The Motorsports Ramblings Top 10 - 2010

A more difficult year in which to make this assessment than many, I think. It may be less authoritative than the Autocourse list, but on the other hand, I'm getting my top ten in first. Feel free to argue...

1.Sebastian Vettel

Last year, Sebastian Vettel might have been a title contender, but errors, both his own and those of his team, meant that he was never really a serious threat to Jenson Button and Brawn. This year was not free of mistakes either: Running into the back of Button at Spa, and into the side of Webber at Istanbul; Falling asleep behind the safety car at Hungary and picking up a penalty which cost him a near certain victory. That, though, was not enough to stop Vettel from claiming the title. Even those mistakes aside, his was not a perfect year. After starting the season with a bang, (but for engine and wheel-bearing woes, he would have won all three of the opening Grands Prix) he appeared to go off the boil in the following races. At Spain and at Monaco, team mate Webber appeared to have established the upper hand. This was followed by their clash at Istanbul. With most impartial observers placing the lion's share of the blame in Vettel's quarter, and with Webber recovering to finish 3^rd, this might have marked the end of Vettel's championship challenge.

Instead, however, it marked something of a positive turning point for Vettel. He chalked up his second win of the season at Valencia and in the following races at Silverstone, Hockenheim and Hungary, he appeared the quicker of the two Red Bull drivers – though misfortune and unforced errors meant that Webber won two of the three races and appeared to be heading out of Vettel's reach in the points table.

It was his drives at the end of the year which secured him the title, though. After clattering into Button at Spa, he really got his stuff together. But for an engine failure while leading in South Korea, he would have won all of the last four races that season, and established at last a clear upper hand over Mark Webber. When the team didn't order him aside for Webber in Interlagos, despite the latter's apparently much stronger position in the title fight, it seemed at the time that Red Bull were about to sacrifice the driver's title to keep their long-term number one driver on side. As it turned out, Vettel repaid their faith in spades. Where Webber crumpled under the pressure, and Ferrari were panicked into a poor pit call in Abu Dhabi, Vettel finally took the head of the driver's points table at the only point where it really mattered. A worthy addition to the pantheon of champions.

2. Fernando Alonso

Was the Ferrari F10 really a title contending car? There were times, most notably at Silverstone and at Istanbul, fast courses which put a premium on aerodynamic efficiency as the fifth gear corners require as much downforce as can be mustered, when the car looked a very long way from contention indeed. No match for Mercedes or even Renault, never mind Mclaren or Red Bull.

Whenever the Ferrari was anywhere close to being in contention though, Alonso got the most out of it. Five wins was about as much as anyone could ask from a driver in the F10 this year. At least when he was up against Red Bull's RB6. The Singapore victory, in particular, stood out on a weekend when the Red Bull was surely the quickest car on the circuit. At Monza, he was calm and error-free, not allowing himself to get spooked when Jenson Button got ahead at the start, and in tricky conditions at South Korea, he was in the pound seats when the Red Bulls ran into trouble. Remember, Felipe Massa didn't pick up a single victory all year (although one might argue that the German Grand Prix was by rights his).

That said, he does to some extent have only himself to blame for not claiming the title this year. The penalty for the uncharacteristic jump-start at Shanghai, writing off his car in a practice shunt in Monaco that forced him to start from the back, and crashing out of the Belgian Grand Prix all cost him points, although it must be said that his recovery drive to 6^th from the back row at Monaco was as good a drive as any put in by the frontrunners.

In Alonso, Ferrari have perhaps found their new Schumacher. A man whom the team can unite around in a way that they were never able to do around Raikkonen. If this is unlikely to result in a period of dominance for Alonso and Ferrari in the manner that Schumacher managed in the early part of the last decade, that is, I would argue, more of a reflection on the sheer quality of the opposition than anything else.

3. Lewis Hamilton

There were times when the man who had until a fortnight ago been the sport's youngest ever champion, and who is still only 25, seemed able to conjure a magic which saw him drag a far from perfect Mclaren far further up the field than it really had any business being. Did a Mclaren, which Button could only qualify 14th, really have any business finishing up second in the British Grand Prix? And what about Hungary? Unlike recent cars from the Woking team, the MP4/25 never looked happy in the slow, twisty stuff, and yet Hamilton dragged the car up into fourth and, in the light of Vettel's penalty, might have got it on the podium had his gearbox not packed up.

His win at Istanbul might have owed much to luck - and specifically the Red Bull drivers' self-destruction, but his other two victories - at a Canadian Grand Prix where the new surface kept destroying the tyres, and at a wet Spa, making up for the travesty of the 'stolen' win of 2008, were classic Hamilton. Taking a car which was not the fastest on the day by the scruff of the neck, and keeping ahead through sheer force of will.

Unfortunately, there were classic Hamilton errors as well. He over-drove at Shanghai in the wet, and might have won had he been a touch calmer. That, though, was understandable. Spearing into the side of Felipe Massa on the opening lap at Monza was just silly, and might well have cost him a realistic chance at the title. Likewise, his move on Webber at Singapore was foolhardy. Arguably, had he left the Aussie a touch more space, he not only would have avoided a race-ending collision, but would have comfortably sailed past to boot. If the accidents at Monza and Singapore were his own fault, like all the other title contenders, he could point to instances of sheer bad fortune. The timing of his qualifying run at Sepang that left him stuck 20th on the grid. The gearbox failure in Hungary, and the exploding tyre that took him out of an impressive second in the Spanish Grand Prix.

There's a reasonable argument that Hamilton had to drive at ten tenths, to take every 50/50 chance that came his way, because his Mclaren was no match for the Red Bulls, or even, in the latter part of the season, for the Ferraris. And that being so, one fears for his rivals if Woking turn out a car the equal of their 2007 or 2008 chassis next year.

4. Robert Kubica

How good a job did Robert Kubica do for Renault this year? With rookie Vitaly Petrov, an unknown quantity, in the other car, it was hard to know for sure. In the hands of Petrov, at no time did the car ever appear the equal to those of Red Bull, Mclaren, Ferrari or even Mercedes.

