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...

Like Father, Unlike Son

Imagine you're in your late teens. Growing up in Monaco. The son of a multi-millionaire. The world is your oyster. Probably, you need never really do an honest day's work in your life if you don't want to. Sounds like a dream come true? Perhaps, but on the other side of the coin, that very ease, the way that everything has been handed to you means it's hard to imagine that you're going to have the application, the drive, to really make the most of the gifts that fortune has bestowed upon you.

So in a way, it's a little surprising that 1982 World Champion Keijo Rosberg's son Nico has been as successful as he has in Formula 1. An awful lot of sons of famous fathers have tried their hands at motorsport, but the success stories have been relatively thin on the ground, at least at the very top level. And I can't help thinking that being the comfortably-off son of a famous father probably doesn't help a young driver's focus and determination. I suspect that it is no coincidence that the two most successful sons of famous fathers both lost those fathers while they were still themselves children - Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve. Perhaps it was some sense of insecurity which gave those two a determination which such as the Mansell brothers, Nelson Piquet Jr, Nicolas Prost et al, have seemed to lack (though the Mansell brothers at least, never really showed any real sign of having the fundamental ability to do the job anyway).

Nico Rosberg, though, is an awkward exception to the rule. In his early junior career, he didn't really stand out to me. He attracted attention principally for getting that Williams test back in 2003 when he was only 17, and one couldn't help but think that Frank was simply doing a favour for the man who had won the 1982 title for his team. Certainly, as late as 2004, when, in his second year in the championship, he finished fourth in the F3 Euroseries behind Premat, LaPierre and champion Jamie Green, there was nothing to suggest that he was any qui from a host of talented youngsters, not all of whom could possibly find a place on the F1 grid.

But then he moved to GP2 with ART and, while I expected British F3 Champion Nelson Piquet Jr to win the battle of the 'sons of famous fathers', and reckoned Alexandre Premat likely to be the quicker man in Frederic Vasseur's team, he went and won the championship at his first attempt, narrowly edging out the more fancied Heikki Kovalainen. And all of a sudden, he was rather more than just a fresh-faced son of a famous father. Scratch beneath the surface, and there was always reason to think that Rosberg might have been a cut above many of the young hopefuls in the junior formulae.

For one thing, while it would be easy to caricature Rosberg as the spoiled son of a 'racing dad' he is probably one of the brightest men on the grid. He turned down a place to study engineering at Imperial College London in order to further his racing career, and apparently achieved the highest score ever recorded on the 'Engineering Aptitude Test' given to all new Williams drivers when he joined the team in 2006. It's striking too that Rosberg Jr always sounded calm and confident when dealing with the media, even when at the time of his F1 debut at the age of just 20, back in 2006, in marked contrast with Piquet Jr who always gave the unfortunate impression of a young man with a chip on his shoulder (though to be fair, the difficult atmosphere of the Renault team during his sojourn there can't have helped).

On the surface, he's a very different character to his father. Where Keke was famous for a very non-PC willingness to speak his mind, and had a popular image as something of a 'hard man' of the F1 grid, his son looks like a man who has walked straight out of a shampoo commercial, has been christened 'Britney' by harsher members of the F1 fraternity, and always sounds 'on message' when speaking to the press. Asked if he would have preferred to have raced in his father's more free-wheeling era, a time when drivers could smoke without being subject to brickbats for compromising their race fitness, he responded simply that he hated smoking. But beneath that, I wonder if it is not only a natural aptitude for hustling an F1 car that he has inherited from his father. Just as Rosberg Sr, for all his larger than life persona, was a tremendously determined man whose path to the top was not easy, a man who overcame adversity to win, so Rosberg Jr is the gilded youth born into a life of comfort and riches, who could have lived the life of a feckless playboy, but who has chosen to try to show that he is every bit as good as his father.

The question remains though, just how good is Nico Rosberg? He certainly made an impact when he made his F1 debut at the Sakhir circuit at the age of just 20, back in 2006. Picking up fastest lap in his first ever race, becoming the youngest person ever to do so in the process, he followed this up with a third place grid position two weeks later in Malaysia, in a Williams that was hardly the class of the field. At the time, Jackie Stewart talked about him as a potential future mega-star and while Stewart's view might have been influenced by his work for Williams sponsor RBS, he's not a man who's easily impressed.

