Like Father, Unlike Son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Dog Has Its Day - F1 2009 In Review - Part Two

Only Brawn, Red Bull, Mclaren and Ferrari actually won races this year. Yet the strangest thing about this season, in many ways, what marked it out from the 25 or so I've seen before, was that almost all of the remaining six teams on the grid had days when they looked as though they were in contention, and with a fair wind, they might have joined the winners' circle.

Perhaps the strongest of the six was the now departed Toyota team. It is ironic that the German-Japanese squad have had the rug pulled from under them by the parent company just as they were beginning to look like a serious racing team, as opposed to an enormously expensive white elephant. They made a number of very good calls this year. They were one of three teams to hit upon the double-diffuser concept from the start, and this put them in good stead in the early part of the season. They were also the only manufacturer team not to divert time and money into a KERS programme that they couldn't make work. The team locked out the front row at the third round in Bahrain, and I still wonder if they might have been in with a shout of victory of they had played a tactically smarter game - and in particular had they not put the wrong tyres on both cars at the first stop.

For much of the mid-season, the team appeared to slip into anonymity, struggling to make the tyres work and scoring little after Trulli's podium in Turkey. It was perhaps during this long, disappointing summer, the nadir of which came with a truly embarrassing performance at Monaco where neither driver could get sufficient heat into the tyres and one-time Monte Carlo winner Trulli was left ambling round at the back, seconds of the pace, that the decision was taken by the Toyota board to throw in the towel. If so, the late season return to form is all the more ironic. Timo Glock took an impressive second in Singapore after Rosberg and Vettel eliminated themselves from contention with penalties for pitlane offences and, Jarno Trulli, who had been nowhere in Singapore, settled the score at Toyota's home race (albeit on a track owned by Honda) at Suzuka, with another second place. In the end, it was a case of close, but no cigar for the team though. This year, they came closer than they ever have to taking a maiden race victory, but they leave the sport winless.

The same cannot quite be said of BMW-Sauber. Nonetheless, Mario Thiessen's decision to abandon development of the 2008 car to concentrate on a 2009 title assault now looks mightily presumptuous. It was never quite clear what was wrong with the 2009 BMW. There were times when it ran quite respectably. Aided by luck with the timing of the safety car, Robert Kubica looked in with a shot of victory at the opening race in Melbourne before he locked horns with Sebastian Vettel 3 laps from the end. Nick Heidfeld, who showed rather better relative to his much heralded team mate than he had last year, picked up a lucky second place a week later in Malaysia, and did a good job of picking up the minor points in a car that appeared capable of no more. There were days when it appeared Robert Kubica wasn't really interested, although it may only have been that he was less able to adapt to the 09 BMW's foibles than Heidfeld, who has rather greater experience of driving 'difficult' cars. That said, Kubica's drive to second in the Brazilian Grand Prix was one of the highlights of the year for me.

Unlike Toyota, who always struck me as a rather soulless team, devoid of real character, I'll miss BMW. Yes, they were ultimately just the plaything of a large corporation, but they done a good job of turning the Sauber team into a front-running squad, until things went wrong this year. That they didn't do the right thing by the Swiss team, failing to sign the Concord Agreement and selling the assets to shady investment company Qadbak rather than handing it back to Peter Sauber, leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth. A shame, because the building blocks were in place to put together a really first-rate racing team.

Renault, in contrast with Toyota and BMW, appear for now to be sticking with F1. From being, at least in terms of race wins, the most successful of the manufacturer teams last year, they slipped well back down the order in 2009. It is hard to assess exactly how bad the 2009 Renault was, because it was effectively a one-car team. All of the squad's 29 points came from their departing number 1 driver Fernando Alonso. It is hard to know whether this was a case of Alonso dragging the car places it didn't really belong, or whether Romain Grosjean and Nelson Piquet simply weren't getting the job done. Probably it was a mix of the two. There was a pole position in Hungary, achieved by running ridiculously light, and a podium in Singapore, but other than that it was a barren year for the Anglo-French squad. They made the news only when the 'crashgate' story broke in the aftermath of the sacking of Nelson Piquet Jr.

Given the $100m fine that Mclaren got for unauthorised use of Ferrari data by one of its employees a couple of years back, the deliberate arranging of an accident to attempt to fix a Grand Prix seemed to be remarkably lightly punished all told. But then perhaps the FIA decided that now was not the time to start driving teams out of the sport. And arguably the chief beneficiary of the move, Fernando Alonso, got off lightest of all. It seems hard to believe he would have run the strategy he did in Singapore had he not had some inkling what was planned. Flavio Briatore bore the brunt of the FIA's wrath. He'll probably be missed about as much as Toyota F1.

