Top 10 Driver Rankings of past seasons
To go with the past pre-season predictions thread, I decided to put some retrospective driver rankings of past seasons cos I thought it might be interesting. Feel free to comment. :)
1994
10.Johnny Herbert - Lotus wasn't too bad a car, but it was worst of the established teams, so Herbert did well to lead the team. His latent talent was shown with 4th on the grid at Monza - where on earth did he get that from? Finished close to the points on his one-off with Ligier too but disappointed in his final 2 races for Benetton.
9.David Coulthard - Another driver with a disjointed season. In the circumstances impressed, though never outqualified Hill. Could have won Portugal and was right up there at Monza before running out of fuel.
8.Ukyo Katayama - Pulled a great season out of nowhere to surprise everywhere. It was a VERY Maldonado-2012-like season, but without the big result, and wasting many good opportunities with errors, but the pace was there.
7.Heinz-Harald Frentzen - Fantastic 5th on the grid on debut, only outqualified by his team-mate once all season. A fixture in the top 10 in qualifying, with some sensational performances including fastest at Jerez on Friday (before being bumped to 3rd the next day) and 4th in Japan. Couldn't convert into big results though came 5th in only his second race.
6.Rubens Barrichello - Another driver who wowed by finishing a brilliant 6th in the WDC with 19pts! And he could have had so much more. Compare this to Irvine's 6pts, and you see he did a brilliant job. Another driver usually up there in qualifying - including that pole position at Spa. However, spinning out in race amongst other things highlighted racecraft was lacking somewhat.
5.Jean Alesi - Very quick and very unfortunate, especially losing a certain win at Monza from pole.
4.Gerhard Berger - Gerhard is ahead of Alesi here because he was no slower, but had a much better head, putting together a great season - including 6 podiums, and that memorable win at Hockenheim on his way to a clear 3rd in the championship with 41pts, to signal Ferrari's resurgence and recovery from an awful 3 past seasons.
3.Mika Hakkinen - just misses out on 2nd although I feel he was much quicker than Damon. Outqualified Brundle in every race - and only Schumacher had ever managed that before. Scored 5 podiums but never looked like winning as the car was far too slow. Was banned for a race for causing a crash - he had been involved in several collisions but overall did a great job to come 4th overall, with a strong final part of the season to vault up the standings.
2.Damon Hill - Previously a no.2, suddenly and without warning had the focus and expectation to fight for the title in terrible circumstances. He probably had a big role in sorting out the Williams car from it's shaky start, given the same thing happened when he was at Arrows and Jordan. Co-incidence? This is why he just sneaked 2nd here, as well as putting together a better season than Hakkinen, maximising every opportunity when many others would have crumbled. Tellingly, it wasn't he who cracked at the season finale, and he would probably have won that race even without the infamous collision. However, while Williams was nowhere near as dominant as before, they on balance surely had the best car again by some margin.
1.Michael Schumacher - Taking Benetton to unknown heights was an incredible job when Williams and McLaren had previously been unbeatable. Traction control rumours put a dampener on things, but this would certainly be countered by the large number of disqualifications, without which Michael could have won 12 or more races out of 16!