After that explosive start, though, Rosberg's career has so far failed to live up to that early promise. The 2006 Williams was not one of the better cars to come out of Grove, let down as it was by terrible reliability and a lack of high speed downforce that meant he would make the points just once more all season. Over the year as a whole, it is fair to say that he was comprehensively outpaced by Mark Webber. There's no shame in that, Webber is a very quick driver, perhaps quicker than anyone realised at the time, and he was then into fifth year in the sport, while Rosberg was still finding his feet, but still one wonders, if Rosberg is really quick, wouldn't he have shown better against Webber?

Three more years at Williams brought a steady stream of points, and a couple of podiums but no victories, though as his best finish was a second place behind Fernando Alonso at Singapore in 2008, arguably, he is a Grand Prix winner in spirit, if not in fact. But after four years in the sport, we are arguably no closer to knowing quite how good Rosberg really is. He had no trouble outclassing his Williams team mates, Alexander Wurz and Kazuki Nakajima but its hard to quantify how much of an achievement that is. Were Wurz and Nakajima perfectly solid, competent peddlers who were made to look second rate by an exceptionally gifted team mate? Or were the late noughties Williams a good deal better quicker than we realised?

Williams themselves didn't seem quite sure. There were dark mutterings that, for all Rosberg's clean-cut image and sponsor-friendliness, he just didn't have the overwhelming drive to win that the best of his rivals did. And where Williams certainly did have good reason to complain is in pointing out that Rosberg threw away a fair number of good points finishes - most notably at Singapore in 2009, with silly errors. There, he had looked a safe bet for a podium, and perhaps even an outside shot for victory, when he wandered over the white line exiting the pits and picked up a drive-through penalty which put him out of contention. And what if those rumours that he'd been approached to replace Fernando Alonso at Mclaren and turned that opportunity down are true? That he (or his manager) didn't believe he was fundamentally good enough to take on Lewis Hamilton in identical machinery? If it's true, it suggests a man who doesn't have the self confidence of a natural born winner.

A move to Mercedes for 2010 ought to have answered these questions. If Rosberg had matched, or even bettered Jenson Button, then we could be sure that he was amongst the very quickest in the business - a potential future world champion. Except that Button jumped ship to Mclaren and Rosberg found himself paired up with a returning Michael Schumacher. If the younger German had feared that he would be put in the shade by the 7 time world champion, he had no reason to worry. Rosberg has generally been a shade faster than his more illustrious team mate, and has certainly been a good deal more consistent, bringing the car home where Schumacher has seemingly been a magnet for trouble.

But is that because Rosberg is much better than we realised, a man who can beat the outstanding driver of the last 20 years? Or is it simply a sign that Michael Schumacher is over the hill, race rusty, long past his best? There is simply no way of knowing for sure. The truth may lie somewhere in between. While I just can't quite bring myself to believe that Schumacher, at the height of his powers, would have found himself trailing Nico Rosberg by 44 points to 102, it may be that Schumacher looks less competitive than he is because we are underestimating Rosberg. After all, if Schumacher had been trailing, say, Hamilton by a similar margin, one might almost be tempted to congratulate the old stager for putting up such a good fight at 42. If Schumacher were to call time on his increasingly ill-advised looking come back and hand the car over to Nick Heidfeld, we'd be much closer to knowing the answer.

The Motorsports Ramblings Top 10 - 2009

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

10. Robert Kubica

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

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

9. Nick Heidfeld

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

8. Mark Webber

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

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


7. Rubens Barrichello

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

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

6. Nico Rosberg

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

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

5. Kimi Raikkonen

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

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

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


4. Fernando Alonso

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

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


3. Sebastian Vettel

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

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

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

2. Jenson Button

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

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

1. Lewis Hamilton

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

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

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

The rest...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domenicali's Dilemma

After winning the German Grand Prix, a journalist asked Lewis Hamilton if he was surprised that Felipe Massa didn't defend his second position more strongly than he did. "All I can say is that, if that had been me, he would never have got past." he came straight back. It was a response which has left him open to accusations of arrogance - which were duly and predictably hurled about the internet - but I can't help but think he did no more than speak his mind, and come to that, that he was probably right.

