Mark Hughes' top 10 F1 drivers of 2012

Triple champion Sebastian Vettel? Ferrari star Fernando Alonso? The unlucky Lewis Hamilton? Or comeback king Kimi Raikkonen?

All of these drivers starred in 2012 and they weren't the only ones. With eight different winners and incredible races there was plenty of scope to shine during the season and many did.

But some shone brighter than others, so here are the 10 F1 drivers Mark Hughes believes were the best of the best in 2012.

10. Pastor Maldonado (YV)
Championship position: 15th
Team: Williams
Starts: 20
Wins: 1
Poles: 1
Fastest laps: 0

He ought not to be here. He made way too many errors, threw far too many points away, got pulled into that red-mist frenzy where all reason can go to hell too often.

It was as if he drove around looking for a fight at times - and his point-blank refusal to give an inch of racing room in combat was downright scary at times. And yet... there is a fantastic driver locked in there somewhere and at Barcelona he found his way out of the fog.

He's brilliantly quick, albeit in a ragged way that leaves him having to improvise new ways of being so each lap, and can ally that to a wonderfully sensitive feel for the tyres. The Williams boys are regularly amazed at the fidelity of that feedback from the rubber and he was a large part of why that team was one of the first to understand what the Pirellis required.

These are rare skills and they've allowed him in through the back door, shimmying this way and that and following a logic only he knows.

He's trying hard to decouple the emotion from the battle, and he understands the mechanism that triggers it all. But in moments of stress we revert to old habits and that understanding becomes subservient to the rage.

9. Daniel Ricciardo (AUS)
Championship position: 18th
Team: Toro Rosso
Starts: 20
Wins: 0
Poles: 0
Fastest laps: 0

Everything's light to the touch with Danny and it's misleading. The laughing, smiling demeanour can make it seem like he's not serious or focused, the smooth inputs in the car can make it appear like he's not on the edge. But both impressions would be wrong.

Ricciardo absolutely wrung the neck of a less-than-great Toro Rosso this year and into the latter half of the season regularly backed that up with tough, relentless race performances that got him into the points.

Unlike a Sergio Perez or a Romain Grosjean he was not super-strong for four or five races but missing in action or a liability in many of the others; once he got his head around what the tyres required of him he was always maximising what was at his disposal.

8. Nico Rosberg (D)
Championship position: 9th
Team: Mercedes
Starts: 20
Wins: 1
Poles: 1
Fastest laps: 2

"What was Nico's time?" Asked Michael Schumacher of his Mercedes team-mate over the radio just after completing his own Q3 lap in China. "Oh..." he said upon being told. Then a gap... "Well done to him."

It scrambled Michael's mind and secured Rosberg pole. It was one of the best single laps anyone put together all season, and he was then faultless from the front in taking his first victory.

That was only his due, for he's operated at a high level for seven seasons now. But that was early season when the Merc was quick, when its double DRS gave it a qualifying advantage before the development limitation it imposed had become apparent. What about in adversity, when the car had dropped into the midfield?

Very difficult to rate a guy in circumstances like that, but there was a run where his 16-year-older team-mate Schumacher had it over him, was regularly quicker - and Michael was not the Michael he used to be. So that has to raise questions.

7. Nico Hulkenberg (D)
Championship position: 11th
Team: Force India
Starts: 20
Wins: 0
Poles: 0
Fastest laps: 1

The smiling hustler who just lets his driving do the talking, whose sunny disposition gets everyone in the team onboard with him, did his stuff in 2012, built on that Williams foundation season of 2010. F1 got a fuller reading of Hulkenberg this time and what it read promised great things.

He's underlined his claim to be one of F1's great wet-weather drivers too many times for it to be dismissed - but he's terrific in the dry too, his gung-ho style moderated when the tyres dictated to emerge ahead of as tough a team-mate as Paul di Resta.

The transfer to Sauber should be seen as a move into the fringes of the Ferrari family, but not a binding one. The future's up to him: if he can achieve his potential he'd be wasted as an Alonso tailgunner.

6. Mark Webber (AUS)
Championship position: 6th
Team: Red Bull
Starts: 20
Wins: 2
Poles: 2
Fastest laps: 1

The driver who was pounded into the ground by Vettel's blown-diffuser trick techniques in 2011 bounced back right to where he'd been in 2010 - a hard, hustling handful, flat through the fast corners, adrenalin pumping. He'd rather go beyond feasibility than accept anything less.

While the Red Bull RB8 was just like any other racing car into the first part of the season, Webber was absolutely as powerful a force as Vettel. Those victories in Monaco and at Silverstone showed Vettel what happens if he's off his game even just a little.

Given the season Mark had just been through, doesn't that just say everything about the competitive, combative spirit within? This creates problems in a Seb-centric team - but it's a great problem to have.

Team boss Christian Horner may have been unimpressed with Webber's leaning on Vettel into Turn 1 of the title decider, but what about the seven points the exact same attitude had taken off Vettel's title rival by catching and passing him at Silverstone? Combine Webber's spirit with Raikkonen's God-gift and what a driver that would be.

5. Kimi Raikkonen (FIN)
Championship position: 3rd
Team: Lotus
Starts: 20
Wins: 1
Poles: 0
Fastest laps: 2

Low wattage redefined, Kimi's return was as near to perfect for him as could be in a modern F1 replete with sponsor days and inane media questions.

