If

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer's End

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civil War?

If I'd been asked to pick out the most explosive driver pairing at the beginning of the year, I might have singled out Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. Could Mclaren cope with the combined egos of the two most recent World Champions in the same team? And then there was the question of how Fernando Alonso would settle in alongside Felipe Massa at Ferrari. Massa, after all, had established himself as the de facto number one at Ferrari before his injury in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix. But it is hard to imagine that Alonso moved there thinking he would be playing a mere supporting role, or at the Scuderia hired him for that purpose. Come to that, the combination of aging returning 7-time champion Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg, a man who has got his hands on a potentially race-winning car for the first time and has everything to prove. But right now, in the aftermath of the Turkish Grand Prix, it is the Red Bull pairing of Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel which looks the most troubled because they have been the first pairing to break that cardinal rule of motor racing, "don't collide with your team mate".

Let's not get things out of proportion. Team mates have collided with each other before now, without it resulting in what divorce lawyers might call "irreconcilable differences" and really serious feuds between team mates at the front of the F1 grid are really not as common as is sometimes made out. That's not to say that F1 drivers have always necessarily got on especially well with their team mates but the real swords-at-dawn grudge matches? There was Senna and Prost at Mclaren and, infamously, the tragically brief war between Didier Pironi and Gilles Villeneuve at Ferrari in 1982. But beyond that, I struggle to think of others.

Interestingly, the roots of the feuds between both Senna and Prost and Pironi and Villeneuve lay not in on-track collisions between the drivers, but in what one driver perceived to be the reneging on a deal not to race each other. At the San Marino Grand Prix of 1982, which, like the US Grand Prix some twenty four years later, had a greatly reduced grid because of the withdrawal of the FOCA teams (barring Tyrrell, who in deference to their Italian sponsor, ignored FOCA's boycott of the race), there was little chance of anyone other than Ferrari winning, once the Renaults had gone out. On the final lap, Villeneuve claimed that both drivers had been told to hold station. Pironi claimed otherwise, and dived down the inside of his team mate and into the lead at Tosa to win the race. Afterwards, Villeneuve claimed to have been cheated of a win that was rightly his and was quoted as saying "I'll never speak to Pironi again in my life." Two weeks later, he was killed in an accident in qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix.

Seven years later, Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost found themselves on the front row for the second round of the 1989 World Championship, again at Imola. After Senna had been eliminated in a first corner accident at the opening round at Jacerapagua, he apparentl approached Prost and suggested a deal by which they didn't race each other into the first corner at Tosa on the opening lap. Prost agreed and, at the start, Senna duly got away from pole and into the lead. On the fourth lap, however, came Gerhard Berger's horrific fiery accident at Tamburello which caused the race to be stopped. At the restart, it was Prost who got away from the line better and led through Tamburello. Senna, however, dived out of his slipstream and snatched a lead he would never lose. Later, he would claim that the original deal had covered only the first start, and not the restart. Prost considered this a fundamentally dishonest claim, and relations between the two were never really the same again, reaching their nadir with their collision at the Casio Chicane while fighting for the title at Suzuka later in the year.

One might point to the rivalry between Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Williams in the late eighties, more recently, the intense battle between Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton in their year together at Mclaren in 2007. However, these always struck me as first and foremost a battle between one of those drivers and their team, rather than a grudge-match between the two drivers. Both Alonso and Piquet has assumed that, as double world champions, they had implicit number one status when they moved to Mclaren and Williams respectively, and neither appreciated it when they found that their less fancied team mates were not only being allowed to take the fight to them, but appeared to have the support of at least a faction within their team. While I don't doubt that Piquet and Mansell, in particular, would certainly never be friends - their background and outlook on life was far, far too difficult (and Piquet's childish comments to Brazilian Playboy about Mansell's wife didn't help).

So where might the Webber/Vettel falling-out fit into this picture? I would argue it has more in common with the latter two examples, than with the all-out war between Senna and Prost. Where Senna and Prost were clearly the two stand-out drivers of their era, two men who knew that, in equal machinery, nobody else was much of a threat, Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel are merely two of perhaps seven or eight really first-rate drivers in Formula 1 at the moment. Likewise, until the collision last Sunday, they had largely avoided causing each other trouble, and appear to have a fair degree of mutual respect for each other. Whether that can survive their accident at the Otodrom Istanbul remains to be seen, but neither strikes me as the sort of person to pursue a vendetta against a team mate.

No, the far bigger problem is likely to be the relationship between Mark Webber and his team. For in my eyes, and indeed, those of the great majority of observers, the plain truth of the matter is that Sebastian Vettel made a mistake while trying to pass Webber and drove the pair of them off the road. Perhaps he thought, wrongly, that he was already clear of Webber's front wing by the time he began to pull right, back towards the racing line in preparation for braking. Perhaps he simply expected Webber to yield and give him room, in which case I can't help but think he hasn't been paying enough attention to his team mate's racecraft over the last couple of years. Webber gave him just enough room to stay alongside, but was determined not to give any more than he had to, to give Vettel the choice between backing off and following him, or braking on the dirty, dusty inside line. What happened was an understandable error on Vettel's part, a racing accident, but

The trouble is, Red Bull didn't seem to see it that way. Christian Horner's first comment to journalists was that he was disappointed that his drivers didn't give each other room. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that what he was really saying was that he thought Webber should have given Vettel space, let him past, in the interests of ensuring a Red Bull one-two.

And that, inevitably, that can only have fed a creeping belief on Webber's part that Vettel is Red Bull's favoured son. He is, after all, the team's longer term prospect. The man far more likely to be with the team in three, or even five, years time. The man that the team need to keep sweet if they want to be certain he won't run off to Mercedes when Michael Schumacher finally calls time on his career.

On top of that, there are those who would whisper that the young fresh-faced Vettel is a much better 'fit' for Red Bull's marketing activity. Certainly, as someone rather closer in age to Webber than to Vettel myself, I can't help thinking it's been a very long time since I last went out on the town fueled by vodka and red bulls. It's the sort of thing I might have done when I was, like Vettel, in my early 20s. Personally, I can't stand the stuff. On top of that, Vettel is also the Red Bull protege, having been backed by the soft drinks maker since his early teens, where Webber came to the team as a hired mercenary, having previously driven for Williams.