Williams started the year in the best form they have shown for several seasons, another team to benefit from spotting the 'double diffuser' loophole in the 2009 aero-regs from the outset. Sadly, the cards never seemed to fall their way. Potential podiums in both the opening races were lost to the timing of the safety car and a bungled pit stop in Australia, and to the timing of the opening of the heavens in Malaysia. The team flattered to deceive to some extent, usually topping the timesheets in free practice, only to slip back down the order when it counted on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

All the same, the team were probably stronger than their 7th place in the Constructor's Championship might suggest. Only once, at Singapore, did they look as if they might be within striking distance of winning a race, although Lewis Hamilton probably had Rosberg covered even before Rosberg effectively eliminated himself from proceedings by tripping over the white line on the pitlane exit. However, there were other races, notably Brazil and Malaysia, where car and driver looked much stronger than the final points tally suggests. As with Renault, Williams were held back by the fact that, in a tight and competitive field, they relied exclusively on Rosberg to pick up points. Kazuki Nakajima might be better than I thought him to be based on his GP2 performances, and certainly he was much closer to Rosberg on pace than Grosjean or Piquet was to Alonso, but in the end, he just wasn't quite quick enough to merit a place in F1. With Toyota's departure, his F1 career is probably over, unless he can use his connections to get a drive with one of the new teams next year.

The single biggest upset of the year, perhaps the greatest shock of the decade, came when Giancarlo Fisichella grabbed pole at Spa - not by running a silly fuel load - but by plain outpacing everyone else in a Force India. The team formerly known as Jordan were making steady progress towards the back of the field up to that point, sometimes frightening Toyota and BMW on their off-days, but until that weekend in the Ardennes, they had never actually scored any points. Yes, Sutil wasn't far off at Silverstone, and he impressed mightily in the rain in China until he flew off the road a few laps from the end, but the best you could say, really, was that while still backmarkers, they were much less far off the back of the pack.

Then Fisichella grabbed pole at Spa, and finished second. He was faster than eventual race winner Kimi Raikkonen too - it was really only the Ferrari's KERS equipment and, to be fair, probably Raikkonen's superior race-craft, which enabled the Italian team to take the victory. To prove it was no fluke, a week later, both Force Indias ran top-5 at Monza too. The VJM002 was clearly well suited to fast, open tracks. To judge by both the car's speed-trap times and it's remarkable fuel efficiency, which was better than that achieved by either of the other Mercedes-powered teams by some margin, it appears that the crucial advantage they had was tremendous aerodynamic efficiency. At tracks like Singapore and Abu Dhabi, where mechanical grip through slow and medium speed corners was crucial, they remained also-rans, but their late-season form was nonetheless a revelation.

Last, and in most respects, least, there was Toro Rosso. There was no repeat of the giant-killing performances of 2008 for the Faenza team, and it was a little hard to believe that they were running the same basic car as the Red Bull team which was in the running for the title. I suspect a large part of the explanation is that they simply didn't have the drivers to get the job done. Sebastian Buemi did a solid, competent job for a 20 year old in his first season, but it was hard to assess how quick he really was. Should he be judged by his pace relative to Sebastien Bourdais, who never seemed to get to grips with F1 at all, and relative to his still less experienced team mate Jaime Alguersuari? Or would a fairer comparison be with the 'A team' Red Bulls?

In what was a very competitive year, it could be argued that Toro Rosso did well to pick up eight points over the course of the season with what is by some distance the smallest team on the grid. Their approach to driver selection continues to baffle me. Jaime Alguersuari might be a British F3 champion, but his performances in the Renault World Series were hardly such as to mark him out as anything particularly special. If racking up points was the objective, then Takuma Sato or Anthony Davidson would surely have made more sense. On the other hand, Alguersuari is Spanish and well-connected, so it's possible than sponsorship concerns may have driven the decision, especially if Red Bull are still intending to sell the team. He did just enough, in my book, to merit a full season next year. In the end, Toro Rosso didn't have a bad season, especially in comparison with the team from which they were born, Minardi. The trouble is, everyone else, even Force India, had a better one...

End Note: Shell got in touch with me recently regarding promotion of a competition offering bloggers and aspiring writers the chance to establish a career as a motoring journalist. Those who know me will be aware that this is strictly a hobby for me - Ten years ago, it might have been right up my street, but these days I'm well settled in a job as a policy-wonk in Government and have seen too many people end up disillusioned when they mix work and pleasure. You, however, might feel differently, and if you do, you might want to take a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXYNn1ZxTc&feature=player_embedded
http://www.writeintogear.co.uk/shellv-power/,

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.