On occasion, though, it was a real front-runner in Kubica's hands. No other driver had quite such a margin over his team mate. Comparing each driver's fastest lap of the weekend, Kubica was nearly a second a lap faster than his team mate over the season as a whole, and outqualified him 17-2. That, on its own, might be no more than would be expected of a man rated as a potential future champion, paired up with a rookie of uncertain provenance. Scoring three podiums with only the fifth quickest car in the field, in an intensely competitive season, however, confirmed to many of us after the blip at BMW last year, that Kubica really is something special. Is there another driver who could have got the Renault on the front row at Monaco? Perhaps, but if there is, I would hazard that said driver's name is Hamilton or Alonso, and that's compliment enough. And then there was that stunning performance in qualifying at Suzuka. Had he not lost a wheel on the opening laps, he might have caused Webber a lot of grief that afternoon. Podiums in mixed conditions at Spa and at Albert Park showed that, while the Renault might not have been competitive enough to enable him to mix it with the front-runners in normal conditions, he was ideally placed to take advantage when the weather threw a curve-ball. Time will tell, but if Renault, or Lotus, or whatever the team end up being called next year, continue their progress, Kubica could be ideally placed to 'do an Alonso' and lead the former Toleman team right back into contention.

5. Mark Webber

Has he blown the best shot at the title that he is ever likely to get? Webber, through his career, had been famous for his bad luck and seemed for a time to be following in the footsteps of fellow Antipodean Chris Amon. This year, though, fortune smiled on him. Unlike all his other title rivals, he suffered no race-ending mechanical failures, and in the Red Bull RB6, he had a car that would pass muster in the company of the Mclaren MP4/4, the Ferrari F2002 and the Williams FW14. One of the all time great racing cars.

But with fortune smiling on him for once, he didn't quite deliver. He had a scrappy start to the year, finishing an anonymous 8^th in Bahrain and persistently spiking his own guns at his home race in Australia, finishing 9^th after clobbering the back of Hamilton's Mclaren in the course of a scrappy, error-strewn performance. He began the fight-back with pole at Sepang, but left the door open for his team mate in a manner I expect he rued for the rest of the season.

His purple patch began in Spain, with a lights to flag victory which left Vettel wondering where he had disappeared to. He repeated the performance a fortnight later at Monaco, with a drive that was as good as any that Vettel managed all season, mastering the ultimate driver's circuit. Then came Turkey and the collision with Vettel that cost him a possible victory. To my mind, the blame for that accident must rest primarily with Vettel, but the team appeared to see things differently and that apparent vote of no confidence from his team seemed to unsettle him. The situation only worsened with the 'front wing' controversy at Silverstone when the team removed the upgraded front wing from his car and gave it to his team mate, leaving him wondering where priorities lay at Red Bull. He responded with an impressive victory that weekend but thereafter, he was rarely quite on the pace of his team mate. A Schumacher-esque drive secured victory at Hungary, but had Vettel not been penalised for failing to keep up with him under the safety car, he would have been only second. The last time he really got the upper hand on Vettel came at Spa, though on that day, he was beaten by Hamilton.

In the closing races at Singapore, Korea, Japan, Brazil and Abu Dhabi, Vettel established a decisive upper hand in terms of pace, but even that might not have been enough to secure him the title had Webber not dropped a wheel onto a damp kerb in South Korea and thrown away a certain second place. It was a mistake that may haunt him for the rest of his days. He's always seemed one of the more grounded members of the paddock, though, and watching footage of his accident at Valencia earlier in the year, he may simply be grateful to be alive and in one piece.

6. Jenson Button

I have to confess, I feared that, by leaving Brawn for Lewis Hamilton's Mclaren, Button was heading straight into the lion's den and that the 2008 champion, who had matched no lesser a man than Alonso in his first year in the sport, and who had all but killed Heikki Kovalainen's career stone dead, would make light work of Button. As it turned out, Button racked up two impressive wins in the rain at the beginning of the year before the more feted Hamilton had even got off the starting block. In both cases, his ability to perform on slick tyres on a still damp circuit helped him to victory though at Shanghai, especially, I was taken aback to see he simply appeared faster than Hamilton in the wet. Thereafter, he was never quite so quick again, and did not win another race.

Unlike his main title rivals, its hard to point to a single significant mistake on Button's part all year, but the truth is, too many times, he simply wasn't quite fast enough. Failing to break out of Q2 at Silverstone and Hungary something Hamilton was able to do without breaking a sweat indicated that an old Button shortcoming, his inability to find a way of working around a car not performing to his liking, is still there. After Shanghai, the only occasion on which he actually looked quicker than Hamilton was at Monza, where his ability to make the combination of the f-duct and a very high downforce setting (by Monza standards, he was running a barn door on his rear wing) enabled him to come very close to stealing victory from Alonso. In 2010, Button showed that his 2009 title was not solely a matter of having the good fortune to find himself in the right place at the right time at Brawn, and that there is a real talent there especially when the weather is inclement, but at the same time I don't see a driver in quite the same league as the very best of the current crop. Good, but not quite a Hamilton, a Vettel or an Alonso.

7. Nico Rosberg

I've never been able to figure out how quick Nico Rosberg really is. Was he dragging an uncompetitive Williams far further up the field than it really deserved to be, or was he flattered by team mates who had no real business being in Formula 1? 2010 provided no definitive answer to this question. Was Nico Rosberg the hitherto undiscovered superstar who became the only man ever to go up against Michael Schumacher in equal machinery and come out on top? Or was he kept honest by a race-rusty 41 year old, way past his best? I don't think we can know the answer to that question, and so one is forced to judge Rosberg solely on what he got out of the first Mercedes F1 car to grace the grid since 1955.

Three podiums was not a bad score for a man driving what was only the fourth quickest car in the field. He came within a couple of points of dislodging Felipe Massa from sixth in the drivers' points standings, and it is hard to point to a single significant mistake from the Finno-German driver all year. On the other hand, there weren't really any occasions on which he looked transcendentally quick. No equivalent of Kubica's giant-killing performances at Monaco and Spa. Probably his best drive of the year came in the wet at Shanghai, where an inspired decision to stay out on dry tyres as the track got wet allowed him to run second for much of the distance, and to pick up his first podium of the year on a day when his vastly experienced regenmeister team mate looked all at sea. On the whole, the impression was given of a good, solid professional doing a decent job rather than of a superstar and world champion in the making. Perhaps, if Schumacher aborts his come-back and Sutil or Heidfeld gets the second Mercedes seat, we will finally get an answer to the question of whether Rosberg is or is not as quick as his dad used to be.

