front…at last?

Toyota have spent a lot of time and money in F1 since the turn of the decade without achieving much in the way of anything. There are signs that this might be about to change this year. The team appear cautiously confident that the TF109 will be right at the front, and Timo Glock hinted in a recent interview that he thought victory in Melbourne not beyond the bounds of possibility. The team will have benefited more than most from the ‘reset’ provided by the rules changes, and despite budget cuts, they still have more resources than more or less anyone else on the grid.

After an uncertain start, Timo Glock has matured quickly into a very solid F1 performer – about the only team mate Jarno Trulli has ever had who has troubled him as a qualifier on occasion. Trulli, meanwhile, remains the master of the single quick lap. If the latest rules don’t make overtaking easier than it has been in recent years, then given a half-way quick Toyota, that might be enough to secure Trulli Toyota’s first win.

The Renault-powered quartet

None of this year’s F1 cars would win beauty contests, but nothing else is quite so downright ugly as the stubby-nosed Renault R29. Early pace in testing suggested the car might be as bad as it looked, too. Since then, though, Flavio’s team appear to have sorted out the car’s rumoured lack of downforce and Fernando Alonso has been sounding a lot more positive with regards his chances than he did at the same time last year. Certainly if the Renault is anywhere approaching competitive, Alonso can be relied upon to get the most out of it. His troubled year at Mclaren notwithstanding, anyone who can win two races with last year’s R28 can be relied upon to get the job done.

Nelson Piquet Jr’s retention I can only guess is down to the team not being confident that Di Grassi or Grosjean were likely to be any better. There was little indication in 2008 that he will follow in his father’s footsteps though unlike Hamilton, he is at least unlikely to unsettle team mate Alonso to the detriment of the team as a whole.

Renault will also benefit from having been allowed to update their engine to achieve parity with the other engine-makers after they took the engine-freeze regulations a little more literally than anyone else last year. It’s reckoned that alone might give them another couple of tenths of a second, and that will be good news not only for Renault, but for the Renault-powered Red Bulls.

If the Renault is the ugliest car on the grid, then a strong case can be made for the Adrian Newey-designed Red Bull RB5 being the prettiest. After flying in the hands of Sebastian Vettel soon after being unveiled at Jerez, they haven’t really stood out since but all the same, surely it’s time for Adrian Newey to build another world-beater. Perhaps they’re just taking a little longer than others to get on top of their car. However fast the Red Bull does or doesn’t turn out to be, though, the battle between team mates Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel is going to be one to watch. Neither man can afford to be outpaced by the other. Both are clearly quick, but questions remain as to whether either is absolutely first-rate. Webber, the 21^st Century Chris Amon, lost much of the winter to a broken leg picked up in a cycling accident – not what he needs as he faces the sternest challenge of his career. On the other hand, Vettel wouldn’t be the first highly rated youngster to come off second best to the Aussie. Ask Pizzonia. Or Wilson, Or even perhaps Rosberg. As I say, one to watch…

Woking in trouble?

It doesn’t matter how much money you have, or how long your pedigree, building a racing car is a tricky business, and the scope to get it horribly wrong is considerable. Early indications are that the 2009 Mclaren is simply not working as it should – that it has fundamental aerodynamic flaws. With the in-season testing ban, it’s going to be very difficult for the team to make up for lost time and ground, though if anyone has the resources to do it, it is Mclaren.

That said, those 1.17 laps at Jerez right at the end of winter testing – are they a sign that the team have got their problems licked? Or just a glory run on a day when the circuit was particularly quick?

If the car is as bad as it seems it might be, it will be an interesting test of Lewis Hamilton’s character. There’s no doubt that the young Briton is outstanding in a good car, but in his whole career, he’s never really experienced the dispiriting feeling of being in an uncompetitive car. If he rises to the occasion, and transcends the limitations of his equipment, as say, Schumacher did at Ferrari in 1996, his reputation will be well and truly sealed. If his head goes down, and he allows himself to be outpaced by Kovalainen, or if he begins to take his frustrations out on the team, his reputation might be destroyed as quickly as it was made.