Iconic Cars - The first in an occasional series

Iconic racing cars? For people of my father’s generation, it might be the Lotus 49, The Ford GT40, the Maserati 250F or the Jaguar E-Type. I, on the other hand, am a child of the 1980s, the sort of person for whom the recent film Son of Rambow (if you only ever see one Rambo film, this is the one…) is a full-on nostalgia trip.

Maybe it’s inevitable that everyone looks back on their youth as a golden age. Maybe every motorsports fan is most entranced by the sport as it was when they happened first to become hooked. For me, it is the racing and rally cars of the 1980s which first come to mind when I think of truly iconic machines. I’ve chosen three such cars for what will be a short series of articles. The first of these is something of an eccentric choice. A car that was by no means especially successful, nor even particularly pretty to look at. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, Williams Grand Prix engineering’s very own Group B Rally Car – the Metro 6R4.

On the whole, Formula One teams keep to the business of building Formula One cars. For sure there have been exceptions. McLaren built their F1 Road car, of course, and a whole host of entirely ordinary production cars have had the names "Williams" or "Jordan" bolted on in the hope of shifting a few more units.

Back in the early eighties, however, the very future of the sport was looking decidedly shaky. The FISA/FOCA wars looked like they might result in the F1 series being split into two competing, weaker championships. There was every possibility that the sport wouldn't survive such a damaging split.

At around the same time, the board at Austin Rover were toying around with the idea of restoring their once highly successful competitions department. Back in the 1960s they had had a great deal of success with their lightweight Mini Cooper rally cars. Since then, there had been, to put it kindly, more mixed results with Triumph TRs, Rover SD1s and even an Austin Allegro.

In 1980, Rover's competitions department approached Williams Grand Prix Engineering with the idea of mounting a 3 litre V6 engine (essentially a Rover V8 with two cylinders lopped off) into their recently launched small hatchback, the Austin Metro, to turn it into a potential Rally contender. With the uncertainty hanging over the future of F1 at the time, Patrick Head agreed to take on the task. It may have been difficult to design a rally car at the same time as running an F1 team, but Head had the long term future of Williams as an engineering firm to think about.

A year later, the first prototype was complete. Williams had created for Rover a 220BHP rear engined Metro. Unfortunately, by the time that Rover were ready to commit to a full blown world rally program, this car was woefully inadequate for the job. The Group B era had arrived, and four wheel drive was a prerequisite for success, as well as around double the Horsepower the Metro was producing.

So the concept went back to Williams. They hard-tuned the engine so it was producing a whopping 410BHP, and added the by now obligatory four wheel drive. The car that resulted was a striking beast indeed. In order to accommodate new regulation wide tyres, the car had the most flared wheel arches ever seen on a production car. Spoilers popped out all over the place. It puts the sort of boy-racerish nonsense of Fast & Modified and the Cruise crowd to shame. Certainly, it was one of the most distinctive cars ever to grace the world of rallying.

A question remained though. Could a non-turbo charged car live with the
latest generation of Group B Rally cars? The Metro would be up against stiff competition from Lancias Delta S4, Peugeot's 205T16, Audi's Quattro Evo and Ford's new RS200. There was a chance it might. Turbo lag was a tremendous problem on the early Group B cars, rendering some of them all but undriveable. The Metro might have a much heavier engine, but, so the thinking went, it would be a lot more driveable.

The car made its world rally debut at the RAC Rally in 1985, some half a decade after its' initial conception. The late Tony Pond and Malcolm Wilson were enlisted as drivers. Malcolm Wilson was not to last long before his engine gave out, but Tony Pond was mixing it with the best of them. As the rally progressed there were only the brand new Lancia Delta S4s separating him from a debut win. Received wisdom held that the Lancias wouldn't go the distance anyway. Half the team were booked on an early flight home, and nobody expected the horribly complicated Italian cars to stand up to the rigours of the British forests in winter.

Survive they did, however, and though Tony Pond racked up eleven fastest stage times, he was unable to catch them and record a debut win for the works Metro. Nonetheless, it was a promising debut and it boded well for the works team's first full year in 1986.

Sadly, it was the best result the car would ever record on a world rally. Whether it was because a normally aspirated car, for all the advantages it had in terms of driveability over the Turbo Group B cars, simply didn't have the power, or whether it was that the team didn't have the money to do the job properly is an open question.

A year later, at the final World Rally for Group B cars, the RAC Rally of 1986, the best Metro 6R4 was only eighth. The car was ultimately, in competition terms, something of a failure. Rather than a Rallying legend, it remains something of a curio. Unkind souls might describe it as the ugliest of the Group B cars. It certainly wasn't the most competitive.

Yet the car would go on to prove a success at club level for many years. In the hands of amateur rally drivers, it remains more than the equal of other, much more recent machinery. Like many Group B cars, it also found a home as a rallycross car for many years. The engine, meanwhile, gained a couple of turbochargers and ended up in the back of Jaguar's XJ220 supercar.