8. Rubens Barrichello

The Brazilian driver, in his eighteenth full season in the sport, was never going to add to his total of 11 race wins in a Williams Cosworth. And a part of me wondered why, after a surprise opportunity to compete for the world title arose at Brawn last year and enabled him to win a couple of races, he didn't just call it a day. It would have been easy for him to mark time. As it was, he stepped up to the plate and led something of a resurgence for the Grove team. He out-qualified new team mate Nico Hulkenberg 13-6 and scored the lion's share of the team's points. The Williams' Cosworth engines were never the match of the Mercedes and Ferrari powered opposition, with their power units particularly prone to losing horsepower over the course of their life (19 races with 8 engines) and yet he frequently dragged the car into Q3 and had a stunning run mid-season wherein he picked up a fourth place in a topsy-turvy race at Valencia and somehow followed this up with a fifth at Silverstone, scene of the greatest drive of his career back in 2003, and a circuit on which Williams have tended to struggle in recent years. Indeed, from Valencia onwards, he only once failed to make the cut for Q3 - a slightly better record than that achieved by former team mate Button, who had the distinct advantage of a Mclaren Mercedes at his disposal. Like Riccardo Patrese nearly twenty years before, the Brazilian veteran appears to be having something of an Indian summer to his career at Williams. His calm and experience will come in especially useful next year if, as expected, the team replace Hulkenberg with the mercurial but well-funded Pastor Maldonado.

9. Kamui Kobayashi

The Japanese driver whose career looked washed up only a year ago after a lacklustre second year in GP2 took a little while to get to grips with F1 with Sauber in 2010. In his early races, there was little sign of the feisty youngster who had traded blows with Jenson Button in the two races with Toyota at the end of 2009 which had made his name. But then the Sauber, at least in the early part of the year, was really not a competitive proposition, at least on circuits requiring any significant measure of mechanical grip. When Peter Sauber's team began to extract some pace from the car, it was Kamui who took full advantage. Dragging the car into Q3 and scoring the reconstituted team's first points in Turkey, he would follow up with a particularly fine drive at Valencia, making an unusual tyre strategy pay and stealing 7^th from Fernando Alonso on the very last corner. Another 7^th place finish was the reward for a fighting drive at his 'home' circuit of Suzuka (though, in fact, as he'd spent almost his entire junior career in Europe, he hadn't raced there in years) at which he single handedly demonstrated that it is possible to overtake in a modern F1 car, scything through the field from 13^th after his pit-stop to finish 7^th and showing it is possible to overtake in a modern F1 car, providing you show enough initiative. He repeated the performance, albeit in a slightly more low-key way, at Brazil a few weeks later, passing both Toro Rossos on track to nab a point. If his race-craft was second to none, his qualifying form was rather more erratic. He was frequently bested by veteran Pedro De La Rosa in the first part of the year, and its something he'll have to address if his career is to progress, but to my mind, he did enough to establish himself as the best of the new drivers this year, in spite of having arguably the patchiest pre-F1 CV of any of them.

10. Nico Hulkenberg

Ok, if it hadn't been for that stunning pole on a drying track at Interlagos then I might have given the tenth spot to Sutil, Glock or Massa, and I'm not convinced that Willi Weber's latest young charger is in the same league as the man who established the former Hotelier as a driver manager par excellence. He struggled in the first part of the season to match Rubens Barrichello, but as the year wore on, he was increasingly able to get on terms with his more experienced team mate. A spirited drive in Monza was a highlight, although it must be said he was lucky not to be penalised given the number of times he missed the first chicane while defending his position from Mark Webber's Red Bull. And then, of course, there was that pole in Interlagos. Yes, it owed a certain amount to luck, and he was running a high-downforce set-up that would make his life difficult on race day, but still, he was able to find grip from slick tyres on a still damp circuit that eluded all his more experienced and highly feted rivals. If race day was a disappointment by comparison, he nonetheless defended his position maturely, making the likes of Alonso and Hamilton work to get past him, without doing anything stupid and taking a title contender out of the race. It's a shame that Williams' financial situation is such that they probably can't afford to keep him on next year.

The Rest...

There are a number of drivers who have had legitimate claim on the lower reaches of this list. Felipe Massa picked up five podiums for Ferrari on his return from injury and once or twice even appeared to have the upper hand on Alonso. There was little sign, though, of the driver who usurped presumed number one Kimi Raikkonen in previous years at Ferrari. After being asked to move over for his team mate at the German Grand Prix, he never really looked a match for the Spaniard. The Scuderia might reasonably have expected more than a smattering of podiums from Massa, given that his team mate went into the final race leading the world championship.

Adrian Sutil did a decent job with Force India, making the most of the team's early season form to rack up a decent points tally. Highlights included holding Hamilton off for fifth in Malaysia and keeping it on the road for another fifth place in Belgium. He pretty much did for the idea that Vitantonio Liuzzi was a great unappreciated talent.

My final contender for inclusion in this list was Virgin Racing's Timo Glock. It would have been easy for the ex-Toyota driver to have gone to sleep, faced with a season toiling away at the tail end of the grid in a car that was four or five seconds a lap off the front-running pace. Instead, he completely dominated team mate Di Grassi and got about as much as it was possible to do so from out of the Virgin. When strategy or weather conditions favoured him, he occasionally got the car a good bit further up the order than it really merited, holding back a queue of early pitters in Singapore, and threatening to become the first man from the new teams to break through into Q2 on merit in Brazil (I'm excluding the freak wet qualifying in Malaysia where anybody who wasn't able to set a time as the track dried in the final part of the session was never going to get through).