The pressure is on for his team mate, Kovalainen too. Last year, he seemed to be within reach of Hamilton over a single lap, but could not stay with him over a race distance and Mclaren’s failure to capture the constructor’s title from Ferrari could be said to be down in part to their number 2 driver’s lack of race pace. If he’s to remain with Mclaren, or another front running team beyond the end of the season, he’s going to have to be a lot closer to Hamilton than he was in 2008. That said, he does have more experience with bad cars. Perhaps his troubled debut year with the difficult Renault R27 might turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

More of the same for Frank’s boys?

Williams seem to go well every winter, and every season since they fell away from the leading teams around 2004, they have suggested that this time it will be different, and the team will be back at the front. It never seems to work out that way. Recent Williams have tended to be quick out of the box, and with their good mechanical grip, they usually run well on the streets of Melbourne, but the team have been behind the curve when it comes to aerodynamic efficiency, and it’s not clear whether the rules changes will help. The testing times have been encouraging, but then they always are. The team abandoned development of the 2008 car early to concentrate on the 2009 machine, but that would be more likely to pay dividends if it weren’t for the fact that Mclaren and Ferrari aside, pretty much everyone else did the same thing.

On the driver front, it’s crunch time for Nico Rosberg. After a promising couple of years in 2006 and 2007, he struggled to rise above the limitations of his car last year, and with the emergence of Kubica, Hamilton and Vettel, no longer looks like he’s necessarily one of the stars of the future. Kazuki Nakajima acquitted himself well last year, but unless he ups his game this season, he’ll only be in the sport as long as engine-suppliers Toyota think its worth paying to have him drum up interest in the sport in Japan.

Supporting cast

Toro Rosso are unlikely to match the highs of last season, which saw them beating parent-team Red Bull and winning their first race. Whatever happens this year is likely to be something of a come-down. Which is a shame, because there is real potential here. They will still be running a Ferrari-engined Red Bull, which with Giorgio Ascanelli heading up the engineering side, should provide the team’s latest pair of Sebastiens with the means to embarrass the front-runners on occasion. Bourdais has been retained for another year, which was probably the right decision. Armchair enthusiasts might have been keen to see the return of Takuma Sato, but in all honesty, the Japanese driver has had more than his fair share of chances in the sport already, and failed to make the most of them.

The choice of Sebastien Buemi to partner Bourdais seems rather odd, and the only way it makes sense is that he was the only driver on the Red Bull junior ladder with the experience needed to make the switch to F1. He was unexceptional in his time in GP2, and if he doesn’t deliver quickly, the likes of Brandon Hartley and Jaime Alguesuari will be knocking at the door. That said, if he excels in F1, he wouldn’t be the first driver to prove quicker in F1 than in his junior career.

It’s hard to believe that a Mercedes powered Force India is going to be any quicker than a Ferrari powered one, really. Team owner Vijay Mallya has been making optimistic noises which leave me wondering whether he really understands the sport and the sheer scale of the task facing the former Jordan outfit. Giancarlo Fisichella and Adrian Sutil are back for another year. Both are competent enough, but I must confess to feeling a little disappointed that the team aren’t bringing on another promising youngster. Sutil no longer entirely convinces me – a driver who’s really going places shouldn’t struggle to beat Fisichella, and it would have been interesting to see what Grosjean or Di Resta could have done in the car. Expect them to bring up the rear again.

So who’s going to win it?

Pretty much the whole thrust of this piece has been to admit that for once, I really don’t have a clue (not that I’ve got a brilliant track record of picking driver’s champions anyway). At the risk of putting a curse on the Maranello team my hunch is that Ferrari will have the edge over the season as a whole. Brawn might appear to be the quickest of the bunch right now, but there have to be question marks both over the legality of the car, and over whether they have the money to fund the kind of development needed to keep them at the front over the whole season. Toyota have looked promising, but even if the Toyota can match the Ferrari on pace, are Trulli and Glock really able to take the fight to Raikkonen and Massa? Kubica, Alonso and Hamilton all certainly can, but with the possible exception of Kubica, I’m not convinced that any of those three will have the car they need to make a bid for the title. So, forced to choose, I’d tip Ferrari, and forced to pick one of Massa and Raikkonen, I’d back Raikkonen to secure a second driver’s crown. But I can rarely remember feeling less sure….

A Comedy of Errors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Coulthard's Final Hurrah...