It's hard to imagine that Hamilton - or Alonso or Kubica for that matter, would have made it so easy on the run down into turn 4. I know that back seat drivers are a pain in the arse, and I know that it's easy to be an armchair critic, but even as the move was taking place I was thinking "No, Felipe, don't leave a gap down the inside. Lewis will nail you if you do that." And sure enough, he did.

The thought must be going through the mind of Ferrari manager Stefano Domenicali's mind that last weekend was merely the latest of a number of occasions on which Ferrari had been let down by its drivers. It's always difficult to be certain, but my impression is that Maranello has produced the fastest car through the balance of the season so far, and yet Mclaren and Hamilton are clear at the top of the driver's championship and hard as it is to believe, BMW's Robert Kubica is snapping at their heels.

Kimi Raikkonen was hired at great expense to fill the shoes (as it were) left vacant by the departure of Ferrari lynchpin Michael Schumacher and after a year and a half at the team, he had failed to establish even that he is consistently quicker than Felipe Massa. There have been days, for sure, when he has looked absolutely imperious. Think of his performance at Magny Cours before an exhaust failure stymied his challenge, or of his win at Barcelona earlier in the year. On other occasions, though, Massa has easily had the measure of him - think Bahrain or Istanbul, and at Hockenheim last weekend, as at Monaco in the rain earlier in the year, he was almost embarrassingly off the pace.

Maybe, with a world title in the bag and a huge fortune stashed away, he simply isn't really interested any more. Maybe he has never really gelled withthe Ferrari and its control Bridgestone tyres in the way he did on occasion with the Mclaren and its Michelins. Or maybe he is simply not as good or as quick as we thought he was back in his Mclaren days. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that at a reported $30m a year, he hasn't been great value for money.

If Felipe Massa was always unofficially considered to be the Number 2. driver at Ferrari then a case can be made that he's exceeded expectations. Despite initial doubts that he would cope with the loss of traction control, he's generally looked quicker than Raikkonen this year. Call me a skeptic, though, but he just doesn't look like world champion material to me. He's always had a reputation for being fast (though only once did he ever appear to be any kind of threat to Michael Schumacher when they were teamed up in 2006) but equally he's never been able to entirely shed a reputation for silly errors. This year he went off at turn 1 at Melbourne after getting a little too enthusiastic with the throttle, spun out of second in Malaysia and spent so much time in rotation at Silverstone I was half left wondering whether he thought he was doing ballet, not racing. Hockenheim highlighted another weakness: He's never been much of a wheel-to-wheel racer. The way Hamilton breezed past him was more than a little reminiscent of how Raikkonen sailed past Giancarlo Fisichella on the last lap of the Japanese Grand Prix back in 2005. And if there is one thing that any aspiring world champion doesn't want to hear, then surely it is comparisons with Fisichella...

The decision Domenicali is left facing is whether his team would be best served soldiering on with its current pairing, or whether they should be looking around for replacements. Earlier in the week, Clive Allen found himself wondering whether in Lewis Hamilton, the sport has another Michael Schumacher, another Ayrton Senna on its hands - a driver who is head and shoulders above everyone else. If that really is the case, then I think Ferrari really need to be casting around for potential replacements now. Mclaren appear to be getting their act together as a team, and if Hamilton is bringing another 2 or 3 tenths of a second a lap to the party on his own, then if I were running for Ferrari, I would be looking for someone who might be able to work the same magic. And I can't persuade myself that either of their existing drivers fit the bill.

The trouble is, the other options appear to be decidedly limited. Fernando Alonso has shown he was capable of matching Hamilton when they were teamed up together last year at Mclaren, and he's doubtless getting rather fed up tooling around in this year's underwhelming Renault. On the other hand, if he could only barely match Hamilton in his debut year, what chance does he have against the Brit now he's more experienced? And is Alonso really a Ferrari man? The disintegration of his relationship with Mclaren last year revealed him as a decidedly temperamental man, willing, if necessary, to go to war with his own team if he feels things aren't going his way. He would certainly be a radical change from the imperturbable Raikkonen or the team-focused Schumacher.