Normally, this wouldn't be obvious. Webber might suspect that Vettel was the unofficial Number 1 in the team, and Dietrich Mateschitz might prefer it if it were Vettel who was racking up the wins and leading the title, but if, as happened at Barcelona and Monaco, Webber was the in-form man, the team could live with it. But the Vettel/Webber collision left the team suddenly exposed, forced to nail their colours to the mast, to side with one driver or the other. Or rather, it didn't force them to do any such thing, but under pressure, in the heat of the moment, the team's allegiances were thrust into the light. And it will be interesting to see whether Christian Horner, Dietrich Mateschitz, Adrian Newey, et al, can repair the damage and ensure that both their drivers still believe they have the full support of the team. The news, last week, that they had re-signed Webber for 2011 suggest that, in spite of everything, they're determined to give it a go.

Looking Ahead

Formula One, it seems, is doomed to live permanently in the immediate future. Those at the front never really stop to bask in the glory of their successes, while down the field, the focus is always on how to claw one's way closer to the front, tomorrow, next week, next year. It might seem sad in a way, this inability to stop and smell the flowers, to enjoy the moment, but it's an immensely competitive world, and anyone who lets their guard down, who isn't ruthlessly planning for the next race, the next season, will quickly fall behind. After just six races and two months, already teams and drivers are beginning to turn their focus to 2011. And vultures are beginning to circle around those who have been judged to be under-performing.

In truth, there are really only eight seats in Formula One that offer a driver a realistic shot at winning races on a regular basis right now - two apiece for each of Red Bull, Mclaren, Ferrari and Mercedes. As such, those teams hold all the aces when it comes to selecting drivers, and in recent weeks, there have been persistent rumours that one or another of the big four is considering a change to their line-up for next season.

Looking most precarious at the moment is Ferrari's Felipe Massa. The Brazilian had surprised many over the past three seasons by matching and latterly generally beating the highly-rated Kimi Raikkonen. The arrival of the more focused Fernando Alonso, however, seems to have stopped Massa in his tracks. Autosport publish a handy ready-reckoner chart before each race, taking the fastest single lap from each driver over each Grand Prix and averaging them out to show how far each driver is from the ultimate pace. It's most useful for comparing the performance of team mates, and what it shows is not good news for Felipe - he's been an average of four tenths of a second a lap off the pace of Alonso thus far this year, a far bigger performance gap than separates any of the other pairings in the big four teams.

Why? It's really hard to say. Perhaps Massa was flattered by comparisons with Kimi Raikkonen, who had seemingly lost interest in F1 after sealing the world title in 2007, and who was perhaps never quite so quick as was thought. Maybe he's not quite the same driver he was before that horrific accident in qualifying at Hungary last year. Equally possibly, Alonso's determination to get the whole team behind him, something which Kimi Raikkonen was never really interested in trying to do, has pulled the rug out from under Massa. A team which had taken Massa to its heart perhaps in part because they had found Raikkonen such a cold fish, now, in Alonso, have someone who can really lead them in the way that Schumacher used to. Leaving Massa a little surplus to requirements. And the trouble is, that with the competition between the top four teams so intense, Ferrari really can't afford to have one of its drivers feeling lost, lacking in confidence, unsure of himself. Not if it's costing him four tenths of a second a lap, anyway.

Mercedes, too, are wrestling on the horns of a dilemma when it comes to driver choices for 2011. When they announced that Michael Schumacher would be returning to F1 with the team, it looked like they had pulled off a remarkable coup. Rather than running a line-up of Rosberg and Heidfeld, one which looked a little uninspired when their major rivals had the likes of Hamilton, Alonso and Vettel on their books, suddenly they were being led by a seven time World Champion, probably the single best driver of the last twenty years.

Except he just doesn't seem quite the man he once was. Yes, Rosberg's points lead over him owes much to Schumacher's misfortune - the mechanical failure at Sepang, the first lap chaos at Melbourne, the penalty for that moment of silliness at La Rascasse last weekend. But still... does anyone really think that the Schumacher of old, the one who so dominated the sport for more than a decade, would find himself being matched by Nico Rosberg? A man who, with all due respect, has not one Grand Prix victory to his name? Schumacher himself admits that after three years away, it's taking him time to get back into the swing of things, but that's not something he seemed to need when, with almost no previous experience in an F1 car, he rocked up at Spa one August day in 1991 and stuck a Jordan 191 further up the grid than the car had ever been in the hands of its regular drivers. So do Mercedes hang on in the hope that he'll come good eventually? Or do they start casting about for a younger man who has the hunger to take the fight to Red Bull, Mclaren and Ferrari?

The question though, is, if not Schumacher, then who? About a fortnight ago, Mark Webber's career looked to be hanging by a thread, and he might have jumped at the chance to drive for Mercedes next year. Beaten by his team mate in the opening races, he'd compounded his problems with a series of silly, unforced errors which cost him points in Australia and in China. Then came the strongest week of his racing career; back-to-back victories at Barcelona and at Monaco where he plain outpaced his young superstar team mate and didn't put a foot wrong. Now he's leading the driver's championship and being talked about as a possible replacement for Massa at Ferrari - if they can persuade him to leave. He might make a very good partner for Rosberg at Mercedes, come to that. Surely, though, the man that Mercedes must really want is Webber's team mate, the 'new Schumacher', Sebastian Vettel. Surely anyone with pretences of putting together a 'German superteam' must need the country's rising star, the man who nearly won the World Championship for Red Bull last year, on board? Except why would either Webber or Vettel want to give up a drive in the dominant, Adrian Newey designed Red Bull?

Far more likely to be interested in situations vacant at Mercedes or Ferrari is Renault's Robert Kubica, to my mind, the one really great, first rate racer who is not currently signed to one of the big four teams. with a realistic shot at the World Title over the next couple of years. He's frequently dragged the Renault R30 far further up the field than it really belongs - a 2nd at Australia, a front row grid slot and podium finish at Monaco - and he actually looked disappointed he hadn't won!. All this in a car his team mate Vitaly Petrov has rarely troubled the points with. As in 2008, while obvious title contenders are busy spiking their guns, he looks like he just might lead a sneaky, insurgent campaign for the driver's crown in a car that's far from championship winning material.

Further down the field, there will be others wondering whether a change might do them good, and unlike the big four, they might well not wait until next year before making the switch. Take Sauber: They've been curiously disappointing all year after looking quick in winter testing, only once looking like they might score points (at Barcelona). And surely I can't be alone in wondering whether their driver line-up of Pedro De la Rosa and Kamui Kobayashi isn't part of the problem, whether they've really been getting the most out of the car.