A British success story it was not. In fact one might view it as an appropriate symbol of the mess that the British car industry, and Rover in particular was in. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was a truly iconic car, and an intriguing chapter in the tale of one of the most important and successful F1 teams of the last 30 years.

When your time is up

British F1 viewers will have been treated to, or perhaps that should be, subjected to, a series of adverts for the mobile phone company, Vodafone, in which Dame Judy Dench tells us (over a montage of pictures and clips of one Lewis Hamilton) that "a dream can only become reality if you chase it and chase it and chase it." Maybe so, but the thing about dreams is that they tend to be unrealistic, to be flights of fantasy. Else they wouldn't be dreams.

Lewis Hamilton's 'dream' - that of becoming Formula 1 World Champion, is a case in point. In the 57 years that the World Championship has been in existence, just 29 individuals have achieved this feat. Given that there were around 29 drivers on the grid over the course of this year alone, (and, according to Wikipedia, nearly 800 different drivers over the years) the odds are not especially good.

Even making the F1 grid, though, is a kind of statistical lottery win. As a young kid, I had dreams of being an F1 champion myself. As with probably almost every kid who got hooked on watching the sport, I didn't have the family connections, or money, to pursue this ambition in any meaningful way. I was a couple of years older than Lewis Hamilton is now when I even first got behind the wheel of a kart. If I had wanted to become an F1 driver, I would have had to have been racing karts since my early teens The vast majority of those dreaming of F1 stardom fall at the very first fence, and through no fault of their own. (Incidentally, there have been odd exceptions to this rule. Damon Hill was the last World Champion who did not come up through karting. To my knowledge, the last driver who did not spend his teens in the karting ranks was Robert Doornbos).

That still leaves hundreds, perhaps even thousands of young men across the world who take their first steps into the world of Junior single seater racing each year. The options are myriad - Formula BMW, Formula Ford, Formula Renault, and various less well recognised routes exist in Britain alone, and most of these championships have their analogues in every western country as well as, increasingly, many less traditional motorsporting countries in the Far East, the Arab world and South America. Most of the drivers in these categories will never progress beyond them - to Formula 3, International Formula Masters, Formula Atlantic or any of the other categories that make up the next rung on the ladder. Sometimes this will be because they simply didn't have the requisite ability to pursue their career to the next level - sometimes it will be a shortage of funds. Sometimes, given that many drivers have backers who see 'their' man as an investment, it is hard to disentangle the two.

While there are drivers who make the leap straight from Formula 3 to Formula 1 (or even from Formula Renault to Formula 1, in the exceptional case of Kimi Raikkonen), the final step these days, is almost invariably a stint in GP2, or perhaps the Renault World Series. Most aspiring single seater drivers never get this far, and yet still there is no getting away from the fact that even most of those men who do will never race an F1 car in anger. In the three years that GP2 has been running, just 5 drivers have made the leap to F1. Thus far, of those five, only Lewis Hamilton has actually won a race (though one would not necessarily bet against Heikki Kovalainen or Nico Rosberg eventually joining him on the list of GP winners). For every Michael Schumacher, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of men who might have wanted it just as much, but who lacked the talent, or the breaks.

What, though, of two drivers sloping out of the back door after a decade in Formula 1? In the final analysis, were Alexander Wurz and Ralf Schumacher successes or failures? Both came into Formula 1 in 1997, and both initially looked like young guns who were going places. Alex Wurz began his career as a substitute for fellow Austrian, Gerhard Berger, picking up a podium in only his third race. After this promising showing, Benetton gave him a full time ride alongside Italian Giancarlo Fisichella in 1998. His time at Benetton started well enough, with a string of points finishes in the early part of the year, but gradually tailed off
as the season went on. The following years were not great for Benetton, but over time, Fisichella comprehensively established himself as the more promising of the two, and it was no great surprise that Wurz found himself without a drive in 2001.

Wurz's decent technical understanding of the sport and his work ethic made him an ideal candidate for the role of test driver, and it was in this role that he was employed for five years at Mclaren. In a sense, it must have been immensely frustrating for a man who had his heart set on reaching the top in Formula 1, but it was perhaps not such a bad way to earn a living really. Mclaren almost certainly paid its test drivers rather more handsomely than any middling team that Wurz might otherwise have ended up at would have paid its racing drivers. Perhaps the Austrian had figured out from his time at Benetton that, while a perfectly decent racing driver, he lacked that extra something which separates the good from the great. In view of that, a solid career as a test driver must have seemed a sensible option.

