The Best of 2007

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

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

Timo Glock

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

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

Luca Filippi

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

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

Sebastien Bourdais

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

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

Robert Doornbos

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

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

Romain Grosjean

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

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

Nico Hulkenberg

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

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

Alvaro Parente

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

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

Marko Asmer

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

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

Dario Franchitti

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

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

Marcus Ericsson

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

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

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?

Trusting to luck

Its a cliche often repeated that "bad luck tends to balance out over the season". Its true as often as not. A driver may emphasise a misfortune in explaining away his failure to win a title, but all too frequently, the rival who beat him to the championship will have suffered an identical misfortune at another race. One might point to Michael Schumacher's engine failure in Japan last year, but that would be to forget Fernando Alonso's equally costly wheel nut disaster in Hungary. When a championship is particularly finely balanced, as is the case this year, it is possible for luck to play a decisive part in determining the winner. Usually, however, luck evens out, and other, more decisive factors come into play.

It isn't always so. The law of averages dictates that from time to time, someone is going to end up being repeatedly, and persistently unlucky. You don't have to give credence to voodoo, or witchcraft, or the idea that some people are just "born unlucky". Its just a logical consequence of the idea that misfortune is randomly distributed. Most people will suffer an average amount of bad luck, but a small minority will, by sheer chance, suffer a very high number of such "unlucky events". We see it from time to time in Formula 1. Remember when, in the early 1990s always seemed to be Johnny Herbert's Lotus that ended up broken by the side of the road? Or think about the sheer number of times that plain misfortune kept Chris Amon from winning a Grand Prix. Come to that, but for luck, might Kimi Raikkonen have been a double world champion by now? (I'm thinking 2003 and 2005, in case you're wondering).

Clive and Alianora have been having an interesting conversation about the GP2 series over at F1 Insight. I agree with much of what they say. Certainly, the category dies not seem to be producing a driver of the calibre of Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg or Heikki Kovalainen this year. What strikes me most, though, is that the championship appears to be developing into a fight between a very good racer who has had more than his share of bad luck, and a rather mediocre driver who has consistently had the cards fall in his favour.

Lets deal with Lucas Di Grassi first. The Brazilian comes with a rather uncertain pedigree. He arrived in GP2 last year with Durango having taken third in the Formula 3 Euroseries in 2005. Durango were thought of as one of the series' weakest teams, and Di Grassi's smattering of points finishes looked respectable enough and was certainly more than his team mate managed. A deal with ART for 2007 was therefore something of a make-or-break moment for the young Brazilian.

To my mind, its been a matter of his having been broken rather than made. ART have been the team to be with for the past two years. There's no doubt that their driver line-up hasn't exactly hindered them. Rosberg, Premat and Hamilton were all seriously quick drivers. Nonetheless, I think its reasonable to assume that if you can't win with ART, you probably can't win at all.

The problem is, Di Grassi hasn't been winning. His victory at Turkey last weekend was his first all season. Given he's a second year driver with one of the top teams, and given that the GP2 series has seen no less than 10 different winners, that doesn't exactly suggest he's been doing an outstanding job this season.

Nonetheless, that win was enough to haul him, briefly, to the top of the points standings. Why? Unlike almost all of his rivals, he's not been unfortunate enough to get caught up in silly accidents, and he's had impeccable reliability from his car while others have struggled with persistent gearbox woes (seemingly the fault of suppliers Mecachrome, rather than the teams themselves, for the most part). The end result is that he has been able to gather points by stealth, to the point where he is now the only realistic challenger to Glock in the battle to be GP2 champion. Of course, to a degree, the old saw is true, and you really do make your own luck. Di Grassi may not have been especially quick, but he has made few mistakes, at least until the sprint race on Sunday saw him hit Pantano, pick up a drive-through penalty and finish outside the points for the first time since the opening round in Bahrain.

In the end, though Di Grassi's position owes an awful lot to the fact that he has retired from just one race, while Glock has failed to finish on 5 occasions. The bare statistics indicate that Glock has won 3 of this year's 15 races. That figure really ought to be higher. Glock picked up steering damage at the opening corner of the opening race in Bahrain, and claims that only this prevented him taking the fight to Luca Filippi there. His performance in Barcelona suggests this might well have been more than mere bravado. The only front-running driver not to pit under the safety car in the opening laps of the feature race, he was left having to find 30+ seconds over his rivals. Despite this, he clawed his way back to beat all except Bruno Senna. He then promptly won the sprint race from 7th on the grid - just to ram the point home. Qualifying in Monaco didn't go quite to plan, but a steady, consistent drive brought a podium finish.