De la Rosa has never struck me as anything more than a good journeyman, a man with enough testing experience perhaps, to be useful to a team struggling to re-group after being sold down the river by former owners, BMW. Kobayashi, on the other hand, has thus far been a crushing disappointment. There's been no sign of the feisty self-confidence and pace he displayed in his two races at the end of the season with Toyota last year. Perhaps last year's Toyota was better than we realised, or maybe he's just not at home with the Sauber, but the precise reasons matter little, the team just can't afford not to get the most of what they have.

Maybe they will be tempted to try to steal away one of a number of solid, talented drivers currently wasting their efforts in machinery that's four or five seconds a lap off the pace at the back at the field. Virgin's Timo Glock and Lotus' Heikki Kovalainen and Jarno Trulli might be putting a brave face on it, and maybe they really believe that in a year or so, their new teams will be snapping at the heels of the likes of Sauber, but I can't help but think one or more of them could be tempted away to try to sort out Sauber.

Failing that, if the team must run an unproven GP2 racer of uncertain pedigree, there might be others at least able to get stickers on the sides of the bare white car. Pastor Maldonado has never struck me as quite the real deal, but he might be worth a shot, especially if he comes with pots of Venezuelan Oil cash. Then there's Sergio Perez, the current GP2 Series leader who, by the by, looked mighty at Monaco in the GP2 feature race last weekend, and who has a long-standing relationship with the Mexican telecoms giant, TelMex. Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I'd be surprised if De la Rosa and Kobayashi both see out the season at Sauber.

Talking of people with reasons to fear for their jobs, watching the action from Monaco last weekend, I got to thinking that if I were Sebastien Buemi or Jaime Alguersuari, I might not be feeling to secure at Toro Rosso right now. It's not that either of them are doing particularly badly with the Toro Rosso this season - they've both looked solid enough, picking up points here and there and not doing anything silly. But neither has done anything to persuade me that they're potential future World Champions. People the Red Bull team proper will be interested in. Whereas, watching Daniel Ricciardo, the latest of a long line of Red Bull junior drivers, dominating the field in the Renault World Series race at the weekend, I had the uncanny feeling I was watching the new Sebastian Vettel doing his stuff... Surely Red Bull are going to want to get him into an F1 car sooner rather than later... Next year, perhaps....

Last Chance Saloon

Ten minutes before Qualifying Three. The track appears to be drying off. You look across the garage to where your team mate's car sits. He's what, 22 years old. He's won three Grands Prix and he's being talked about in some circles as the heir to Michael Schumacher. Silly hyperbole, maybe, but still... No point feeling jealous. That's not going to find you that last tenth of a second.

A thought flashes across your mind. Where were you when you were his age? Stuck in a cul-de-sac marked 'FIA GT Series' wondering if your single seater career was already over. OK, so it was a pleasant enough dead end. The GT series was a bit more of a serious race series back then, and the Mercedes CLK-GT-R was quite some beast, even if the damned thing near enough killed you at Le Mans. But without funding to do F3000, how to make the step to F1?

You got there in the end, notwithstanding ending up with the Arrows test drive just as the team was imploding. Flavio got you a seat at Minardi. Not a car you were ever going to do much with, you thought, but it had been enough for that Spanish teenager to serve notice of his talents the year before. You reckon you did about as much as anyone could have done with that car. You blow away your team mates, Alex Yoong and his temporary replacement Anthony Davidson. But there doesn't seem to be quite the same buzz there had been the previous year when Alonso had demolished Tarso Marques.

No matter, you've done enough to persuade the guys at Jaguar to take you on alongside the hotly tipped Brazilian, Antonio Pizzonia. Beating him? That should count for something, and Jaguar? They might be a royal shambles, so much so you were mixing it with them at Minardi on occasion last year, but they're a proper works team with the backing of the Ford Motor Company. There's potential, right?

Pizzonia proves no trouble. So much so that the team ditch him half way through the season and hire the guy you went up against in F3000 the year before last in his place. Justin Wilson's no more able to match your pace than Pizzonia was and he's out on his ear by the end of the season, replaced by some Austrian F3 hotshoe with a bag of Red Bull cash behind him.

Ah, Wilson... A reminder that it could always be worse. Five races in a halfway decent race car and that was it - his F1 career over. Went off to ply his trade in the backwater that is American single seater racing. You glance at the weather satellite picture. Looks like the top ten run-off's going to be dry. On balance, a good thing. You've no fear of a wet track, but today of all days you could do without the confounding elements.

Jaguar never got their act together, and the team was sold off at the end of the year. You jumped ship to join Frank Williams' squad. Frank and Patrick were your kind of people, no-nonsense racers, with none of the corporate bullshit that was constantly going on behind the scenes at Jaguar. Your fourth season in the sport, this should have been the moment it all started to come good. They might have had a rough time of it the previous season, but they had been title contenders the year before that, and Montoya had come good and won the last race of the season. This was the break you had been waiting for....Right?

Wrong. All told, the 2005 car was a bit of a dog. It just didn't have enough downforce to be competitive, and to make matters worse, their relationship with engine supplier, BMW was on the rocks. At the end of the year, they offered you a seat at their new joint venture with Sauber, but you opt to stay with Frank's team. A mistake? Maybe, but, you think, remembering how Heidfeld and Kubica have gone this weekend, maybe not.

The 06 Williams starts out fast but unreliable. Your new team mate, GP2 champion Nico Rosberg, grabs the headlines with fastest lap in the opening race, and goes and sticks the car on the second row next time out in Malaysia. You're left wondering if your own efforts are going unnoticed. Does anyone remember that, for the rest of the season, the new boy almost never even gets close to you? Or that you had a serious shot at victory in Monaco before the car broke, as it kept doing that year? When Frank decided he wanted to cut your pay to take up your option in 2007, you opted to move back to your old home, Jaguar, or Red Bull as it had become in the interim.

Once again, your new team mate, for all that he was once a title contender and has 13 Grand Prix victories you his name, proves to be no trouble. Over two years you out-qualify him 31-4, even if the vagaries of life in the midfield mean that he contrives to score more points than you. But still, there's the nagging, insistent thought that your career is slipping away from you. You're no longer the coming man. Raikkonen and Alonso, who entered the sport around the same time as you, are World Champions now. You haven't even won a race. Already, the spotlight has moved on to a new generation - Robert Kubica, Lewis Hamilton, these guys are nearly ten years your junior. You're in your thirties now. You've only got so many years ahead of you in F1. And for all that Red Bull look a serious team, for all that they have Adrian Newey heading up the design team, they haven't looked like winning a race. Then you go and break your leg - on a bicycle, of all things.