On some level, though, he must have hankered to try his hand at race driving again, for little else could explain his move from Mclaren to take a testing job at the much less well-funded Williams team. Sure enough, when Mark Webber exited stage-left for Red Bull, he was drafted in to drive alongside Nico Rosberg. This brought a final podium finish (at Canada) but on the whole must be judged a disappointment. While reasonably quick in the races, he was hopelessly lost in qualifying, and in modern F1, that is always going to leave you at a massive disadvantage. Whether it was because his competitive edge had been dulled by too many years testing, or whether it simply was an illustration of the fact that Wurz lacked the last few tenths of a second a lap that make a really great F1 driver, there can be little doubt that by the end of 2007, his time at the top of the sport was done.

All the same, when assessing whether a driver succeeded or failed, some account must be taken, I think of what he did with what he had. In this respect, I think Wurz came out well. In terms of sheer, innate talent, I don't think he was anything exceptional, but he was a good solid worker, and he picked up a few podium finishes when the cards fell his way. I think he can retire, comfortable in the knowledge that he achieved about as much as could have been expected.

It is much harder to know whether the same can be said of Ralf Schumacher. He has always struck me as something of a mercurial talent. There were times when he was absolutely imperious - and all too many others when one scarcely noticed he was there at all. He has, of course, the misfortune of being Michael Schumacher's younger brother - and compared with him, Ralf's F1 record looks decidedly second-best. But then, in comparison with Michael, whose doesn't?

It was widely suspected that he reached F1 largely because of the family name, but his first couple of seasons with Jordan identified him as something of a diamond in the rough - quick, if prone to mistakes. It was in 1999, when he moved to Williams, that his reputation was made. Paired alongside Champ Car champion Alex Zanardi, and given the least competitive car Williams had built in over 10 years, he set about picking up a very decent haul of points and finished sixth in the drivers' standings. His team mate, by contrast, failed to score a single point all year.

2001 was, in a way, both the making and the breaking of Schumacher Jr. Paired against another Champ Car champion, Juan Montoya, Ralf picked up his first victory in the San Marino Grand Prix and followed this with further wins in Canada and Germany. He finished up fourth in the driver's championship - about as much as could be expected from anyone driving a car other than a Ferrari or a Mclaren. The trouble, for Ralf, was that his inexperienced team mate looked ultimately the more exciting prospect - the driver who had more potential.

2002 was a bit of a non-event, such was the sheer level of dominance achieved by the Ferrari F2002. Ralf was one of only two non-Ferrari drivers to win a race, but while Juan Montoya somehow hustled the Williams to seven pole positions, Ralf never started from P1, cementing the view that the Colombian was the quicker of the two.

In 2003, Ralf Schumacher found himself, for the only time in his career, with a car which had the potential to win the world championship. The Williams was no race-winner at the start of the year, and it was noticeable that Juan Montoya was able to do a lot more with it than Ralf Schumacher. Thus, while Montoya was second in the opening race, Ralf could only manage 8th. While Montoya managed to salvage 8th on the grid when the car proved all at sea in Malaysia, Ralf was 17th!

The thing is, when the Didcot squad got the car really sorted, the pendulum swung. Nothing could touch the Williams for pace in the middle of the season - and at that point, it was Ralf, rather than Montoya who was able to extract the greatest pace from the car. Had it been the other way round, Juan Montoya just might have ended the year as World Champion. Interestingly, the moment the Williams began to fall away from the ultimate pace, sure enough, it was Montoya who was quicker again.

After that one opening that Ralf Schumacher had for a title campaign (it's easy to forget that at mid-season, he looked as good a bet as anyone to take the championship), he would never win a race again. To be fair, though Juan Montoya won his final race at Williams in 2004, he never really had a race-winning car again. It is open to question, how much the blame for that lay at his own door. To the surprise of many, Ralf Schumacher moved to Toyota for an absurd sum of money in 2005. At the time, it looked like a case of pecuniary greed getting in the way of furthering his career. In retrospect, it can be argued that he correctly foresaw Williams decline, and Toyota ought to have been the more promising team.

For a while, in 2005, it looked like he might be right. In the early part of 2005, they were briefing Renault's closest challengers, but it was noticeable that Jarno Trulli, rather than Ralf Schumacher, was the man racking up the results for them. The situation reversed in 2006, but it scarcely mattered - Toyota have never maintained the momentum they showed at the beginning of the 2005 season, and have slid ever further back into mediocrity. In 2007, the situation had reversed again, and generally, Jarno Trulli was the man who managed to eke a little more out of yet another undistinguished Toyota chassis. When the team decided that Ralf Schumacher was an expense that made little sense, it was no surprise that a long queue did not form for the German's services.