Lotus is a team asking next to nothing of him other than being Kimi - just getting in the car, asking for what he needs, then expressing a talent given him on a day the gods must have been feeling very generous.

He's missing a couple of tenths from his great days, when he used to make a Sauber or a McLaren dizzy with his high-wire acrobatics. But he's slotted into exactly where he was in the Ferrari days, which is still way beyond the dreams of most of the other guys on the grid: a practised, clean success machine. He could get those missing tenths back - but it would involve too much compromise in the rest of his life.

How you feel about that is irrelevant to him, which in turn either enrages or endears or even excites. That's how Kimi incites such an amazing range of emotions- by displaying almost none.

He likes to nudge against the limits of the tyre on entry to the corner and he needed steering with less sensation pollution. Once they understood what he was asking for, he was even better.

4. Jenson Button (GB)
Championship position: 5th
Team: McLaren
Starts: 20
Wins: 3
Poles: 1
Fastest laps: 2

When the car and he are in love, in synch, each anticipating the other's every move and nuance, Button is untouchable, nuzzling up to limits out of reach even to those who can rescue miracles from disaster: Melbourne, Spa, the early drizzly stages of Interlagos.

But a racing car's not usually so cooperative, even in this simulation age. It usually requires a bit of cajoling, a bit of working around, some acceptance that it's not always going to be on exactly the wavelength you like. When that happens he can lose the thread spectacularly, and the capricious traits of the Pirellis in the first half of the season, when people didn't understand them, caused him to get even more lost, spun him into a three-race sequence of oblivion.

But he got it back, and don't ever underestimate the steel fist beneath that purple velvet glove.

Three years, almost 60 races, as team-mate to one of the fastest of all time - and JB's record is comparable.

3. Sebastian Vettel (D)
Championship position: 1st
Team: Red Bull
Starts: 20
Wins: 5
Poles: 6
Fastest laps: 6

Alonso and Hamilton may go out of their way to let the world know they rate only each other and that Vettel is just a good driver in a great car, but he's rattled them into saying those things.

Rattled them by his very acceptance that he's benefiting from being part of a very special partnership, shrugging his shoulders and smiling that sunny smile, saying he's very proud to be part of it.

It's a reaction that's guaranteed to wind them up, surely - effectively saying: 'Yes, you're right. That's why I keep beating you and why I will continue to do so.'

He's every bit intelligent enough for that to be his actual belief. But to take advantage of what Red Bull provides him with still requires a pretty special talent.

He races exceptionally well anyway - look at that drive to second at Spa - but when the RB8 was induced to behave like the RB7 from Singapore onwards, he was able to conjure the tricks that went with that. He was able to use the on-throttle exhaust blowing to stand on the gas to stop the entry oversteer he'd induced with his speed, just as he'd been able to do through 2011.

In putting the pieces of a qualifying lap together built up over a weekend, building to a crescendo of perfection, he's perhaps the best in the business. If there are still a few flaws in his race game - a bit of over-emotion in times of stress perhaps - recall his age and the fact that he's still improving.

2. Lewis Hamilton (GB)
Championship position: 4th
Team: McLaren
Starts: 20
Wins: 4
Poles: 7
Fastest laps: 1

An F1 car yearns to let rip through a top-gear blast, tons of downforce grinding it into the ground. Twists between the walls like those at the end of the lap in Singapore or Abu Dhabi feel too tight and restrictive for such a machine.

But Hamilton can make his car do tricks here, can cast a spell over it that gives him liberty to do anything he wishes. There is no-one else around who can even approach the level of acrobatics he can conjure around such places and if this is all F1 was - driving an F1 car like it was a 750bhp kart - then no-one else but Lewis would ever win a race.

This year he's combined that with the perfect balancing point of restraint and aggression in his driving, as dictated by the Pirellis, to maximise a great car. The dips and inconsistencies of 2011 were but a memory - though one he invoked at Spa - and once he'd made the decision about his future it was as if he just relaxed into the enormity of his natural gift and expressed himself even more freely.

There's a whole dimension called leadership missing from his game though. How else could a team not be dumbstruck that such a talent was leaving?

1. Fernando Alonso (E)
Championship position: 2nd
Team: Ferrari
Starts: 20
Wins: 3
Poles: 2
Fastest laps: 0

A magnificent warrior's campaign of season-long relentlessness, locking onto every half-opportunity and never letting go. It was as if pre-season he took on board the enormity of the task of going for a title with this car and realised he'd need to produce not just special, but sustained special.

With the possible exception of Valencia, there were no drives of the gods, but he scored 9.9 out of 10 in every department. In an off-the-pace car for the first four races of the season, the chink of a chance arrived with a downpour on the Sepang grid and there was an inevitability about his rise to the front.

With a half-decent car he produced the perfect qualifying lap in front of his adoring fans at Barcelona, transcending the car's level by about two rows.

In Monaco the car was driveable, but not particularly quick out of the corners or at the end of the straights - yet had he not been called in for his stop when setting purple sector times he'd likely have won on raw and relentless pace.

To have seen him at Tabac dancing between brakes and steering, a lot of initial lock, then less as he came off the brakes and gave the tyres more bite, and yet shaving the inside barrier by millimetres - every time - was to understand how the lap time was coming.

These early races set the tone of his season and he maintained that throughout, inspiring and cajoling the team along the way.

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