I'll leave analysis of this year's F1 title race until next week, when it's all over and whatever I write is not almost immediately outdated. Whether Lewis Hamilton and Mclaren will succeed in throwing away a second World Title in as many years will soon become apparent. This weekend will see David Coulthard's long Formula 1 career come to an end and that is of some interest to me, not least because he is perhaps the first F1 driver whose career I have seen almost right from the beginning (I was at several of his early Formula Ford races as a kid) to his retirement nearly 20 years on.

Clive has written recently on the prospective battle between his replacement, Sebastien Vettel (who would have been all of 2 years old when I was sat in the stands at Woodcote and Lodge, watching a young Coulthard doing his stuff in Formula Ford!) and Mark Webber. Of Webber, he remarked "For every driver who manages to grab a world championship, there must be several who never get a decent shot at it. Many of them could claim to be capable of the feat, if only they could get their hands on a good car. But fortune dictates that some will never have that chance and the years roll by with potential never fulfilled".

The same could not be said of David Coulthard. Coulthard got himself a potentially championship winning car, I would estimate, 5 times in his career (on two of those occasions, his team mate did win the title with it) and yet the best he ever managed was a very distant second to Michael Schumacher in 2001, ironically not one of the years in which I would have said he had a car capable of winning the title. Coulthard himself appears to recognise this, commenting after announcing his retirement earlier this year that "I did have a world championship-winning car. I just didn't win it."

Coulthard, then, was not quite world champion material, but he wasn't far off. You don't last 9 years at Mclaren without being pretty handy in a racing car. In the early years of the Hakkinen/Coulthard partnership, it was Coulthard who actually appeared more often than not to be the faster of the two men. It was, after all, Coulthard who won the Mclaren/Mercedes partnership's first two races, and would have won their third had he not been ordered to hand the win to team mate Hakkinen in the final round of the 1997 World Championship in Jerez.

He would be ordered to hand over victory to Hakkinen again at the opening race of 1998, after a radio-communication mix-up had put the Scot ahead of his Finnish team mate. At the time, it was the source of almost as much outrage (at least in the British press) as Ferrari's Austrian GP incident did four years later. Some see this as the point at which Hakkinen established his de-facto Number 1 status at Mclaren, a moment at which Ron Dennis decided that Hakkinen, rather than Coulthard would lead Mclaren's title charge. Perhaps. Though it must be remembered that Hakkinen was only ever behind Coulthard in the first place because he had erroneously been called into the pits, reputedly because the team's radio system had been hacked by an outsider.

There is, in any case, another way of looking at it. Rather than Hakkinen having established the upper hand at Mclaren because he was Dennis' favoured man, he was the Mclaren's boss's choice for Number 1 driver precisely because Dennis had already fingered him as the man who had the greater ultimate potential. There was never any need for team orders throughout the rest of the 1998 season because Coulthard never got close enough to Hakkinen on pace for it to matter one way or the other. Hakkinen won eight races that year on his way to the title, while Coulthard picked up but a single victory. Perhaps all Hakkinen had ever really needed to unlock his potential had been the knowledge that the Mclaren team were behind him. Maybe Dennis simply knew that Coulthard was never quite in the same league. Certainly, he made a very good number 2 - he always obeyed those team orders when they were given to him, and he had sufficient pace that he could pick up a useful haul of points for the constructor's championship.

It became something of a cliche that, at the beginning of each year, there would be a big interview with David Coulthard in which he would claim that this year would be his year - this time he really would challenge for the world title. We now know, of course, that that day would never come. But how close did he get? In 2001, he wound up runner-up, ahead of a rather demotivated Mika Hakkinen, but to my mind, his best season came a year earlier, in 2000.

Though he fell away towards the end of the year, for much of that season, he was every bit as much a title contender as Mika Hakkinen and eventual winner Michael Schumacher. He won 3 races in the first half of the season, including an impressive victory at his home race at Silverstone which saw him go round the outside of Barrichello at Stowe to take the lead and arguably his most memorable victory, in France, which saw him go toe-to-toe with Schumacher and come out on top.

Ironically, though, probably his best opportunity for a world title came much earlier in his career. Coulthard had a contract with Williams for 1996, but bought his way out of it to move to the then rather less competitive Mclaren. The 1996 Williams Renault was easily the class of the field and it was clear that anyone driving it had only to beat his team mate to take the driver's title. Damon Hill eventually claimed that honour, after seeing off rookie Jacques Villeneuve but one is forced to wonder whether Coulthard, who by then would have been in his second full season, and who sometimes matched Hill for pace in 1995, might have stood a better chance of wresting the title from Hill.