So how should Ralf Schumacher's career be judged? As a success - on the basis of those 6 wins? Or as a failure, because of the tantalising hints that he was capable of so much more. Much depends on the answer to one question. When the car wasn't quite there, was it simply that his driving style required a car that was absolutely right for him to show his abilities to best effect or did he simply get lazy. If the former, then he probably achieved about as much as he could. If, on the other hand, it was a lack of application on his part, that's another matter. He would be a driver who had the talent, but just didn't work hard enough - wasn't consistent enough, to deliver all that he might have been capable of. Another Juan Montoya, if you like. In the words of Dame Judy, he had a dream, but he didn't keep chasing it, and chasing it.

Rumours

There appear to be an awful lot of stories doing the rounds in the F1 paddock at the moment. Whisperings that leading teams are unhappy with one or more of their drivers, and, come to that, rumours of drivers decidedly unhappy with their teams.

Of course, in an environment as intrinsically competitive as Formula 1, when the results aren't coming, it is natural that the leading players will be desperately seeking to understand why this should be. Inevitably, some will wonder if a key player who is a weak link in the chain - a chief designer, a driver or a team manager who isn't pulling his weight. It is human nature, too that the last person that most F1 people will think of as the weak link is himself. You can be sure that while the rest of the world might think that Ralf Schumacher isn't doing a very good job at Toyota, or that Honda is being terribly managed, Ralf and Nick Fry will be convinced that the blame lies with others.

So, what are the stories doing the rounds? Ralf Schumacher seems as good a place to start as any, as an awful lot of other questions might hang on his future. Schumacher, who is widely rumoured to the second-highest paid driver on the F1 grid, has not had the best of seasons at Toyota. He has scored just 2 points all year, compared to his team mate Jarno Trulli's 7. More importantly, he has looked off the pace when compared to his team mate all year. He was outqualified by the two Spykers at Monaco, he made a silly mistake which put him out on the first lap at Indianapolis. Come to that, even in the races where he did score points - Australia and Canada - his performances were hardly outstanding. In Australia he threw away 7th place, allowing Nico Rosberg past him on a track where passing is normally all but impossible. In Canada, he may have made the points, but on a day with such a high attrition rate, his team might reasonably have hoped for better than 8th place.

Toyota's problem is this: Given that they're paying for him anyway, and given the extreme difficulties in enforcing performance-clauses, is there any point in getting rid of Schumacher Jr before his contract comes up at the end of the season? He may not appear to be doing a very good job, but it has to be said that the Toyota does not appear to be an especially good car. It is not clear, either, who would take his place. The team could draft in test driver Franck Montagny, who would probably be competent, but he wasn't so good that Renault thought him worth keeping - and that despite his nationality... And if not Montagny, then it is unclear quite who they would go with. Kazuki Nakajima has links with the team, but surely lacks the experience necessary to do any better than Schumacher - besides which, he has looked unexceptional in absolute terms in GP2, and wasn't as quick as, for example, Paul Di Resta in F3 last year.

So, chances are, Ralf Schumacher will keep his drive until the end of the year, but that this might well be his final season in the sport. Next question. Who might replace him in 2008? If some of the wilder rumours are to be believed, the answer to this question could be.....Kimi Raikkonen

At first glance, this might appear to be rather far-fetched. Haven't Ferrari paid him some unimaginable sum to be his lead driver until the end of 2008? On closer inspection, though, perhaps it is possible. Its hard to avoid the conclusion that the Raikkonen-Ferrari marriage has got off to a rather rocky start this tear. Ferrari have been decisively outpaced by Mclaren in recent races and the question must be there in the back of Jean Todt's mind - Is it the drivers?

Felipe Massa had, on balance, been quicker than Kimi Raikkonen this year, despite the pre-season assumption on the part of most observers that he was the de facto Number 2 at Maranello. This has been seen by some as a sign of remarkably improved form from the previously rather mercurial Brazilian, but what if it isn't so much that Massa is quicker than we thought he would be, as that Raikkonen is slower?

If that were so, then it would suggest that, with a driver of the calibre of an Alonso or a Hamilton, Ferrari might be able to mix it with Mclaren without having to find improvements in the car. The trouble is, though, if the team believe that neither Massa nor Raikkonen are their best options, who else on the grid might do a better job?

If paddock gossip is anything to go by, it would seem that the Ferrari management have alighted upon the promising Williams driver (and the other GP2 champion) Nico Rosberg. Working on the assumption that Alex Wurz hasn't forgotten to drive in the years since he was last a full time racing driver, it does rather appear that Rosberg Jr is getting the Williams much further up the grid than it really deserves to be. Of course, the same thing appeared to be true of Mark Webber at Jaguar, and he's never really looked quite so quick since, but if Ferrari become convinced that Kimi Raikkonen is not the answer to the conundrum of replacing Michael Schumacher, they may as well try someone else.