Then his season began to fall apart. Pole at Magny Cours came to nothing when his race ended in a silly startline collision with fellow front-row man and team mate, Andy Zuber. Neither were entirely blameless, but in my eyes, it was Zuber who must take the lion's share of the responsibility for the accident. Such was Glock's pace at the circuit, that it was still possible he might score in the sprint race, but a gearbox failure early on meant that we would never know.

The Silverstone race brought two further non-finishes. A likely podium finish in the feature race fell by the wayside when his electronics packed up, and a fantastic drive through the field from the back in the sprint race was ended by a braking error from Zaugg, which saw Glock punted off the road. There was more strife in Hungary, where again Glock looked far and away the quickest man on the circuit in the sprint race, but a wheel-gun error at his mandatory
pit stop sent him tumbling down the order, and he ended up spinning still further back, probably in sheer frustration.

Turkey brought a sprint race win, but it really should have brought a feature race win too. Again, Glock found himself a victim of a bad call during a safety car period, and was left with the difficult task of building up such a lead that he could afford a tyre stop and still retain his position. In the circumstances, his fourth place was a very remarkable achievement indeed.

There's one area, though, where this kind of misfortune counts for little, and that's reputation. People know that Glock is quick. Sebastien Bourdais reckoned that, had he stayed in Champ Car (where he made Rocketsports look like far more of a serious operation than in fact it was), Glock might have been the one man who could have posed a serious threat to him. He's bagged a BMW test drive, and Toyota are rumoured to be giving serious consideration giving the young German Ralf Schumacher's race seat next year. Di Grassi, on the other hand, shows no sign of progressing beyond GP2, even if he does luck into the title.

END NOTE: Something that's always bothered me about Blogger is the difficulty of producing a complete post index. I've decided to bite the bullet and create my own list here. All the previous Motorsports Ramblings articles in date order.

GP2 2007: Back down to earth?

If F3000 never had much success when it came to discovering new talent (just 2 F3000 champions ever went on to win Grands Prix), the early signs are that GP2 may be doing rather better. In the first two years, we've had Nico Rosberg, Heikki Kovalainen and Lewis Hamilton make the jump to F1 with serious teams, and Nelson Piquet Jr is waiting in the wings at Renault.

The question is whether the category can keep up this remarkable run of form as it goes into its third year, the last with the current car, at Bahrain in just over a week's time. Picking out favourites for the title seems a little more difficult than in the first two years. Last year, there were several established front-runners going into their second full season in the category and, in Lewis Hamilton, a standout F3 champion who looked like he might prove a match for any of them. This year, its hard to pick out anyone so obviously promising from among the sophomore drivers (the entry list, by the way is here). Reigning champions ART have two second year drivers, in Michael Ammermueller and Lucas Di Grassi. Both looked competent enough in their first year, given that Di Grassi was not with one of the more highly rated teams and Ammermueller had come straight up from Formula Renault, but neither man has so far done anythint to suggest that they are in the same class as Hamilton or Rosberg.

Luca Filippi, the former Euro F3000 champion is also back for a second year, but while team boss Dave Sears reckons he's quick, and he's topped the timesheets in testing on occasion, he didn't really do anything to suggest he was really from the top drawer last year. Andreas Zuber is back for another season but he is yet another driver who was neither fish nor fowl last year - winning a race on one occasion, but frequently looking utterly anonymous next to team mate Gianmaria Bruni at Trident. The same can be said of series returnee and former Spanish F3 champion Borja Garcia and of the rest Nicolas Lapierre has already failed to grasp too many opportunities and neither Javier Villa nor Jason Tahinci are likely to bother the top half of the grid.

What, then, of the newcomers? British F3 champion Mike Conway and fellow front runner Bruno Senna are both making the step up this season. Conway, in particular, has impressed me in the past when he used to race in Formula Renault, but I can't help but think that neither appeared to be in the same class as 2005 champion Alvaro Parente. What the Portuguese driver would give for a recognisable surname eh? Talking of recognisable surnames, Kazuki Nakajima, son of Satoru, the man who partnered Bruno's late uncle at Lotus some 20 years ago, is among those graduating from the Euroseries this year. He's got a Williams test drive too, though one can't help but feel his Japanese nationality and Williams' Toyota engine deal must have played a part (ironic really, because 20 years back, Williams lost their Honda engine deal in part because of their refusal to employ his Dad). His fellow countryman Kohei Hirate is also making the step up, and is probably marginally the quicker of the two new Japanese drivers (his testing contract is with Toyota...) but one can't help thinking that he hung around for a long while in Euro F3000 without achieving much.

A couple of potentially very quick drivers are making the jump over from the Renault World Series. Venezuelan Pastor Maldonado may be best known for receiving a multi-race ban after running down a marshal at Monaco, but he is quite possibly a much better prospect than Ernesto Viso ever was. Former Spanish F3 champion Andy Soucek is also a driver very much worth watching. Either of these two, who have much greater experience of racing powerful single seaters than most of the debutants, might make a good each way bet for this year's title.