One man I haven't mentioned so far, of course, has been Michael Schumacher, whose come-back was decidedly underwhelming. There were occasions on which he had the better of team mate Rosberg, but more often than not, the man whose sportscar racing career only missed overlapping with that of Nico's father Keke by a single season looked a shadow of his former self. About the only trace of the old Schumacher was evident in his still appalling track manners. Running his former protege, Massa off the road in Canada and engaging in blocking of breathtaking stupidity while vainly trying to prevent fellow veteran Rubens Barrichello from nabbing a point for tenth from him in Hungary. After an absolute nadir in Singapore, he appeared to find something of his old mojo in the closing races of the year. It will be interesting to see whether this was a flash in the pan, or a sign that he's finally shaken off his race-rustiness.

Another veteran driver making a return to F1 after several years away was Pedro De La Rosa, who was brought in to provide some experience for the Sauber line-up. He was probably better than his results suggested, and suffered the lion's share of Sauber's mechanical woes over the course of the season, but I always thought it a little odd that he had been chosen in preference to long-time Sauber man Nick Heidfeld. It wasn't such a surprise to see him let go to make way for Heidfeld after the Belgian Grand Prix. At 39, his F1 career must surely now be over.

Of the rest, Liuzzi was inexplicably disappointing, typically half a second or so slower than team mate Sutil. I can only suppose there's some financial reason for his continued presence at Force India, as I would have been inclined by now to stick test driver Paul Di Resta in the car and see what the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries title back in 2006 can do. Vitaly Petrov deserves some credit for occasionally besting team mate Robert Kubica at Renault, but more often than not was a very long way from the Pole's pace. The second Renault seat has seemingly never been a happy place, and again, money seems the best explanation as to why Petrov is in the car rather than, say, Glock, Heidfeld or Kovalainen.

On the subject of Kovalainen, the Finn went some way to repairing his reputation after taking a real beating in his two years as team mate to Lewis Hamilton at Mclaren. Mike Gascoyne's hurriedly put together Lotus was a deeply conventional car and was never likely to trouble the midfield, but both Kovalainen and team mate Trulli got on with the job of getting the most out of it. Assessing quite how well they were doing is rather tricky, as they were essentially in a private race with the Virgins, but both appeared surprisingly upbeat, and they usually got the better of Richard Branson's low-cost F1 team. Team boss Tony Fernandes appears serious, so there's a good chance the 2011 car, which will have a Red Bull gearbox, will be a more competitive proposition.

Toro Rosso youngsters Sebastian Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari looked to have got to grips with F1, and looked feisty on occasion, but neither did anything to persuade me he is a star in the making. Alguersuari's best drive came right at the end of the year, holding back Felipe Massa's much faster Ferrari for 9th in Abu Dhabi. Buemi usually appeared slightly the quicker of the two and scored the lion's share of the team's points, but I couldn't help but think that a team with a Red Bull chassis and a Ferrari engine ought to be achieving more. I'd be inclined to drop one of them and stick Ricciardo in the car next year.

Last, and by most accounts least, Bruno Senna, Karun Chandhok, Sakon Yamamoto and Christian Klien all found their time wasted driving the ashes of Adrian Campos' F1 dream. The HRT was frankly embarrassingly slow, given it was the work of the world's premier off-the-peg racing car manufacturer, Dallara. Assessing their relative merits is rather tricky. Bruno Senna appeared a shade quicker than Chandhok, just as he did in GP2, though Senna's failure to out-pace Yamamoto suggests to me that he's nothing special either. Christian Klien reminded us all that he existed by stepping into the car on occasion. I hope he wasn't paying for the privilege...

Who goes where?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Kids On The Block

Last year, it seemed that the in-season testing ban, combined with the severe restrictions on race-weekend mileage imposed by the limits on engines and gearboxes that a team could use over the course of a season, had together frightened F1 teams away from hiring drivers without previous F1 experience. Doubtless, there was a fear that the lack of opportunity for drivers to get seat time in a Grand Prix car would seriously hamper any newcomers and Toro Rosso were alone in turning up at Melbourne last year with a driver who had never taken a Grand Prix start before - Sebastien Buemi. Others came in over the course of the year, as first Toro Rosso and then Renault became disillusioned with the drivers they had started the year with and replaced Sebastien Bourdais with British F3 champion, Jaime Alguersuari and Nelson Piquet Jr with Romain Grosjean, while Toyota drafted Kamui Kobayashi to fill in for an apparently injured Timo Glock but in comparison with previous years, last season was not a vintage one for fresh talent.

This year, though, there will be at least three drivers making their F1 debut in Bahrain in just over two weeks time, and possibly more if Campos, Stefan GP or USF1 defy the odds and make it to the grid this year. The three drivers who will definitely be there are the men who finished first, second and third in this year's GP2 championship, Nico Hulkenberg, Vitaly Petrov and Lucas Di Grassi.

Forced to pick one of these three as the man most likely to establish himself as a real star of the sport, I'd have to choose Willi Weber's latest protege, Hulkenberg. He is, after all, managed by the man who plucked one Michael Schumacher from obscurity, but more importantly than that, he won last year's GP2 championship fairly convincingly at his first attempt, despite the fact that most of his rivals were in their second or third year in the category, and comprehensively overshadowed his team mate Pastor Maldonado, who had been thought one of the fastest drivers in the series. He's also a previous winner of the F3 Euroseries, and helped Germany to the A1GP title back in 2006/07, while still a teenager.

The Williams seat looks like a good bet for the youngster too. The Williams FW32 should be competitive enough for him to show what he's capable of, but not so quick that he'll face the presssure of being thrown straight into a potentially title-winning team while he's still learning the ropes (although this didn't seem to do Lewis Hamilton any harm). In Rubens Barrichello, he's got a team mate who is vastly experienced, knows how to set up and develop a car, and who is fast enough that beating him will gain him credibility in the paddock, but who, crucially, is now going into his 18th season in the sport and who is almost certainly not quite as quick as he used to be. If Hulkenberg is really as good as his junior career suggests, he should be able to get the better of Barrichello from time to time, at least by the second half of the season.