So if not Alonso then who? Of the current young guns, two stand out as having, potentially at least, that extra something which would enable them to take the fight to Mclaren and Hamilton. They are the young German (much touted as the 'new Schumacher' in his homeland) Sebastien Vettel, who has been doing incredible things with the hitherto uncompetitive Toro Rosso, and BMW's Polish star Robert Kubica, who has been perhaps the standout driver of the year thus far.

The trouble is that both of these men are firmly contracted to other teams. For sufficient cash, it would doubtless be possible to buy off Red Bull or BMW, but can Ferrari be so confident of what they are getting as to justify the expenditure? After all, might they be feeling that they threw a little too much money in the direction of Kimi Raikkonen? Of the two men, Robert Kubica is the one who has done more to establish his credentials (he is, after all, a Grand Prix winner and led the driver's championship earlier this season) but that would mean paying off BMW. The German team would doubtless demand an awful lot of money for letting go of their prime asset - and all that would not merely be money which Ferrari were losing, but money which a team fast emerging as a serious threat to them would be gaining. It might not cost Ferrari quite so much to prise Sebastien Vettel out of his Red Bull contract, but he is rather more of an unproven quantity. Sure, he looked mighty in the wet at Fuji and China last year, and he has sometimes got that Toro Rosso far further up the grid than it ought to be, but on the other hand, would the next Michael Schumacher really lose the F3 Euroseries title to Paul Di Resta?

Williams team leader Nico Rosberg is another possibility. Nonetheless, I can't shake the suspicion that, while Keke's son may be good, he hasn't got that extra something which marks him out as really special. After all, in his debut season, his head went down, and he found himself comfortably outpaced by Mark Webber. Last year he looked rather impressive against the floundering Alex Wurz, but this year he seems to have made an awful lot of mistakes (I've lost count of how many Williams nosecones he's trashed). For me, the final nails in the coffin, if it is true, are rumours that he was offered the Mclaren drive alongside Hamilton this year, but turned it down because he lacked the confidence to go head to head with Woking's golden boy. Not, in my view, the attitude of a born winner.

The eccentric option, as it were, would be Rosberg's former team mate Mark Webber. Webber has been around the sport for a good long while now, and on the face of it, it could be argued that he hasn't achieved much. That may be so, but then he has never had the car to do the job. Sometimes, especially in qualifying, where it is perhaps easier for a minute or so of sheer inspiration to make up for a vehicle's limitations, that hasn't mattered so much. Back in 2003, he put a Jaguar on the front row in Malaysia. A fortnight ago, he repeated the trick in a Red Bull. A couple of years back, he was in serious contention for an outright win in a Williams at Monaco, before the car failed (as it so often did that year). More than any of the other experienced drivers on the grid, he strikes me as the man most likely to really get the job done given a top car. Of course, a few years ago, I would have said the same thing of Giancarlo Fisichella (who continues to impress when stuck in an uncompetitive car) but Webber seems a man more likely to keep his head under pressure, more likely to really work at getting the most out of a front-running car than Fisichella ever was.

One thing is clear though. Stefano Domenicali's predecessor, Jean Todt, never really had to think about who drove the red cars. There was no doubting that, with Michael Schumacher at the wheel of one of their cars, if they weren't winning, it was unlikely to be down to the limitations of the man holding the steering wheel. Now, though, Ferrari cannot be so sure, and they face some difficult decisions on that score...

The Motorsports Ramblings Top 10 - 2007

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

10. Heikki Kovalainen

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

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

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

9. Robert Kubica

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

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

8. Mark Webber

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

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

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

7. Jenson Button

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

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

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

6. Nick Heidfeld

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

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

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

5. Nico Rosberg

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

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

4. Felipe Massa

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

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

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

3. Fernando Alonso

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

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

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

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

2. Kimi Raikkonen

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

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

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

1. Lewis Hamilton

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

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

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

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

The Rest

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

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

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

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

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