What is perhaps most striking though, is the list of drivers not in this year's championship. There's no place for Euroseries champion Paul Di Resta, nor for his close rival, teenage prodigy Sebastien Vettel. While, for Vettel, a World Series driver and a BMW testing contract doubtless softens that blow, one suspects that Di Resta's drive in a 2 year old Mercedes DTM car alongside fellow Scot, Susan Stoddart might justifiably leave him feeling a little hard done by.

Renault World Series champion Alx Danielsson was talked about as a candidate for the BCN drive, but that never materialised (the seat has now gone to Sino-Dutch driver Ho Pin Tung, who deserves his place more than many on the grid) and Alvaro Parene remains stuck in career limbo. British F3 championship runner-up Oliver Jarvis has had to go off and ply his trade in Japanese F3, and will have to console himself with the thought that this did Adrian Sutil no harm and Spanish F3 championship winner Ricardo Risatti is yet another driver who didn't get the second BCN drive.

The upshot is that the field of promising young talent is neither as promising nor as talented as it should be, or as it was in the first two years of the category. This might just open the door for one of three drivers I haven't mentioned yet to take the title.

Ex F1 drivers Antonio Pizzonia, Timo Glock and Giorgio Pantano have borken the mould by getting paid drives from teams with corporate sponsors who are keen to wrest the title away from ART. Some have suggested that it is unfair to allow ex-F1 drivers to compete against the up and coming drivers. Personally, I think this is nonsense. Ivan Capelli and Roberto Moreno both won the F3000 series with prior F1 experience, and their presence provides a very useful barometer of the overall talent level of the series. Suffice to say that if the young guns can't beat the likes of Pantano and Pizzonia, they probably don't deserve to be too far up the F1 team bosses' wish lists.

The contrasting motivations of the 3 ex F1 drivers are intriguing in themselves. Pantano has been around seemingly forever, and must surely be keen to win a title of some significance. For him, F1 can surely no longer be a realistic possibility - he was was mediocre in his single season with Jordan, and left that team under something of a cloud.

Pizzonia, by contrast, probably does still harbour F1 ambitions but he is very much in the last chance saloon in this regard. He showed pace on occasion both in his drive at Jaguar and in his one-off races with Williams, but he was far too inconsistent to merit a full time frontline drive. Only a serious show of dominance in GP2 is likely to revive interest among the F1 team bosses, but its just possible that he is capable of it.

Timo Glock, by contrast, is still very much a young hopeful. He showed a fair amount of promise in his one-off drives at Jordan despite being seriously inexperienced at the time, and was pretty quick in the unfancied Rocketsports Champ Car in 2005. Most importantly, though, he was capable of giving the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Nelson Piquet Jr a fright in the ISport GP2 car last year, and he remains with Paul Jackson's team for his second full season of GP2. At the risk of looking very foolish at season's end, he's my tip to become the third GP2 champion. Its just a shame he's not up against the sort of opposition he should be.

GP2 in review - Hamilton at a canter......

If nobody quite knew what to expect in the first season of GP2 last year, then this time our hopes were high. Close fought racing between almost F1-quick single seaters with no electronic trickery or driving aids and most of the best aspiring young would-be F1 drivers at the wheel. With slick tyres this year, they edged still closer to the back of the F1 grid in performance terms - on occasion they might have been in a position to give at least the earliest version of the Aguri F1 car a fright in lap speed terms. In other words - more often than not the most interesting part of the Grand Prix weekend. I think its fair to say that GP2 entirely lived up to these elevated expectations this year.

At the start of the year, I predicted that the title battle would be fought between between Premat, Lapierre, Carroll and Piquet. Which shows how much I know. In my defence, I can only point out that, of the newcomers, I did single out Glock and Hamilton as the series debutants most likely to upset the applecart. Certainly I didn't expect Hamilton to take the championship by the kind of margin that he eventually did.

If the championsip battle was not as close fought as that between Kovalainen and Rosberg last year, the same could not be said of the individual races, some of which were very hotly contested indeed. The battle between Jose Maria Lopez and Timo Glock in the sprint race at Hockenheim stands out in particular, while the last lap of the feature race at Barcelona, where ART team mates Premat and Hamilton fought it out was a graphic illustration of how close it sometimes got.

In all there were 9 different winners in the 22 races this year. For sure, the feature/sprint race split, with the latter being run with semi-reversed grids, probably inflated this number a little (neither Andreas Zuber nor Michael Ammermuller ever really looked like winning a feature race) but there were still 6 different winners in the 11 feature races - not a bad total when compared with F1, or especially with this year's world rally championship.