The man whom he beat to the GP2 title, Russia's first F1 driver, Vitaly Petrov, will have a harder time at Renault. The Renault R30 is, on the balance of probabilities, likely to be about as competitive as the Williams, but if you were a young driver going into his first F1 season and you were given the choice, you'd probably prefer to be paired up with Barrichello than with Robert Kubica, a man whom many (including myself) see as being in the same league as champions Alonso and Hamilton. And that's before you take into account the fact that the second Renault has proven to have been something of a poisoned chalice. Add to that the fact that, unlike Hulkenberg or Di Grassi, he has little previous F1 testing experience, and he faces a very steep learning curve indeed. Perhaps the fact that Petrov Sr. is reported to be putting up £10m for his son's drove will ensure that he gets a decent shot.

But even if he does, is he quick? It's hard to say. When he arrived in GP2 back in the middle of 2006 he appeared to be a rich kid who was desperately out of his depth - perhaps not surprising when you consider that he had little single-seater experience beyond 'Formula Lada Revolution', whatever that may be. He stuck at it and learned the ropes, though, winning his first race in 2007, becoming a more regular front-runner in 2008 and finishing runner-up last year, something which suggests that, whether or not he's really from the very top drawer, he knows roughly what he's doing. And when you consider that he's a late starter, considerably less experienced than most racing drivers of his 25 years, he could yet turn out to be better than his junior career has suggested. There's no doubt he got the drive ahead of more obviously qualified candidates thanks to Daddy's millions, but it's now up to him to prove he deserves to be thought of as more than just a pay-driver.

Lucas Di Grassi wound up third in last year's GP2 championship and is the final member of this year's rookie trio. The Virgin VR01 is a rather less enticing prospect than a Williams or a Renault drive, but the vast pool of young drivers chasing a small number of race seats, an ambitious young hopeful would probably be well advised to take any seat going. And he might be feeling very glad he didn't sign for USF1 or Campos right now. Di Grassi has never struck me as being a really quick driver, a decent journeyman, but not someone whom I'd expect to see emerge as a regular race winner. In GP2 he's always been there or thereabouts, somewhere near the front, but even in the year he spent with multiple title winners ART, he never established himself as a regular winner.

It was a steady points-scoring approach that enabled him to come close to snatching the 2007 title from his Virgin team mate, Timo Glock, but the German driver always looked a good deal quicker, and frankly it would have been a travesty had Di Grassi snatched the title from under his nose simply because his ART machine never broke... He was reported to have been well respected as a development driver when he was a tester at Renault, though, and that could turn out to be more important than those last couple of tenths of outright pace in his new role at Virgin. On the plus side, the car hasn't looked too slow out of the box at Jerez, and it looks as though Nick Wirth's gamble on building a car without reference to a wind-tunnel just might pay off, but so far, the car has proven woefully unreliable.

If he wants to establish a long term future in F1, Di Grassi will have to do what he couldn't do in GP2 and get on terms with Timo Glock. In the first half of the year, he might be given the benefit of the doubt, but F1 is an unforgiving world and if he isn't matching Glock by the second half of 2010, he'll never be anything more than a journeyman in the eyes of the Grand Prix paddock. His task is the same as that facing Hulkenberg, and most dauntingly, Petrov, to get on terms with a much more experienced team mate. It's asking a lot, but since Lewis Hamilton rewrote the rules as far as what can be expected of a talented newcomer, anything less may not be enough.

The Incredible Hulk? GP2 In Review

Since its inception, I've been enthusiastic about GP2. Always making time to watch the coverage, first on Eurosport, and then more recently on ITV4. This year, though, I ciuldn't summon up much enthusiasm. Maybe it was the fact that the GP2 coverage had switched from Eurosport with its informative and entertaining team of Martin Haven and Gareth Rees, to the seemingly disinterested and certainly uninteresting bunch at Setanta. By the time Setanta had collapsed and the GP2 coverage had reverted back to its natural home at Eurosport, I'd cancelled my subscription so was reliant on rather patchy (Finnish language) coverage in one of the murkier corners of the internet to keep in touch with F1's leading feeder series, on those occasions when I could be bothered.

Maybe, though, it was just the sense that the 2009 GP2 series felt a bit of an irrelevance. The vast bulk of the field seemed to be made up of drivers who had been around in the series for a while, who had had their opportunities and been found wanting. Lucas Di Grassi was back for, what, his fourth season in GP2 with reigning champions, Racing Engineering, who went from having one of the prettiest liveries on the grid last year in their Repsol colours to one of the most jaw-droppingly awful when they were rebranded 'Fatburner Racing'. And Di Grassi did nothing in his fourth season in the category to suggest he is anything more than a 'nearly was'. His only hope of progressing into F1 must surely lie in how badly the other Renault test-driver is currently doing in the race seat. Talking of which...

...Romain Grosjean had the same kind of opportunity that Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton seized with both hands when he was signed with ART last year. He didn't take it, and while it lookd in the early part of the year that he was going to make amends for that with Barwa-Addax, it didn't work out that way. He was the class of the field in the opening races, though to judge by the fact his closest rival was team mate Vitaly Petrov, that might have owed as much to the old Campos team having got the car right as to anything the driver was doing, but as the season went on, he found himself increasingly being outperformed by Petrov, and after a dominant win in the Monaco Feature Race, he never won again.

Vitaly Petrov is, without doubt, the best driver yet to have come out of Russia. He didn't show badly this year in the GP2, winning a couple of races - feature races at that, but all the same, given that he was in his third full season in the category, nothing he did really screamed out "Future F1 star". He clearly has a lot of money behind him and isn't out of his depth in a powerful single seater, and a such, he might get a ride in one of the new F1 teams, providing at least one or two of them actually make the grid next year. I'd be surprised if he amounts to much when he gets there, though you can never be sure. He was, let's not forget, the man who finished second in the title race behind Nico Hulkenberg.