So if Rosberg goes to Ferrari, Kimi Raikkonen would be in line for being shuffled off to Toyota (if retirement doesn't seem the more appealing option) and Williams, who would struggle somewhat with meeting Raikkonen's fees, might well go chasing Adrian Sutil.

But what if that's not what happens. What if Ferrari decide that the best way to take on Mclaren's seemingly invincible driver line-up is to snatch one of them. Mclaren would probably be very reluctant to let either of them go - the biggest advantage of having the two quickest drivers on the grid tied into long-term contracts is that the best on offer to any putative rival is the third fastest driver on the grid. Ron Dennis will remember well that, whatever his other problems at the time, when he had Senna and Prost in the late eighties, the other teams never posed much of a threat.

The problem is that the drivers themselves might not see it that way. Both Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton might feel that they are drivers of the kind of stature that deserves undisputed no.1 status. They can't both have that at Mclaren, so if a vacancy were to open up at Ferrari at the end of the season, would Ron really be able to keep hold of both his young charges?

There's one final thought, which I haven't heard aired this season, but which I can't write off as entirely fanciful. Remember what Alonso said at the end of last season, after he had won his second world title? He said that "3 world championships is a good number. It's what Senna got, it's what Piquet got, it's what Lauda got. I don't want to be a racing driver forever." Fernando has never enjoyed the fame and attention that has come with being a double F1 world championship and neither does he appear to be revelling in the challenge posed by his rookie team mate this year. He must know, too, that given time, Hamilton is only likely to get better. Could it be that, if he were to win the title this year, he would simply walk away from the sport, job done, still only in his mid-twenties? What would that do to the driver market?

Better than they appeared?

Talk about motor racing to an outsider, and sooner or later, he or she can almost be guaranteed to comment "But surely its all about the cars isn't it? How do you know who the best drivers are when you need the best car to win." For me, this additional complexity - the way that the abilities of the driver and the speed of the car can be so hard to disentangle - is one of the things that fascinates me about motorsport where most other sports leave me cold.

Such a discussion normally leads to another question: Of all the drivers you've seen, which would have proven to be really first-rate had they been given the opportunity in a front-running team? My own answer to this question is unusual - but I stand by it. In the time I've been following Formula 1, I really don't think that any driver who had a career of any length - let's say a whole season - was an undiscovered superstar. The obvious possible exception was Stefan Bellof - the young German who drove for Tyrrell in 1984 and 1985 before dying in a sportscar race at Spa. He might have had what it took to mix it with Senna, Prost, Mansell, Piquet and Berger in the late eighties. But really, he's the exception that proves the rule. Even in the desperately uncompetitive atmo-Tyrrell, he'd done enough to catch the attention of the big team bosses - and had he lived, he would have been in a Ferrari in 1986. The 1986 Ferrari was not exactly the finest piece of kit ever to come out of Maranello, but it would have been enough for Bellof to show whether he had it what it took.

Is there anyone, though, who might have been overlooked through their whole career? Not really. A case can perhaps be made for Bernd Schneider, whose 2 years in Erich Zakowski's awful Zakspeed cars never really gave him a chance to shine. His subsequent long and highly successful career in the DTM against pretty classy opposition suggest he may have been rather better than he appeared in F1.

There have been plenty of drivers who could have won races in the right car. People like Derek Warwick, Martin Brundle, Eddie Cheever, Pierluigi Martini and Nicola Larini. None of these, though, were true greats, and they got just enough chances, that had they been something really special, they would have been able to show it. They were, if you like, the Felipe Massas and Giancarlo Fisichellas of their day.

If anything, the strongest cases are probably those who, for whatever reason, never got to F1 in the first place. Tom Kristensen and Sebastien Bourdais just might have been very quick indeed - although I still hold out the hope that Sea-Bass at least might yet be given an F1 chance. The question of drivers who never got the opportunity to race in F1 in the first place, though, is not quite the same - and perhaps I'll return to it some other time.

To return to our argumentative man in the pub, it is interesting that he never puts his argument the other way round. Never says "I don't understand Formula 1, you never get to find out who's really built the best car because it all depends on who has the best drivers." Now, that's perhaps understandable. People are more interested in superstars than in teams of anonymous boffins. But it goes beyond the casual fans - even on the motorsport talkboards, I struggle to recall a single thread about cars whose potential was frustrated for want of a quick driver. Which is odd really, because I think there have been a few...