With 5 wins, three of them in feature races, and a further 9 podium finishes, Hamilton was clearly the dominant force this year, and the way he dominated his second-year team mate, Alexandre Premat (who, after all, was not really any slower than Nico Rosberg last year, merely a little less consistent) indicates that he is something really rather special indeed. Whether or not he gets the Mclaren seat alongside Alonso next year, it seems pretty clear that this is a young man who is going places.

To my mind, the numbers are about right in placing Nelson Angelo Piquet best of the rest. Like his father, he seemed happiest when out in front, and never really seemed to have the same racer's instinct as Hamilton. Neither was he as consistently quick, but on the other hand, it was hard to evaluate the competitiveness of his team (Xandi Negrao never really figured in the other Piquet Sports car) and he perhaps didn't have as good a car as ART were able to provide Hamilton with. He also showed impressive speed in the wet at Hungary, winning both races, and wet weather speed is always a sign that there is something special about a driver. He deserves his Renault testing role, now that Heikki Kovalainen has been promoted to the race team for 2007. Whether he has the mental toughness and racer's instinct to be a really first rate F1 driver, on the other hand, remains to be seen.

There remains the tantalising thought that had Giorgio Pantano done all the races, or had Timo Glock started the season with ISport, rather than with BCN, with whom he never really seemed to gel, one of these two ex-Jordan F1 drivers might have given Piquet and Hamilton a serious run for their money. The numbers suggest they probably would not quite have been able to, but Glock, in particular, looked more than a match for anyone in the second half of the season. Certainly it is a mystery why he was quite so slow in the BCN Competition car, and does beg questions about the degree to which team, rather than driver ability, plays a part in a series where the cars are supposed to be identical.

Equally intriguing were the sheer number of occasional one-off outstanding performances that were witnessed over the course of the year. Franck Perera, for instance, might not generally have made much of an impression, scoring just 8 points all season - but he got all 8 of those at Monaco, where he started and finished 2nd, behind Hamilton. There was another front row start for him at the Nurburgring - just enough perhaps, to suggest that the Toyota junior driver might make rather more of an impression if he gets another run next year - but still very much against the run of form. On other occasions, Hiroki Yoshimoto, Tristan Gommendy, Adrian Valles and DPR boys Olivier Pla and Clivio Piccione all showed flashes of real front running pace (Gommendy's front row start at Valencia, Valles' podium at the same, Yoshimoto's performances at Imola and the Nurburgring and the DPR drivers' performance at Monaco. None though, were able to threaten the front runners on anything like a regular basis - though whether this boiled down to inexperience, the limitations of their team, or their own foibles as drivers was very hard to tell. Yoshimoto, though, does look a rather more sensible bet for a Super Aguri drive than either Yamamoto or Ide did.

There were a few notable disappointments this year as well. Arden failed to recapture the form that took them to so many F3000 titles, and perhaps have lost the momentum they had before team owner Christian Horner took up Dietrich Mateschitz's offer to run Red Bull Racing. Of course, it might be the fault of the drivers. I, for one, expected Nicolas Lapierre and fellow Frenchman Alexandre Premat to figure a little more strongly after their dominant winter double act over in A1GP, but Premat was rarely close to his team mate Hamilton, while Lapierre came no closer to actually winning a race than he did last year. He was at least a little closer to the front than he had been last year, though an injury at Monaco put paid to any kind of a serious challenge.

Another man to struggle despite high pre-season hopes was Racing Engineering No1 driver Adam Carroll. In race trim he was as aggressive as ever, but he was often off the pace in qualifying, seemed to be harder on his tyres than just about anyone else in the field (for which he often paid a heavy price in the longer feature races) and, in the first part of the season at least, simply made too many mistakes. Whether the problem lay with Carroll, or Racing Engineering (whose other driver, Jose Villa looked utterly lost after being talked about as the 'new Fernando Alonso' in F3 the year before) was hard to tell. Perhaps it was a combination of the two - Carroll has always struck me as being a 'seat of the pants' kind of racer, and he might have suffered for not having an experienced team mate to help get car set up pointing in the right direction. Champ Cars seems the obvious place for him, if you as me.

Of the rest, Ferdinando Monfardini occasionally impressed, Lucas DiGrassi had a reasonable mid-season run, Felix Porteiro looked like a driver who might shine given a little more experience, and that was about it. Jason Tahinci, Fairuz Fauzy, Sergio Hernandez and Vitaly Petrov, in particular, seemed to represent a waste of a good cockpit.

So, not a bad sophomore year, all in all - the series did a pretty good job of establishing itself as not only the most important European single seater championship outside F1, but as being at least as competitive and suffused with talent as the IRL and Champ Car series. With the big names once again moving on to bigger and supposedly better things, lets hope that 2007 proves as exciting.