What of the champion, Hulkenberg? I'm not quite sure what to make of him. There's much to suggest that he might be a real talent. He won the title quite comfortably at his first attempt, though we'll never know for sure quite what might have happened had Grosjean raced the whole season. This was quite impressive, given that he was up against a host of drivers in their second or third year in the category. It will go some way to erasing the still-awkward memory of his lacklustre first attempt at the F3 Euroseries back in 2007. What leaves me a little uncertain about Hulkenberg's ultimate potential is that I never saw any sign of the kind of dominance that Rosberg and Hamilton demonstrated on occasion. A part of me thinks that a driver who is really the class of the field ought to be able to rack up more than 3 feature race wins over the season. On the other hand, Timo Glock didn't manage to, and he's looked at home in F1. And Hulkenberg was a rooki up against an awful lot of sophomores and seniors (the university metaphor seems curiously apt, anyone spending more than 3 years in GP2 is surely wasting his time and someone else's money.) We'll find out soon enough, if as is widely rumoured, he ends up partnering Rubens Barrichello at Williams next year.

For me, the disappointment of the year was the lack of pace from Hulkenberg's ART team mate, Pastor Maldonado. The Venezuelan has been the beneficiary of the state oil company largesse once showered on Ernesto Viso, and in the past had looked quick if rather wild. In the latter part of last year, at Piquet Sports, he seemed to find some consistency to marry to his prodiguous pace. This year, though, that once mighty pace seemed to vanish out of the window. About the one thing that can be said in his favour is that the second ART seat has been something of a poison chalice in recent years. Ask Michael Ammermuller... Or Luca Filippi.

Another man signed to a title winning team who failed to live up to expectations was Giedo Van Der Garde. At the start of the year, in spite of a rather torrid time in the sideshow GP2 Asia Series, I expected the reigning Renault World Series champion to be a serious contender in the ISPort car. As it was he was left scrabbling for reverse-grid wins, and only really hit his stride late on at Monza. Maybe it was simply that ISport have lost their way a bit - Diego Nunes was even less of a factor in the other car.


Of the rest? None really figured. Kamui Kobayashi never looked like repeating the form that took him to the GP2 Asia crown against admittedly hardly stellar opposition. Team mate Jerome D'Ambrosio figured early on in the year, but fell into something of a trough mid-season, from which he never really recovered. Alvaro Parente surprised everyone by winning a Feature Race - at Spa no less, with the team formerly known as BCN, but at 25 is probably already too old to make the break into F1 (though you never know). The likes of Luca Filippi, Roldan Rodriguez and Javier Villa continued to tread water, probably burning the family cash to be there. Davide Valsecchi never really lived up to his promise when he replaced Romain Grosjean at Barwa Addax and down at the back of the field, the lack of strength in depth in this year's GP2 grid was all-too apparent. Ricardo Texeira, Nelson Panciatici and Michael Herck all looked like men with no business racing at this level.

So, not a classic year for the series. If GP2 is to maintain its credibility as a feeder formula for F1, it is crucial that Hulkenberg gets on at Williams, if indeed that is where he winds up. After Grosjean and Piquet Jr, I suspect there may be an ever greater reluctance among F1 team bosses to hire on the basis of a good showing in GP2 alone. More to the point, when Red Bull's large junior programme all but entirely ignores GP2 now (its drivers being placed variously in British F3, Formula 2 and WSR) and when last year's British F3 front runners, Jaime Alguersuari, Oliver Turvey and Brendon Hartley all gave GP2 a miss, one wonders whether there is a risk that Bruno Michel's baby is fast becoming the new F3000

Racing As Testing

Musing on the Finn's rather lacklustre performances at Ferrari last year, one F1 journalist asked "where is Kimi Raikkonen? If he can't take this seriously, why should I?". Watching the latest round of the GP2 Asia series in Qatar last weekend, I found myself asking much the same question of it.

Is it really a championship in it's own right or is it merely a glorified series of test sessions for the GP2 series proper? Take the three leading teams in GP2 at the moment. Champions Racing Engineering aren't doing the championship at all. ART have run no less than four drivers in their cars this year, with Champ Car refugee Nelson Philippe sharing the second car with prospective European series drivers Pastor Maldonado and Nico Hulkenberg while former F1 pay-driver Sakon Yamamoto continues his unsuccessful bid to revive his career in the lead car. ISport, meanwhile, have kept the same two drivers throughout the season, but Giedo Van Der Garde's team mate, Hamad Al Fardan, a man whose previous greatest achievement was finishing 3rd in the hardly hotly contested B class of the British F3 championship frankly makes last year's ART makeweight Stephen Jelley appear qualified by comparison. If even the GP2's leading teams are struggling to attract two good quality drivers, it doesn't reflect well on the series' credibility.

Further down the grid, things get even worse. Trident have had no less than five different drivers in their cars this year of whom only Chris Van Der Drift has a worthwhile racing CV. Fisichella MotorSport's Kevin Nai Chia Chen has taken part in all four races but has been so embarrassingly slow that it is a wonder he has been given the requisite licence at all. In Qatar he was 7 seconds away from pole!

The fact that, in spite of missing the opening races, Hulkenberg is within striking distance of the title is down, in no small part to the lack of serious runners doing all the races. That he will not compete in the final two races but will instead hand the car over to Pastor Maldonado merely goes to show that even the drivers themselves don't much value the series save as a useful training ground for the 2009 European series.

Part of the problem is that GP2 Asia is to my mind a fundamentally flawed concept from the start. Dazzled by Middle Eastern oil wealth, those behind the championship ignore the fact that the only Asian country with a serious racing history and culture is Japan - a country that the series doesn't even visit. Name a Qatari racing driver of any consequence... Or one from Dubai... The championship is aimed at an audience that isn't listening.

I do think though that there is room for a major winter single seater series, and the vagaries of weather suggest that Europe really isn't the place for it. Whether there is space for both GP2 Asia and A1GP I'm not so certain. What I do think A1GP have got right, which GP2's winter series would do well to emulate, is not sticking solely to Asia, but adding races in South Africa, South America and Australasia. Unlike the UAE, Brazil, South Africa and Australia all have a history in the sport, a significant motorsports culture and at least one past F1 champion each. Unfortunately, there's enough wrong with A1GP, that it's far from clear to me that either series will survive. It has been suspected that GP2 Asia was set up in competition with A1GP, but the end result may be that the two championships cancel each other out and both might be gone within a year or two.

