Why Lotus must sign Hulkenberg

Lotus has spent the past few months watching helpless as Ferrari's grasping hand has reached through the doors of Enstone, stealing away three of its star employees in Kimi Raikkonen, technical director James Allison and highly rated head of aerodynamics Dirk de Beer.

The dust has now settled and left the team with a choice of two courses of action.

It can lick its wounds, collapse theatrically in the smouldering embers of its hopes of re-emerging as a world championship-winning force and accept that things simply will not be as good as they were.

Or it can pick itself up, dust itself down and do the one thing that will make emphatically clear its post-Raikkonen future remains promising.

And what is this masterplan, this great powerplay? Simple. Sign Nico Hulkenberg.

On the face of it, it seems absurd to endow a driver who has, a few eye-catching moments aside, dwelled exclusively in the grand prix midfield with the qualities of a proven world champion like Raikkonen. But Hulkenberg is the real deal even though he has yet to stand on a grand prix podium.

At 26, he is young enough to have a long future, yet experienced enough to know his way around the world of F1. Most importantly he has all the qualities of a multiple race-winner and very likely a world champion. It's not without reason that, had Raikkonen not signed on the dotted line, Hulkenberg would be a Ferrari driver in 2014.

What now for Lotus after losing Raikkonen? © LAT

Word is that the Lotus team, both technical and management, is sold on the Sauber driver. But there is a gargantuan elephant in the room in the fact that Raikkonen had wanted to stay on but the team ownership could not offer him the necessary guarantees that it could build on the successes of the past 18 months.

You can colour that failure any way - focus on technical guarantees, engine guarantees, sponsorship guarantees - but it all comes down to one thing: a lack of certainty that big money will come rolling into the team to allow it to exploit its potential.

Still without a long searched-for title sponsor, Lotus is a team with aspirations of breaking into the top three but yet to show it has the resources to surpass its current station. It has everything it needs, particularly in terms of quality of personnel despite its recent losses, but cashflow is king.

This means drivers such as Felipe Massa, whose commercial pull in his native Brazil, combined with the country's determination to continue its proud run of having at least one of its drivers on the F1 grid, have to come into the equation. It's not that Massa would be a bad signing as he has a wealth of experience and should pick up some decent results, but he is not the stellar catch he would have been five years ago.

A squad with world championship aspirations needs a title calibre driver. And of all the drivers on the grid without an F1 crown on their CV, Hulkenberg is the most convincing and therefore the best available driver to pick up where Raikkonen will have left off at the end of the year.

First and foremost, he is damned fast. He always has been. He has a stellar junior record, but as with all CVs at that level it is not simply the results that impress. Speak to those who have worked with him and they pick him out as not merely a very good driver, but a potentially great one.

He also has that rare ability to prise open a door that falls ajar for him and nail it when opportunity knocks. It's a rarer skill than you might think and tends to be shared by the drivers capable of winning the title.

Hulkenberg is the real deal and what Lotus needs © LAT

His pole position for Williams at Interlagos in 2010 was absolutely stunning. While the team called its strategy to perfection, Hulkenberg still had to deliver and set not one but two laps good enough for pole to prevail in a straight fight with F1's top drivers. He did this knowing he was almost certainly out of the team for the following season thanks to the arrival of PDVSA sponsorship and Pastor Maldonado.

Often, Hulkenberg's rookie season is described as unimpressive, but after a difficult start he showed increasingly well relative to Rubens Barrichello in the second half of the year. Remember, this was a rookie driver at a time when in-season testing was banned, up against the most experienced driver in the history of grand prix racing and an 11-time winner.

At Interlagos two years later, he fought for victory in a Force India. He and Jenson Button stayed out on slicks in the damp and opened up an enormous lead. Button is regarded as the best slicks-in-the-wet driver on the F1 grid, but Hulkenberg is better.

No matter that a tiny mistake in difficult track conditions led to him losing the rear and hitting Lewis Hamilton later in the race. He was fighting for the lead in a decent, but far from the best, car. The mark of a superstar, particularly coming at the end of a second half of the campaign during which he regularly excelled.

His performances in a tricky Sauber have also shown those qualities. A race-leading cameo in China earned him some early headlines, but his outstanding drive to fifth place in Italy two weeks ago reminded everyone he could deliver when fighting for the top positions.

Some question his consistency, but that is a difficult thing to show in an inconsistent car. In a Lotus, he can be every bit as consistent as Raikkonen has been, at least once he is settled in.

This is what makes him the perfect driver for what should be a revitalised Lotus squad next year. A great pilot cannot make the car go faster than is physically possible but he can extract the maximum from it.

And while Romain Grosjean remains a driver of tremendous potential there are still legitimate questions about whether he can realise it. Double his 2013 points tally so far (which would still leave him behind Kimi) and Lotus would be in the fight for second in the constructors' championship rather than marooned in fourth.

Grosjean is yet to realise his full potential © LAT

This is why Lotus needs Hulkenberg. None of the available alternatives will perform as well as Hulkenberg will, none of them have so regularly shown that extra edge that can make them a champion.

If Lotus cannot take him on for financial reasons, so be it. If there is a financial reality to be faced, it is better to have a functioning team on the grid with decent drivers rather than a struggling one with the great line-up that does not have the resources to put into the car and personnel.

The 'pay driver' path was one it went down with Vitaly Petrov in 2010/11 and has since, to its credit, rejected.

But if Lotus does return to that strategy, everyone at Enstone can disabuse themselves of the notion that they are working for an upwardly mobile team.

If Lotus does take Hulkenberg, it is clear evidence that the team has not put all its eggs in the Raikkonen basket and been willing to back down without a fight after losing him and some marquee personnel.

The Finn is the past for Lotus, or will be at the end of the season. Hulkenberg is the future, or at least he is what the future should be if it is a team ready and able to keep making progress along its current impressive trajectory.

And if Grosjean stays on in the other car and can transition from his current position of teetering on the edge of getting it together to delivering on his prodigious potential, that would make a strong pairing.

What's more there's a good chance that if Eric Boullier does sign him, Hulkenberg's performance will make Ferrari wonder if they chose the right man.