Coulthard's final couple of years at Mclaren were a disappointment. He never got to grips with single lap qualifying, and as a result he struggled rather more against Kimi Raikkonen than he ever did against Hakkinen. His last win came in the opening race of the 2003 season in Australia, after Montoya, Schumacher and Raikkonen all lost time making mistakes. Thereafter, he never really looked a threat again, despite the 2003 Mclaren being quick enough to allow Raikkonen to mount a quietly consistent campaign for the driver's title. The 2004 Mclaren was one of the worst cars to come out of Woking, and Coulthard finished a distant 10th in the championship, failing to make the podium all year.

It would have been easy for the Scot to walk away from F1 at this point, tail between his legs, but to some surprise, he signed for Red Bull to race alongside Christian Klien, replacing Mark Webber, who had departed for Williams. With the pressure off, and with a car which was perhaps better than he expected, Coulthard did a pretty good job with Red Bull, scoring as many points for them in 2005 as he had for Mclaren the year before. Klien rarely troubled him in terms of pace and he did much to repair a reputation somewhat tarnished by the later Mclaren years. In the end, he probably stayed in F1 a year or two too long. Certainly, when Mark Webber returned to the team, it soon became apparent that Coulthard had no answer for him in terms of pace. This year, too, he seems to have got frustrated by it all, and has been involved in far too many silly collisions with other drivers.

So, in summation, David Coulthard was never quite world champion material, and one suspects that he knows as much. He was, though, a very quick driver on his day, and through the late 90s and into the early part of this century, he was quick enough on occasion to trouble men who did win world titles. What did he lack? It's hard to say. Consistency, perhaps. His lack of qualifying pace, especially in the single-lap format, suggests that he perhaps had trouble accessing his full potential when it was required. Perhaps he just didn't want it enough. He'd always had good breaks in his career - his wealthy father ensured his junior series days were well-funded and he broke into F1 with a race winning team, before moving straight to another race winning team. Maybe he didn't have the hunger to succeed that a driver who had had a harder time of it might have done. Whatever the truth of it, though, he won 13 Grands Prix, which is more than all but a handful of the most successful F1 drivers ever manage, and he was the best driver to come out of Scotland since Jackie Stewart. Not bad, all in all.

First you've got to be good...

What does it take to win a world title? Ability? Yes. Application? That never hurt either. A team that is 100% behind you? Not for nothing did Michael Schumacher always demand a say in who his team mates were. The right car? Few have won the F1 championship in recent years without having the best machinery on the grid. None of that, on its own, will necessarily be enough, and last weekend's action at Magny Cours demonstrated the point amply.

It was a sportsman of a much earlier generation, the baseball player Vernon 'Lefty' Gomez who famously remarked "I'd rather be lucky than good" and I can't help feeling that Felipe Massa might, very quietly, see what the Portuguese pitcher meant. In the last couple of races, he has had no answer for his team mate, Kimi Raikkonen in terms of absolute pace, but events have conspired to ensure that while Raikkonen has picked up only 8 points from the last couple of races, Massa has scored 14 and has now taken over the lead of the championship from BMW's Robert Kubica.

When Massa spun out of both of the opening rounds of the World Championship, I have to confess that I quietly wrote him off as a serious title prospect. He might be quick, I thought, but the championship would be too closely fought to allow the mercurial Brazilian to get away with mistakes like those. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm wrong. Firstly, I hadn't counted on his most obvious title rivals, Raikkonen and Hamilton making so many mistakes of their own. Secondly, I had forgotten the influence of Lady Luck. After all, if Hamilton hadn't made that disastrous error when exiting the pits in Canada, he and Raikkonen would most likely be comfortably ahead in the standings. Come to that, Raikkonen would be a lot closer to Massa on points had his exhaust not failed during last weekend's French Grand Prix and handed victory to his team mate. After a couple of races, at Monaco and Turkey, where Massa had seemed to have the edge at Ferrari, he never really looked on terms with his team mate in the last couple of races, but nonetheless emerged with more points. It's this sort of thing which could decide the destination of the title.