Lying in your hospital bed, you hear word from testing that the new RB5 just might be the car you've been looking for all your career. That at last the boys have produced a race winner. It's flying in new team mate Vettel's hands, but you're hobbling about on crutches, hoping against hope you'll be ready for Melbourne. You'd never paid too much attention to all this crap in the press about your luck, but now you begin to wonder....

You make the start of the season, but you know that you're not 100% fit. You don't let on that you're still struggling. In battle, show no weakness. But you wonder whether Vettel would prove so much trouble if you didn't have a bunch of metal in your leg. The podiums come, and you're lying fourth in the title race, but Vettel's winning races. You really need to win a Grand Prix if you aren't to end up Vettel's de facto Number 2.

This weekend, though. It's really now or never for you. Win the German Grand Prix. Or spend the rest of the year, hell maybe the rest of your career, as understudy to the wunderkind in the garage across from you. Pressure? Maybe, but with Q3 fast approaching, you feel energised, you feel this could be, will be your race. The energy of youth merging with the last-chance urgency of approaching old age. You've been quick here all weekend, the track's too cold for the Brawns, young Vettel appears a touch nervous about being the man of the moment, in front of his home crowd, expectations weighing heavy on his shoulders. It's there for the taking, you think. You flick down your visor. The mechanics fire the Renault V8 into life. Go out there and make it count...

Tortoises and Hares

Four races in and we're starting to get a picture of where the balance of power lies in this year's Formula 1 championship. After several seasons in which various combinations of Ferrari, Mclaren and Renault have fought it out for the title, this year, it seems at the moment that two teams which had never won a race going into the season are in the strongest position right now.

Brawn GP were quickest out of the blocks at the end of March and Jenson Button has won three of the first four races. However, after looking unassailable at the opening race, perhaps 3 quarters of a second a lap quicker than anyone else, their margin of superiority looked much reduced in Bahrain last weekend. Toyota, benefiting from a decision to run the cars relatively light in qualifying, and from Jarno Trulli's superlative single-lap speed, locked out the front row, but in terms of fuel-corrected pace, it was probably Sebastian Vettel's Red Bull which was fastest in qualifying. Had he not got stuck behind Lewis Hamilton's Mclaren early on, which subsequently left him boxed up behind Jarno Trulli's Toyota while it lost time on the harder compound tyres during their second stints, he might well have been able to take the fight to Button. Certainly, Brawn no longer appear to have the kind of advantage that enabled Button to run away from the field at Albert Park and it seems that Red Bull and, to a lesser extent, Toyota, are leading the charge.

It seems that already at both Red Bull and Brawn, a kind of unofficial Number 1 driver appears to have emerged. Rubens Barrichello generally looked quicker than Button at Honda last year, but has been unable to match him in the opening races of this season. As has long seemed the case, in a bad car, like last year's Honda or the 2001 Renault, Button is usually outclassed by his team mate, but in a good car, he's hard to beat. Whether this is down to a lazy streak in his nature, as Flavio Briatore seemed to hint back in his Renault days, or whether it is simply that his smooth, unfussy style gets the best out of a good car, while leaving him floundering with a poorly-sorted car that requires a more improvisational approach, is hard to say. He's certainly getting the best out of Ross Brawn's latest creation though.

Over at Red Bull, it has been the young Vettel who has led the team's charge. His advantage over Webber in terms of pure pace is small, if he has one at all (he has generally looked a mite quicker in qualifying) but Webber's year has been beset by small misfortunes. The first-lap collision with Kovalainen which left his car compromised for the afternoon, the race stoppage just as things were beginning to turn his way in Malaysia and the contre-temps with Adrian Sutil in qualifying at Bahrain which left him with an impossible task on Sunday. I'm not sure that Vettel is really any quicker, but his win at Shanghai and strong second place in Bahrain (he would have had a podium in Australia had he not collided with Kubica too) mean he's the man with the momentum behind him, and will surely be getting priority for any new parts and first call on strategy and fuel loads. Mark Webber's bid to be the 21st Century's Chris Amon continues unabated...

So will it be a straight fight between Vettel and Button for the World Title in 2009? I doubt it. Behind the battle between the Virgin emblazoned Brawn of Jenson Button and 'Kate's Dirty Sister' (I can't help feeling there's a good one liner in there somewhere) Toyota have been looking very racy. The Japanese team have been around for the best part of a decade, sometimes near the front of the midfield, sometimes nearer the back, but rarely really threatening the front-runners. In the opening races of this year, though, it looks as if they might have turned the corner. Had they got their strategy right in Bahrain, rather than running the slower hard compound tyres in the middle stint, handing Button track position, they might well have taken their first win.

Over the season as a whole, they might be a better bet than Red Bull or Brawn, too. Those first two teams are private, customer-engined teams and while they appear well-funded, they don't have the kind of financial resources that the world's biggest car maker can bring to bear if it chooses. In past seasons, Toyota haven't been quite close enough to the front for that to make any difference, and the front runners, particularly Ferrari and Mclaren, have had equally great resources. 2009, though, just might represent the team's best chance for the team to achieve some kind of return on the massive investment they've made - though they're going to have to be sharper than they were in the race at Bahrain.

So, will the 2009 season be a battle in which the leaner and more nimble Brawn and Red Bull teams have come off the blocks quickly and will fight a rear-guard action against the perhaps more cumbersomely run but ultimately richer and better-resourced Toyota squad? Maybe, but maybe not. The real big guns, Mclaren and Ferrari, have both started the year in disarray. The Mclaren was initially hopeless, utterly lacking in downforce and over a second off the pace. Lewis Hamilton came within an ace of a lucky podium in the opening race all the same, but threw it away by being economical with the truth to the stewards (and I don't care if he was under instructions from Dave Ryan or anyone else in the team - he had the option of simply telling the truth. A week later, this was followed by the firing of Ryan, the resignation of Dennis and rumours that there had been a rift between Hamilton (or his father) and the team. Then came the summons to the FIA World Council meeting today, just in case the team weren't unsettled enough.