It doesn't help either that, unlike the GP2 series proper, most of the races do not dovetail with Grand Prix weekends, and so drivers do not get an opportunity either to impress watching F1 bosses, or to learn the tracks that they might race on if they were to make the jump up to F1. All this might not matter so much if the series visited really top rate race tracks, but the brutal truth is that it doesn't. Take away the novelty of racing under floodlights, and there's no getting away from the fact that Losail circuit really is horribly mickey mouse. In daylight, it would look very uninspired. About the best that can be said for the place is that it is no worse than Dubai, and that unlike the race at Sentul, Indonesia, that it replaced on the calendar, the circuit at least didn't break up.

Whatever my reservations and doubts, though, there was a race last weekend and there were some points of interest and positives to emerge. Sergio Perez might have been overshadowed last year by F3 rivals Turvey, Hartley and Alguesuari, but the Mexican impressed me in the Barwa Campos machine, picking up two podium finishes (including a win) and comprehensively overshadowing his more experienced team mate Vitaly Petrov in the process. His move to secure second place in the feature race stood out as one of the highlights of that race.

The race also served as a reminder that the old GP2 cars were much more amenable to overtaking than the 2008-vintage machines with their more sensitive aerodynamics. The track wasn't exactly ideal for passing, but nobody seemed to tell Alvaro Parente, or the increasingly impressive Davide Valsecchi, who continues to get his Durango machine far further up the order than it really has any right to be.

Valsecchi is now Kobayashi's closest rival in the championship battle. Kobayashi's done his reputation no harm either. He's started picking up feature race wins (he was always something of a Sunday morning reverse grid star until now) and while he doesn't appear to be from the very top drawer, he's Japanese, part of the Toyota Driver Development Programme, and must surely have a covetous eye on the second Williams seat, which current occupant Kazuki Nakajima hasn't exactly done a great deal with.

Have we seen any pointers as to the form book for the season proper? Well perhaps. Remember, after all, that Romain Grosjean dominated the GP2 Asia Series last year, but proved rather less impressive in the European season. That said, though, there are ominous signs that Willi Weber's latest protege, Hulkenberg, could dominate next year in the manner of Hamilton a couple of years back. If anyone's to stop him, it certainly doesn't look like it will be Renault World Series champion Giedo Van Der Garde, on current form. I'd expected him to win races, driving for ISport, but as it has turned out, he has struggled even to score points, and lies a distant 12th in the title race.

It appears too that Campos might have made that last step forward to become genuine title contenders. Last year, had Lucas Di Grassi been there from the start of the year, they might have been able to give ISport and Racing Engineering more of a challenge. Last weekend, they looked very much the strongest team - with both Petrov and Perez finishing in the top 3 in both races. With Grosjean back for a second bash, and driving for them this summer, this might be the year for the former Minardi driver's team. With the creation of the rival F2 championship, and with leading lights from British F3 electing instead to race in the Renault World Series, GP2 might not be as strong as it has been, but I'm still looking forward to when the real action starts in Spain in May.

The Best of 2007

Writing, as I am, on a rather grey and dreich Sunday at the end of the year, I've found myself thinking back over the year just gone. More so even than last year, I found that the world of Formula 1 took up a lot of my energies here at Motorsports Ramblings. We did, after all, have a very intriguing four way fight for the driver's title this year, and if I personally found the political machinations going on in the background rather dull, there is no denying that they had a significant impact on the season and took up an awful lot of energy and attention.

Away from the F1 world, though, there was much else going on that was worthy of attention. Here are ten single seater drivers, in no particular order, whose performances stood out for me in the course of 2007. Some of them are possible future F1 stars - a couple of them are already confirmed on the F1 grid for 2008.
One or two are almost certainly past thinking about F1 and happy to plough their own furrow over in the US. The final name is perhaps best considered a wild shot in the dark...

Timo Glock

When the young Timo Glock deputised for Giorgio Pantano at Jordan back in 2004, he impressed me by immediately getting on with the job in hand - and even scoring points on his debut. I presumed we would be hearing a lot more from the German in the years ahead. At first, it didn't seem that way. He spent 2005 in the career black-hole that is Champ Car. He got rather more out of the Rocketsports car than anyone who drove it subsequently, but it seemed that the F1 paddock had lost interest. He moved to GP2 last year, and in the second half of the season, we got some indication of what he might be capable of. Lewis Hamilton may have captured the world's attention, but from the British races onwards, it was Glock who racked up the most points.

This year, he dominated the GP2 series. The statistics don't entirely bear this out because he was struck by truly awful luck. His 5 victories could easily have been 8 or even 10, had his ISport car been a little more reliable. Other drivers were intermittently quick, but only Timo Glock was on the pace pretty well everywhere that the circus went. I'm glad that he's found a seat in F1 next year, and only hope that Toyota is not the career graveyard for him that it has been for pretty well everyone else who has raced for them.

Luca Filippi

Aside from Timo Glock, it is fair to say that nobody really stood out above the pack in GP2. It might have been interesting to see what Adam Carroll could have done with a full season, and of the rookies, Kazuki Nakajima seemed to have more raw pace than the rest (though I can't help feeling that he has been promoted to F1 a year too early). The award for most improved driver, though, should surely go to former Euro F3000 champion Luca Filippi. After looking out of his depth for much of 2006, he made much more of a serious impression in 2007.

He opened his year with his only win - in dominant style at Bahrain. After that, there were no further victories, but when his car was running reliably, he racked up an awful lot of podiums. There were second place finishes in both the sprint and feature races in Italy, followed by an impressive run to second in the Belgian feature race. More impressive, though, is that Filippi emerged as something of a racer in a way that he had not until now. With an ART drive next year, he's got to be a serious bet for 2008 champion. And already Honda have shown interest in him as a tester.

Sebastien Bourdais

I can't help feeling that Sebastien's biggest enemy in his latter days in Champ Car must have been boredom. Against increasingly weak opposition, it seemed that all Bourdais had to do most weekends was turn up and ensure that he didn't fall asleep at the wheel. On the other hand, what made the opposition seem weak? After all, there were former F3000 champions (Junquiera, Wilson), former F1 drivers (Wilson again, Moreno and Doornbos), former GP2 race winners (Neel Jani) and former Macau GP winners (Gommendy). They were all in the same machinery, and if Newman Haas are a better equipped team than the rest, this was unlikely to have provided quite the sort of advantage, on its own, than Bourdais appeared to have this year.