Also working in Massa's favour is the fact that it this year's title battle is beginning to look like an exclusively Ferrari affair. Their advantage over Mclaren just appears bigger than last year. Perhaps, whisper it, the Woking team are missing the input of experienced double world champion Fernando Alonso, and are suffering for running a pair of sophomore drivers who aren't as used to developing a car over the season, or setting it up under the pressure of a race weekend. Last year, there were clearly 'Mclaren' tracks and 'Ferrari' tracks. To an extent, this remains the case, but Maranello appear to have closed the gap considerably at the 'Mclaren' tracks like Monaco, while Mclaren look further adrift than ever at places like Magny Cours which have always favoured Ferrari. Come to that, some tracks, like Sepang, had better suited the Mclarens last year, but clearly favoured the Ferraris this year.

In light of this, if Hamilton is to have any chance of snatching the title, he really cannot afford to throw away results in the way he did in Montreal, in Bahrain and (to a lesser extent) last weekend at Magny Cours - where from the moment he cut the chicane in the aftermath of his pass of Vettel, I found myself thinking - "let him back through, the stewards will do you for that". He didn't, and the stewards duly did. A marginal call, and one which could have gone either way, but - call me a cynic - I wouldn't take any chances if I were in a silver car. As I have written at F1-Pitlane, Hamilton and Mclaren do have the ghost of an opportunity in that a clear No. 1 has not yet emerged at Ferrari, but increasingly, I'm coming to doubt they can pull it off.

Until last weekend, Kubica was actually leading the title chase, but I somehow can't quite bring myself to take him seriously as a title contender. He drove the wheels off the BMW in Magny Cours, but still ended up finishing behind Jarno Trulli's Toyota in fifth. Nick Heidfeld could do no better than 13th, over a minute off Massa's winning time in the sister-BMW, which further illustrated just how hard Kubica was having to push. To be blunt, I just don't believe that even someone as quick as Kubica can win the world title in a car that isn't even always quick enough to beat the Toyotas, regardless of the fact that, thus far, he has been alone among the top four in the title race in not having made a mistake worth the name./

It wasn't just in the Grand Prix where luck turned out to be the deciding factor last weekend. The GP2 series may appear wide open - there have been 7 winners in the 8 races so far this season - but looking underneath the bare statistics, it seems to me that there are really only three driver/team combinations who have consistently shown the kind of pace that marks them out as real contenders.

Unsurprisingly, two of those three drive for the established top teams in the series - ART's Romain Grosjean and ISport's Bruno Senna. That doesn't necessarily mean its all about the car, to be fair. Their respective team mates, Luca Filippi and Karun Chandhok, proven race winners both, have so far failed to make any kind of an impact and perhaps suggests that, while being with the right team is important, it can be overestimated and sometimes the best teams appear so in part because they have the best drivers, especially in a spec-formula such as GP2.

The interloper in the ISport/ART battle is of course Racing Engineering's Giorgio Pantano. The vastly experienced Italian is the only man to have won two races this year and, what is more, they have both been feature race wins. All the same, Pantano owes his lead at least somewhat to luck. In France, Romain Grosjean looked on course to win until his gearbox packed up, which appeared to hand certain victory to Bruno Senna....except just a few laps later, his gearbox went the same way. Pantano, who had been set to score 6 points while his rivals picked up 8 and 10, now picked up the win while his rivals got nothing. Come Sunday, Pantano bent his steering and failed to finish in the sprint race, but he didn't pay the price he might have done - Grosjean fell off the road at Grande Courbe on slicks on a still-damp track, while Senna, who had started on slicks from the back looked set for a podium only for a recurrence of his gearbox gremlins to force him back down to 5th. So Pantano has a 7 point lead over Bruno Senna, and Romain Grosjean, to my mind still the fastest man in the field, is 16 points adrift and fourth in the title chase.

Right now, it would appear that the gods are smiling upon both Felipe Massa and Giorgio Pantano. However, it is oft said that "luck balances out over a season" and while this isn't always entirely true, it could be that after Silverstone, an article about how lucky Massa and Pantano have been could look very ill-timed indeed. An old Swedish proverb comes to mind. Luck never gives, it only lends...

ENDNOTE: Motorsports Ramblings will be taking a short break next week while I go climbing hills, taking pictures of the windswept isolation and, most likely, getting rained on an awful lot in the Scottish Highlands. I'll be back with you all the other side of the British Grand Prix.