It was noticeable that in Shanghai, Mclaren as a team and Hamilton in particular seemed a little out of sorts. He threw the car off the road on more than one occasion and for the first time that I can recall, ended up beaten by his team mate in a straight fight. A week later, both Hamilton and Mclaren bounced back in Bahrain, mixing it with the Toyotas and Red Bulls, his deficit to the front-runners seemingly down to about 3 tenths of a second. If the team can make up that much time that quickly, then one has to wonder how long it will be before they catch, and pass, the three teams at the front.

Ferrari's start to the season might have been less chaotic and unsettled than Mclaren's, but they have been struggling with an unusual problem with their new F60 - unreliability. Mechanical problems eliminated both cars in the first race, Raikkonen in Malaysia and Massa in China. This from a team which in the Schumacher era seemed all but immune to car failures. On top of that, the car has hardly been scintillatingly fast. They've usually been floating around the edges of the top 10, which is hardly what Maranello has come to expect.

Some might wonder whether this is a sign that Ferrari is reverting back to type in the post-Schumacher, Todt and Brawn era. I'd caution against such an interpretation, though. Like Mclaren, they may be suffering from having thrown everything at trying to clinch the 2008 title while others were working on their 2009 cars, and I think that as the season goes on, Mclaren and Ferrari will make up considerable ground,

Enough to put them in contention for the title? Maybe. As with Renault and BMW Sauber, who have also struggled unexpectedly, they are running KERS. Perhaps KERS has turned out to be a blind alley, but it is equally possible that teams simply haven't quite got to grips with it yet and that as the season wears on, those who have been using KERS from the beginning will see things come their way. If nothing else, it already offers a significant advantage away from the line, often enabling drivers to snatch two or three places from non-KERS cars in front. And in spite of moves to improve overtaking opportunities, track position still counts for a lot in modern F1, as we saw all too clearly last weekend.

Quite possibly, the pattern for the year as a whole is one of Brawn coming out of the box very quickly, with Red Bull and Toyota chasing them down over the following races, and with Ferrari and Mclaren - the slow starters - chasing Toyota and Red Bull in turn. Assuming, of course, that BMW and Renault remain stuck in the midfield, which I wouldn't necessarily take as read. It's like a post-modern version of Aesop's fable about the tortoise and the hare. Except that in F1, track position counts for a lot, and given the choice, I'd take a 30 point championship lead and a well-sorted car over a superior engineering base or more money for development parts. It's advantage Button, but there's still much to play for.

Brawn Spring a Surprise

The grid that confronted us in Melbourne wasn't quite the surprise that the qualifying order for the opening race of the 1990 season in Phoenix had been. Nothing quite so downright bizarre as an Osella in the top 10, or Andrea De Cesaris' Dallara ahead of Senna's Mclaren, both Ferraris and both Williams.

Still, a month ago, you'd have got very long odds on the remnants of the old Honda team locking out the front row. In fact, many, myself included, were far from convinced that the team would even be on the grid, and the bookies were offering 100/1 on Jenson Button winning the opening race.

The odds didn't really shorten much when it emerged that Nick Fry and Ross Brawn had brokered a deal to put the stillborn Honda on the grid as a Brawn, with Mercedes supplying the engines. A car with next to no testing, hastily adapted to take a different engine from the one it was designed for, built by the guys responsible for the awful RA107 and RA108? It sounded like it would be making up the numbers and no more.

The picture began to change when the new car started topping the times in winter testing, but still there was a nagging doubt - Was the pace real or were the team running the car underweight to set headline grabbing times in the hope of attracting sponsors? As time went on, the doubters began to change their minds - Alonso talked of the Brawns being the favourites for victory, and ahead of last weekend, the bookies had had a radical change of heart and installed Button as favourite to win.

Qualifying in Melbourne gave us a definitive answer. Sebastien Vettel, in third, was six tenths away from Jenson Button's pole time, despite being fueled lighter. The Brawn appears to have at least half a second on its rivals at the moment, at least around Albert Park. On race day, they brought the cars home one-two, so completing the most remarkable turnaround I can remember seeing in the sport. The word miracle seems inappropriate - there are no miracles in the real world and Brawn's success was down to a lot of hard work from some very clever people in difficult circumstances. Still, it makes for quite a story.

I do wonder, though, whether their very success might make life more difficult for them later on. The sport's financial structure and deal-making remains as opaque as ever, but it appears that Brawn are on the grid only thanks to the FIA, FOM and FOTA having all put aside any differences to make sure that they got there. The FIA agreed to waive the $30m bond required of new teams, FOTA and FOM are thought to have agreed to treat Brawn as being entitled to Honda's share of the prize money and Mclaren waived their right to veto a supply of Mercedes engine for the Brackley team.

They might have been happy to do this when it was assumed that they were ensuring the survival of a team that would struggle at the back of the grid, not giving a helping hand to a team that had stolen a march on all of them in terms of understanding the new regulations and built a car which, at least for now, seems to have every bit as great an advantage over its rivals as Ferrari's F2004 did. And of course, after Robert Kubica and Sebastien Vettel did for each other's weekends and Jarno Trulli picked up a 25 second penalty for passing under the safety car, it was only the two Brawn cars that stood between Lewis Hamilton and a shock victory from the back of the grid! I do wonder, too, how Brawn's success is going down at Mercedes. Sure, the Brawns have the German car-maker's engines in the back, but you'd have to be a fan to know it - there's no Mercedes logos on the cars, and the casual viewer might have had no idea that their engines were actually in the back of all of the podium-finishers' cars.

Can Brawn get by without moral support from FOTA and Mclaren? Perhaps, after all, the deals are done now, but there is still the problem of money. The team are getting by for now with a dowry from Honda, but the Japanese car giant's support was almost certainly a one-time payment, and running a racing team is an expensive business. The more so if the team want to match the likes of Ferrari and Mclaren in the race to develop their 2009 car. The victory in Australia will be bittersweet for the 250-odd employees at Brackley who look set to lose their jobs. Can the team shed a third of its workforce without adversely affecting their performance? Only time will tell.

Fundamentally, the problem the team face is that in these straitened economic times, it may be hard to attract significant backers even to a team which is out in front and winning races. Maybe I'm being cynical, but I can't help but wonder whether Richard Branson didn't pull of a tremendous publicity coup for his Virgin brand without actually signing any cheques last weekend. Certainly if a major deal had been signed, it was a little odd that the team were sporting only a few small Virgin decals as they set about dominating the weekend's sports pages.