Cast your mind back, if you will, to 1988. In a year utterly dominated by Mclaren, just three teams actually led a lap of a Grand Prix. Mclaren - of course, for they won 15 of them, and Ferrari, who occasionally turned up the boost and disappeared into the distance until they ran out of fuel... and, though many fewer will remember, the beautiful aqua-marine March that was Adrian Newey's first racing car. It may only have led a single lap - in the hands of Ivan Capelli at the Japanese Grand Prix - but it was a rather better car than the statistics suggest. The bare facts are that their best result was an impressive second place in the Portuguese Grand Prix, pushing Prost's Mclaren all the way to the line, and that they scored 20 points, placing them equal 5th in the constructor's championship. What that doesn't tell you is that, towards the end of the year, they were, on occasion, Mclaren's closest rivals.

At the time, a large part of this was put down to the talents of Messrs Capelli and Gugelmin - seen as hard young chargers taking the new March team much further up the grid than it had any right to be. Team manager Ian Phillips, later of Jordan and Midland/Spyker, remarked that he had "the best two 25 year old drivers in the business." But did he? Capelli would come close to winning again with March (or Leyton House as they were known by that time) in 1990 at Paul Ricard, but neither Capelli nor Gugelmin ever achieved much in their post-March careers. Capelli was destroyed by Alesi in the admittedly awful Ferrari F92A before disappearing altogether, tail between his legs, after a couple of races with Jordan in 1993. Gugelmin was equally anonymous in the, to be fair, rather hopeless Jordan Yamaha in 1992, and following the end of the season would never be seen in F1 again. He spent nearly ten years in Champ Cars after that, but won just one race in that time - suggesting he was competent, but hardly special.

In retrospect, it appears to me that the March 881, and its later derivatives, were much quicker than we realised - and let down, at least in the final part of 1988, by a very average driver pairing. Perhaps this is no surprise, given that they were the early works of Adrian Newey, a man whose creations would dominate F1 through much of the following decade. Later, he would comment that while the Mclaren MP4/4 was clearly the class of the field that year, when it came to aerodynamic performance, he was convinced the March was superior. That's not to say the March was actually a better car. It manifestly was not. It really didn't like bumps, it was at least arguably too small and cramped to be driven to its full potential, and it was very fragile. It did, on the other hand, seem to cope with the cooling requirements of John Judd's early V8 F1 engine rather better than the Williams managed. What it does suggest, though is that the March was a better car than its results indicated.

Sometimes, its not so much that a car doesn't reach its full potential because of its drivers, as that a driver gets more credit than they are due for what they achieve with a car that is better than anyone realises. In 1988, Tyrrell got it horribly wrong with their understeery 017. The following year, they bounced back in style. The Tyrrell 018 was a very effective device indeed - quite possibly the best handling car on the grid. In the hands of Michele Alboreto and Jonathan Palmer, it was decently, rather than exceptionally quick. Palmer, though was no more than a journeyman, and Alboreto never really recovered from the bruising he took at Ferrari through the mid-eighties. When Jean Alesi stepped into the car at the French Grand Prix that year, after Alboreto had fallen out with Tyrrell over a sponsorship clash, he made an instant impact, running as high as second, and finishing fourth.

He would continue to race part-time in the Tyrrell through the rest of the season, as and when his F3000 commitments allowed. Despite competing in only half of the season's 16 races, he finished up 9th in the drivers championship that year. The best result for the 018 though, came in the first race of 1990, where Alesi led Senna in the early stages round the streets of Phoenix (a place where handling was always going to count for more than outright power). In the event, he would finish up second, sealing his reputation as an up and coming talent. He would move to Ferrari the following year, but through a further decade in the sport, never really lived up to that initial promise. All of which inevitably leads towards the conclusion that his apparent brilliance was an illusion - he was a good, rather than a great driver, in a car that was much better than anyone realised.

The Tyrrell 018 and the March 881, good as they were though, were never going to be regular race winners. If, for instance, Senna and Prost had been driving the March, and Gugelmin and Capelli the Mclaren, then March might have picked up a race win or three, but Capelli or Gugelmin would undoubtedly have ended up world champion. This begs an interesting question - was there ever a car that was not merely better than it appeared, but might have been a championship contended had the driving line up been right?

One has to be careful here. The 1995 Williams might have been the best car in the field, but nobody can pretend that this was something the average race fan was entirely unaware of. To my mind, a much better case can be made for the 1990 Williams. OK, so Adrian Newey hadn't yet sprinkled his magic fairy dust at the Grove factory. On the other hand, the Renault V10s were, in retrospect, probably already at least the equal of, and perhaps better than, the lumps produced by Honda and Ferrari, which certainly had power, but were thirsty and heavy. With Thierry Boutsen and Riccardo Patrese, the team won 2 races that year - level pegging with Benetton and well behind Mclaren and Ferrari. But who could honestly say that either driver was on the same kind of level as Prost, Senna or even Piquet. It is hard to know for sure what the ultimate potential of the Williams FW13B was, but one this is for sure - when Mansell joined the team the following year, they became a force to be reckoned with. Coincidence?