Eight wins from 14 races is an impressive showing in itself, but the stats hide the fact that, but for a little misfortune, he might well have won another three or four races. More so than even in any of his other four Champ Car winning seasons, Bourdais dominated 2007. Now we shall see what he can do in the altogether more competitive world of F1.

Robert Doornbos

In the end, Sebastien Bourdais had it all his way this year in the Champ Car World Series. For much of the season, though, it wasn't quite that straightforward. Red Bull refugee, Robert Doornbos appeared to be no more than another out of work F1 driver casting around for work, and the Minardi Team USA berth did not look an especially promising one. After all, the team had won but a single race (in rather fortunate conditions) with Nelson Philippe in the past few years.

In his first races in Champ Car, though, Doornbos quietly got on with the job of racking up podium finishes, while poor luck, or foolhardiness, or some combination of the two, did for many of his rivals. This culminated with a fine win in the rain at Mont Tremblant (he passed Bourdais on the road). Thereafter, things began to go off the rails. There was another win at San Jose, but it seemed that while others had their bad luck at the beginning of the season, Doornbos' problems all came at the end. Still. with Bourdais off to Formula 1, who'd bet against Doornbos winning the Champ Car title in 2008 - if there is a Champ Car title to win....

Romain Grosjean

Pre-season, the general assumption had been that Nico Hulkenberg would parlay his phenomenal pace in the A1GP series into a Euroseries win. Failing that, Red Bull favourite, Sebastien Buemi looked a good bet. As it was, a Swiss with little previous form went and beat them both. With six wins over the course of the season, he was clearly the quickest of the current bunch.

A seat at ART next year, especially when put together with a test drive at Renault ( the fact he races under a French licence can't hurt him there) mean that he is perhaps more likely to follow the path of Lewis Hamilton than that of other Euroseries winners who have subsequently fallen into relative obscurity, like Jamie Green and Paul Di Resta.

Nico Hulkenberg

Willi Weber's young prodigy might have been a touch disappointing in the F3 Euroseries this year (although he did win 3 races and wind up third in the final standings) but he deserves his place on this list thanks to his domination of the A1GP series at the beginning of the year.

OK, so there is little doubting that the A1 series is a mite strange, and that success in this formula hasn't always translated into other arenas, but all the same, there is little doubt than when given a powerful single seater, and put up against drivers with past F1 experience, the German teenager never looked less than assured. He's staying in the Euroseries, which I can't help feeling is a shame, because on the available evidence, it looks like he might do better with a more powerful car underneath him. Still, the Williams testing role won't do any harm.

Alvaro Parente

Some drivers seem to be inexplicably, and unfairly overlooked. In 2005, Alvaro Parente won the British F3 championship despite lacking the funds to do a whole season. Despite missing the opening round, he won the title with a race to spare, and didn't even bother turning up to the final round, in order to save cash. This year, he found himself again without backers, but on the eve of the new season, Tech1 Racing decided to take a chance on an unfunded driver, and used its own funds to race Parente in the Renault World Series.

He repaid the previously unremarkable French squad's faith in him handsomely, taking 3 race wins and the 2007 title against what was actually a rather strong driver line-up. Whether this leads to greater things, as it did for Robert Kubica, or to obscurity as it did a year later for Alx Danielsson, remains to be seen. As yet, it would seem there are no GP2 teams yet knocking at his door. It looks as if he'll have to really impress when he gets his Renault test next year.

Marko Asmer

The Estonian son of a former racing hero of the old Soviet Union appears to have been kicking aroun in F3 for a long time without ever having really achieved much. Beneath the surface, things are a little more complicated than that. In truth, he has never really had the funding to do the job properly, and when a driver is worried about how they will pay the bills, they will inevitably find it hard to focus fully on the day job.

This time, that weight was taken off Asmer's shoulders when Walter Grubmuller Sr put up the money to run Asmer alongside his son at Hitech Despite not being a team in the same league as Raikkonen-Robertson or Carlin, they were able to do enough to allow Asmer not merely to win the F3 championship, but to dominate it, and to make most of the series other young guns look decidedly second-rate in the process. One can only hope that he will find a worthwhile ride next year.

Dario Franchitti

I have to confess that I have never much cared for the Indy Racing League. These days, it's hard to ignore the fact that it looks rather healthier than Champ Car does, but that, to be honest, is not saying a great deal. Dario Franchitti once looked every bit as much an F1 prospect as near-contemporary, David Coulthard. Somehow, the opportunities never quite presented themselves, and he ended up leaving for what was then called the Indycar World Series back in 1997. After ten year, there were odd race wins, but he had never really established himself as one of tyhe true stars of the series.

Until this year. First came the Indy 500 victory, helped by a fuel strategy that just paid off as the race was rained off in the final laps. Then, as the season wore on, it became increasingly clear that Dario had finally arrived as a front line driver in the IRL. In his five previous seasons, he had won a total of 4 races. This year, he doubled that total, and when Scott Dixon ran out of fuel on the final lap of the final round, he sealed the title. A shame he's off to drive stock cars round and round in circles.

Marcus Ericsson

An eccentric choice, I will grant you, and a name which fits oddly with the others on this list. He's there because unlike the others, I saw him race in person at Knockhill last year, in the final round of the Formula BMW championship, and he stood out head and shoulders above anyone else in the field. Given that several of the other runners - including Henrys Surtees and Arundel, are considered to be serious prospects in themselves, this was no mean feat. Where the others all looked a shade scrappy, Ericsson seemed able to carry speed which nobody else could find around the tiny Fife circuit.

More interesting still, is that Ericsson really was a chance discovery - not a kid hot-housed by ambitious parents from the earliest age, but someone who walked in to a kart circuit in his native Kumla at the age of 9, and nearly broke the lap record the first time he ever drove. Without family money behind him, he's been reliant on the management of Kenny Brack and British single seater team boss Richard Dutton. It will be interesting to see just how far he goes - but I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility that he will bring Fortec back into contention in F3 next year.