Perhaps the team's best hope is that, if the new, supposedly cheaper F1 is more than a mere mirage, the idea of picking up a well-run team with a car might just appeal to one of the car manufacturers not currently involved in the sport. One of the Korean car makers might be tempted by the opportunity to raise their profile worldwide, and perhaps Volkswagen-Audi Group might finally tire of toying around with diesel sportscars and join the party. They'd have a lot of work to do - Mercedes is unlikely to provide engines to them - but on the other hand, Cosworth have a pretty effective 2.4l V8 sitting around gathering dust, that they could probably be persuaded to sell for the right money.

The trouble is, for all that it might make a lot of sense, especially compared with the way some car-makers have gone motor-racing, it still looks unlikely given that the motor industry has been amongst the hardest hit by the current global recession. Discretionary spend, of any kind, is unlikely to be on the agenda when the fundamental problem facing car makers is the disappearance of the market for their primary product. Maybe, after all, Brawn's best bet is to "do a Williams" and try to run the team according to the conventional business model of selling sponsorship as was once the way almost all F1 teams operated, before the appearance of the car giants, billionaire soft drinks magnates and India's richest businessman changed the rules of the game.

I'd like to believe that if the results come, then one way or another, the team will survive. If a team can win races but still not raise the money needed to survive then something really is wrong with the sport. Can they go on winning races? If you believe what some are saying, much will depend on the outcome of the appeal against the Brawn's diffuser which Renault's Pat Symonds reckons is worth half a second a lap. For all that I'm sure they'll want to win their case on 14 April, it might not be the end of the world if they do lose the appeal though. For one thing, even if it is worth half a second a lap, the scale of the Brawn's advantage at Melbourne suggests they will still be amongst the front-runners. Secondly, I'm not entirely convinced by Symonds' claim anyway. Brawn's closest challenges last weekend were not the other members of the so called 'diffuser gang', Toyota and Williams (though both teams ran well) but the more conventional Red Bull and BMW.

No, I reckon what might swing it one way or the other for Brawn is the question of whether KERS will turn out to be an expensive dead end, or whether once teams have gotten to grips with it, it will turn out to be every bit as essential for anyone running at the front as semi-automatic gearboxes, active suspension or traction control was when first perfected. So far, the evidence is mixed. Only one team ran their cars in both KERS and non-KERS spec, and it was Kubica's KERS-free BMW which went quicker. But on the other hand, Kubica was quicker than Heidfeld last year too. In fact, the two men giving Button pause for thought last weekend were running cars with no KERS and conventional diffusers. It was noticeable though that those drivers running KERS, and in particular Lewis Hamilton, appeared to have an easier time overtaking people than the rest of the field around Albert Park, and Ferrari might have been up there too had they not dropped the ball in terms of strategy and then encountered reliability woes.

If KERS turns out to offer no advantages, at least when configured to the current rules, then I wouldn't be surprised if Brawn are able to remain among the front-runners all year. If, on the other hand, it turns out to offer a significant advantage, the team are likely to be in trouble. For reasons best known to themselves, Honda didn't leave their KERS system with the team when they pulled out of the sport and Ross Brawn say they are very unlikely to run the system in the car this year.

Ross Brawn has already achieved something any life-long racing afficionado would surely dream of - scoring a one-two in his first race as a team owner with a car bearing his own name. Whether his team can mount a tilt for the world title, and whether they can ensure their long-term survival remains to be seen, but the fact they've got this far surely augurs well.

Rivals

How much to read into testing times? Truth be told, it's probably not wise to make too many assumptions on the basis of fastest laps alone. Remember when, through the winter, the 2005 Honda looked like it was a couple of seconds a lap quicker round Barcelona than anything else? Or when the 2001 Prost was topping the time sheets after an abysmal 2000? In neither case did this turn out to be a reliable guide to what would happen come the season proper. Quite why Honda was so quick in the early months of 2005 I've never been sure, while in 2001, Prost were probably running their car underweight to attract sponsors.

Nonetheless, there's something tantalising and intriguing about the fact that Sebastien Vettel's Red Bull has lapped Jerez nearly a second quicker than anyone else (Hamilton's time can safely be ignored, as it was set using a 2008-spec rear wing). The chances are it was only a single particularly well hooked-up qualifying lap when track conditions happened to be just right. Word has it that it is actually Ferrari and Renault who are quickest right now, with Williams, BMW, Red Bull and Toyota clustered together and snapping at their heels. A big question mark remains over where Mclaren fit into this picture. The fact that they had not until recently been able to run their 2009 rear wing leaves open the question of whether there are fundamental problems with their 2009 car, or whether, as with the early problems with the Renault, too much is being made of too little.

All that said, the radical changes to the F1 rulebook have the potential to rewrite the form book to a degree not seen in recent years. No longer are teams chasing incremental performance gains on well-tested concepts. They are, in a sense, starting from scratch. For all that the technical rules are far more restrictive than was once the case, it is probably still just about possible to find that 'unfair advantage'. The introduction of KERS, in particular, just might allow one team to make a leap which results in a car substantially quicker than anyone else's. I hope this doesn't happen because F1 seasons in which only two cars stand any realistic chance of winning races don't tend to be very interesting. Think 1992, 2002, or 2004.

That said, though, it does depend to some extent on which team finds that unfair advantage. The 1988 F1 season remains to my mind one of the classics because, although there were only two cars in the field with any realistic chance of winning races, they were being driven by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost - and Ron Dennis was happy to let them race. In a reversal of the situation in recent years, I'd rather it were Ferrari than Mclaren or Renault. In the Schumacher era, a dominant Ferrari meant the race was a foregone conclusion. It is not entirely clear that Barrichello or Massa were often allowed to race the German, but even if they were, neither was capable of beating him on a regular basis. These days, though, the team have no clear number one and provided that management don't impose one, a battle between Massa and Raikkonen would be most intriguing. By contrast, I can't see Kovalainen putting up a serious fight against Hamilton over a whole season, and as for the idea of Piquet Jr. giving Alonso anything to worry about....

Vettel's testing times got me thinking though.... If one team turns out to be head-and-shoulders above the rest this year, wouldn't it be interesting if it were Red Bull? They've certainly produced one of the prettiest cars on the grid this year (it's a relative thing, they've all got stupidly proportioned wings, but you can't pin the blame on Adrian Newey for that...) but is it just possible that they've also produced the quickest?

Who knows, probably it's nothing more than an idle daydream. But if they have, the battle between F1's long-time nearly man Mark Webber and Grand Prix racing's new golden boy Sebastien Vettel could be as fascinating as the battle which ensued when Fernando Alonso went off to Mclaren as a double champion and suddenly found himself having to work very hard indeed to deal with his rookie team mate Lewis Hamilton.

Mark Webber is perhaps the single great unknown quantity in the sport. He's going into his eighth season now, and still I don't think we know for sure quite how good he is. We know he's quick, but there have been odd hints that he's more than merely quick. That he's one of the sport's true greats - a man who could go mano a mano with Kubica, Hamilton, Alonso or Raikkonen if he only had the equipment worthy of his talents.

After all, he put a Jaguar on the front row at Malaysia in 2003, and this in the days before teams had the option of playing with fuel loads and going for Saturday afternoon glory. At Monaco, in 2006, he looked like for a while like a serious challenger for victory in a Williams Cosworth before the engine let go. Over the last two years, he's outqualified his former title-contending team mate David Coulthard 31-4 at Red Bull. And the Japanese Grand Prix at Fuji in 2007 might be best remembered for Hamilton's great drive in the wet, but Mark Webber was actually catching him in second before he was punted off the road by... Sebastien Vettel.

For all that, it remains open to question whether Webber is really in quite the same class as, say, Hamilton, Alonso or Kubica. Way back when Renault tested both Alonso and Webber, Pat Symonds reckoned that the Spaniard was the quicker driver. His first year at Williams, was rather disappointing too. Yes, the Grove team's relationship with BMW was on the rocks by then, but he didn't really appear to be any quicker than Nick Heidfeld that year. And Heidfeld may be a solid, professional racer, but after 9 seasons in the sport, I've not seen anything to suggest he's from the very top drawer. Added to that is the question of whether the broken leg he sustained in a cycling accident over the winter might have a more lasting impact. It has often been said that no racing driver is ever quite the same after sustaining a serious leg injury, although it didn't seem to stop Michael Schumacher winning five titles after his leg-breaking crash at Silverstone in 1999.

Up against him is the sport's youngest ever winner, Sebastien Vettel. A man whose career has, in some ways, been the very opposite of Webber's. Where Webber has had to fight hard for every opportunity - not usually getting the best cars in his junior formula days, and not making it to Formula One until he was 25, Vettel's path was eased by backing from both Red Bull and BMW, and he made his F1 debut at the age of just 19, standing in for the injured Kubica at Indianapolis. He did a sensible job, came home 8th and in so doing became the youngest man ever to score an F1 point. A tug of love between BMW and Red Bull was resolved in the latter's favour and by the time of the Hungarian Grand Prix, he was a full-time F1 driver for Toro Rosso.

In the second half of 2008, the Toro Rosso proved to be a rather effective weapon, embarrassing the 'works' Red Bull squad, and when the big boys screwed up in the rain in Monza, Vettel seized the opportunity he was presented with both hands and became the youngest Grand Prix winner in the sport's history. It might have relied a little on luck, but Vettel was consistently there or thereabouts in the latter part of the season - only once finishing out of the points in the last seven races.

But how special is he? On the one hand, Toro Rosso is built around the shell of the old Minardi team - and in that light, his haul of one win, one pole and 35 points looks very impressive indeed. But another way of looking at it is that he had, at his disposal, a Ferrari-powered, Adrian Newey designed car, engineered by the hugely experienced Giorgio Ascanelli. Put that way, the Toro Rosso sounds like an impressive package indeed. Sure, he scored an awful lot more points than his team mate Bourdais, but the midfield pack was so tightly bunched last year, that this did not always equate to a significant difference in pace between the two - especially in race conditions. It is worth remembering that, at Monza, Bourdais, after being delayed at the start, was lapping just as quickly as Vettel in the rain.

Both Vettel and Webber have their reputations on the line this year. Each really has to be quicker than the other, or at least as quick as the other. Vettel need to blow away Webber to maintain his status as the sport's coming man, while Webber needs to get the better of his young new team mate if he's not to become yesterday's man before he was ever really today's. Regardless of how competitive this year's Red Bull is, it's going to be an intriguing rivalry between two seemingly apolitical, straightforward men which much at stake. But if Adrian Newey, Geoff Willis and co. have found something special, then it just might turn out to be one of the most fascinating battles the sport has seen. Roll on Australia.

David Coulthard's Final Hurrah...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Mad World

The other day, I was perusing the logs for Motorsports Ramblings when something caught my eye. Someone had been led to this site after entering the search term "What would happen to the plants in the world if it rained Red Bull?" I'm afraid that's a question I am not in any position to answer. If he or she wanted to know what happens to Red Bulls when it rains, on the other hand, the answer is that the improve dramatically. And it doesn't seem to hurt them when they're called Toro Rossos either. I've heard it said that there are no stupid questions, but I must confess I have my doubts.

Still, that was not the only moment of madness I encountered this week. I read on Monday at Grandprix that the Malaysian Government is involved in efforts to secure an F1 ride for Fairuz Fauzy. This would be the Fairuz Fauzy who looked utterly lost in GP2 in his two seasons in the category, and who blended into the midfield in the Renault World Series this year. Why on earth the Malaysian Government could possibly think that the country has anything to gain from placing the hapless Fauzy in Formula 1 I do not know. Fauzy was talked of as Malaysia's most promising young driver back in his British F3 days, but nothing he has done since suggests he would belong on the F1 grid. I can't help feeling that he would probably be even more out of his depth than Alex Yoong, who usually outpaced him when they drove together in A1GP. I can only surmise that he is being considered as a possible Number 2 driver at Spyker, or Force India, or whatever they are called this week. I can't help feeling that even they, however, figure that they can probably do better than Fauzy in what would appear to be something of a seller's market.

If that wasn't strange enough, the report that Roldan Rodriguez has backers prepared to put up nearly £8m to get him into F1 defies rational explanation. Rodriguez, who was probably previously best known for driving into Timo Glock on the warming up lap for the Belgian round of the GP2 series this year has done absolutely nothing to stand out until now, finishing 17th in the year's GP2 championship and being outpaced by previously unfancied scion of the Medley pharmaceuticals corporation, Xandi Negrao. Who thinks Rodriguez's potential represents a worthwhile investment at £8m, and why, is frankly beyond me. Still, the man has a testing contract with Force India, and therefore cannot be ruled out as a potential candidate for the drive next year. His pedigree is probably a good deal more promising than a number of the clowns who have had drives for tail-end teams in the past.

It wasn't all nonsense this week. I was pleased to see Andy Priaulx take his fourth consecutive FIA Touring Car title at Macau on Sunday, despite a rulebook which had seemingly been designed to guarantee we got a different winner this year. Priaulx, unlike many of his rivals, rarely, if ever, engages in dubious on-track moves, and suffered more than his fair share of bad luck. On top of this, the penalty given to rear wheel drive cars in the latter part of the season was such that it shouldn't have been possible for a BMW driver to walk away with the title. That he did is testimony to the Guernseyman's considerable ability behind the wheel of a tintop. As the only man to score a win with Honda's problematic Civic Type-R touring car, he excelled in the category pretty much from the moment he switched over from F3. One wonders whether he might now be winning F1 races had he not been older than most of the current F1 grid by the time he got himself into a decent F3 car.

The F3 race wasn't a classic, but in Oliver Jarvis, it had a very worthy winner. Jarvis was the man who won races for Carlin with a Mugen engine in F3 at a time when it was assumed that a HWA Mercedes was a basic requirement for success. In A1GP, he broke the GB team's duck after Robbie Kerr had spent nearly two years trying, and he has subsequently shined in Japanese F3, where he is currently marooned on account of not having the money to go racing in GP2. Marko Asmer's fine showing, qualifying second and setting fastest lap in the bargain - before eventually finishing 4th when a down on power engine left him struggling on the long main straight - showed that the British F3 champion remains a force to be reckoned with. If Force India were prepared to take a bit of a chance, and wasn't relying on a driver armed with pots of cash, it might do well to take a chance on either of these promising youngsters over such questionable prospects as Rodriguez and Fauzy.

Water, Water, Everywhere

Those with a long memory would have known that there was always a good chance that the first race at the heavily revised Fuji Speedway was going to be very, very wet. Back in 1976, the first Japanese Grand Prix had been held in atrocious conditions, which, notoriously, were so bad that title contender Niki Lauda abandoned his car after just a few laps because he thought it too dangerous to continue. A few years later, a round of the World Sportscar Championship went ahead on a track so wet that the big international teams all packed up and refused to race. The local boys, being perhaps more used to the vagaries of the Japanese weather, had the day to themselves.

The 1976 race was a championship decider. This time round, it was not mathematically possible that the title could be settled in the shadow of Mount Fuji, but the result leaves Messrs Alonso and Raikkonen with only little more than a mathematical chance of coming away with the driver's crown. Neither man can really win the world championship, with Hamilton requiring only a pair of 4th places, but Lewis could still lose it, especially if it were to rain in Shanghai and this time it was his Mclaren that went off the road.

Certainly, if he does win the world title, the Japanese Grand Prix will be a pretty fine illustration of why he deserved it. In atrocious conditions, he put in a drive of control and accomplishment while his double world champion team mate went into the wall trying to keep up. As for Ferrari... the tyre fiasco was frankly the perfect illustration of where they have gone wrong this year. The car looked to have the pace, and Raikkonen and Massa both put in solid, aggresive drives in difficult circumstances...but what on earth were they doing starting on Inters? Leaving aside the fact that, had they read their email, they would have known they could not start on those tyres, the rubber was plainly not up to the job anyway. Judging by their performances under the safety car (a spin apiece), they would have ended up going straight off the road had they still been on inters when they began racing. A fantastic opportunity was thrown away by poor team management. How they must be hoping Ross Brawn will elect to return...

Behind all this, or, as often as not, in front, the race provided a rare opportunity for those whose talent exceeds the performance of their car to show what they could do (or, just possibly, to show how good the RB3 is in the wet...). The super-smooth Jenson Button used his famouly delicate inputs to claim a fine 6th spot on the grid in a Honda that frankly has no business being there. Had he not lost his nose early in the race, who knows what he might have achieved.

If Button was disappointed, Mark Webber must have been absolutely livid. The perennially luckless Aussie had his Red Bull in second place and appeared to have the pace to give Hamilton something to think about when rookie Sebastien Vettel ran into him and eliminated them both from proceedings....under a safety car. Vettel was distraught and could be seen crying, head in his hands, after climbing out of his wrecked Toro Rosso. Webber, who was sick into his helmet in the early laps and really not well enough to race, must have felt even more violently ill by the end of the day.

Let's not forget, though, that until that moment, Vettel's own performance was remarkable in its own right. His run to third place (he had led briefly) certainly didn't look like the work of a 20 year old with just six starts to his name in a tail end car. As someone who, up to now, had wondered quite what either Red Bull or BMW saw in Vettel, I feel I got an answer on Sunday. In years to come, we may remember his Fuji performance as his 'Senna in the wet in a Toleman' moment, rather than for the tragic error which brought it to an end.

The odds on rain in Valencia, where the GP2 series was being decided, must have been rather longer. Nonetheless, that's what they got. I've said before that it would be a travesty if the uninspiring Lucas Di Grassi beat Timo Glock to the title, and I must confess that when I realised the conditions were to be a wet/dry lottery of a race, I wondered if this might be precisely what would happen.

As it is, it was Di Grassi who lost out. Stuck on the wrong tyres at the beginning (as was Glock) he was caught out when he emerged on slick tyres and skated off into retirement in the turn 2 gravel trap. One might call it bad fortune, but in a season where Glock had been plagued with poor luck, it seemed only reasonable.

Timo sealed the title with a win in the Sunday sprint race - his fifth of the season. Had it not been for myriad misfortunes, he might have won twice as many. The big surprise ofthe weekend, though, was that Vitaly Petrov won the feature race - and from the front, outpacing his more experienced team mate in the process. I have to confess I would never have fingered him as a race winner at the beginning of the season. After all, there have been an awful lot of wealthy, but fundamentally pretty useless Russian kids in single seater racing over the last few years (see Victor Maslov, Sergei Zlobin and anyone who ever had anything to do with the Russian A1GP team) and I assumed Petrov was simply the latest of these. You don't win a race on a damp track on slick tyres without being pretty handy though, and Petrov has laid down a marker that he may be a man to watch if he comes back for another season next year. With Mikhail Aleshin showing some form in the Renault World Series, we could at last be seeing something of a breakthrough for the backwater that is Russian motorsport.

If nothing else, the weekend gone has shown that you don't need overtaking working groups, reverse grids, ballast systems, push-to-pass buttons or any of the rest of that nonsense to make single seater racing exciting to watch. You just need a wet track. Now, Bernie.... Howabout scrapping this night race lark in Singapore and demanding that they install some trackside sprinklers instead?