Formula 1's best supporting acts of 2016

Both of Formula 1's on-site feeder series' title fights went to the final round, and both were won by highly-rated F1 junior drivers. But the 2016 GP2 and GP3 seasons were about more than just their champions.

Nineteen drivers won races across the two categories this season, highlighting the depth of talent that litters the F1 undercard.

Here are the leading performers from each series, starting with GP3...

THE TOP 10 GP3 DRIVERS OF 2016

10 RALPH BOSCHUNG
Team: Koiranen GP
Starts: 12
Wins: 1
Championship position: 11th

The Swiss was Koiranen's quickest qualifier at each of the first three rounds - against Parry - and was well in the mix at the Red Bull Ring, where he battled hard with the ART guns before settling back in fourth.

He took a win the following day, but that rain-soaked race was a bit of a non-event with very few laps of actual competition. Still, Boschung did enough to suggest that he'd have been in the mix for seventh in the championship had he not been forced to miss most of the late-season races due to budgetary problems.

That just gives him the nod over Arjun Maini, who joined GP3 for the third round with Jenzer Motorsport and immediately found a happy knack of getting himself at the front of reversed-grid races.

9 NIREI FUKUZUMI
Team: ART Grand Prix
Starts: 18
Wins: 0 (best result 2nd)
Championship position: 7th

So, you're a 19-year-old European who's sent to the alien culture of Japan to be part of a four-car team alongside three future superstars who know most of the tracks. That would be tough, and it works the opposite way too.

Honda-backed Fukuzumi had great equipment at ART and generally made good use of it, learning strongly in his first season out of his homeland. He was only once out of the top 10 in qualifying and, although he got involved in a couple of incidents, he had a good run of results at the end of the year.

8 MATT PARRY
Team: Koiranen GP
Starts: 18
Wins: 1
Championship position: 9th

What happened at Silverstone pretty much summed up his season. Parry set a time good for the front row, but his onboard camera was being shown on TV at that moment and a very minor track-limits offence - indiscernible trackside - got him penalised. Ditto front-wing damage and an enforced pitstop in race two.

Parry was a proper contender through July and August and usually top-six on the grid in that period, but was often out of luck. A win at the Hungaroring and podium at Hockenheim for the Koiranen ace were the highlights of his second season.

7 JAKE HUGHES
Team: DAMS
Starts: 18
Wins: 2
Championship position: 8th

He was part of an all-rookie GP3 line-up, and they were all driving for DAMS - new to GP3 but utterly mega in GP2 and Formula Renault 3.5. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a bit. Hughes grabbed pole on his debut but after that it was a struggle as the team suffered from inconsistent form, struggling especially to switch on its tyres on shiny new track surfaces.

What was impressive about the 'Banzai Brummie', however, was that he was six times the fastest DAMS driver in qualifying, and usually its best racer. Against FR2.0 star Jorg and F3 grad Ferrucci that was highly impressive.

6 NYCK DE VRIES
Team: ART Grand Prix
Starts: 18
Wins: 2
Championship position: 6th

Apart from his superb third season of Formula Renault 2.0 in 2014, the diminutive Dutchman still hasn't quite lived up to the reputation he carried with him from karting.

The McLaren junior can be super-fast - he claimed a pole at the Hungaroring - and he can pull off some spectacular overtaking moves, but such an adventurous spirit could sometimes lead him into trouble too.

Bearing in mind his experience and speed, he shouldn't have been so far adrift of ART team-mates Leclerc and Albon in the points.

5 ANTONIO FUOCO
Team: Trident
Starts: 18
Wins: 2
Championship position: 3rd

After trouncing the field in Formula Renault ALPS in 2013, Ferrari protege Fuoco proved a bit disappointing in F3 in '14 and his rookie GP3 campaign last year.

He looked much better with Trident this season, especially on a gloomy British GP Sunday morning, where he carved through from an early eighth place to win on a slippery track, and pulled off an exquisite outside pass on Leclerc at Stowe on the way.

His season tailed off badly after the summer break, although he still vanquished the Arden duo. He may find it tough alongside fellow Ferrari junior Leclerc at Prema in GP2.

4 JACK AITKEN
Team: Arden
Starts: 18
Wins: 1
Championship position: 5th

Once the 2015 Formula Renault Eurocup champion got his head around the transition from Michelins to the GP3 Pirellis he made big steps forward. He lost the qualifying fight within Arden 8-1 to Dennis, but he usually wasn't far behind and was in the top four qualifiers at each of the last three rounds.

The Scottish-Korean Londoner was also a very strong racer, often advancing in company with Dennis, and deserved more than his solitary reversed-grid win at Spa. Yas Marina, for example, should have been his but for an Albon mistake. The Renault F1 junior would be a title favourite if he sticks around in 2017.

3 JAKE DENNIS
Team: Arden
Starts: 18
Wins: 2
Championship position: 4th

The lanky Brit would have pressed Leclerc quite hard for the title if he'd scored the points he should have done over the first half of the season - some of that was his fault, but he was also pretty short on luck.

As the campaign wore on he was usually someone who would be on the move, partly due to his racecraft, partly thanks to Arden's great race set-ups. The British team has worked hard on getting the Pirellis to last and while it lags behind ART on qualifying pace, its drivers - who were also well-trained in the art of tyre management - usually went forward in races.

In a way Dennis was the star of the end of the season, so it would be a loss to single-seaters if his talent is to be siphoned off into the sportscar world. He deserves to go a lot further.

2 ALEXANDER ALBON
Team: ART Grand Prix
Starts: 18
Wins: 4
Championship position: 2nd

Many who've worked with Albon reckon he's one of the brightest prospects on the single-seater scene, and after a scratchy year in F3 he finally got the chance to show that. That he made the top two in qualifying five times proves he was only a shade behind the very highly regarded Leclerc, his team-mate at ART. And he actually won more races than anyone else.

KTR, his old Formula Renault 2.0 team, reckoned he was close to par with Stoffel Vandoorne, who that team also ran, so he'll get chance to prove that with his likely move to GP2 with ART. As far as 2016 was concerned, this was a breakout season during which he qualified and raced well.

1 CHARLES LECLERC
Team: ART Grand Prix
Starts: 18
Wins: 3
Championship position: 1st

Here is a driver brimming with talent, arguably the most exciting - in terms of what he may achieve one day in Formula 1 - of anyone following in the wake of Max Verstappen. Yet the manner in which he operates is the polar opposite.

To make a lazy comparison, if Verstappen is a thrilling, dynamic fighter of a new Senna, it's entirely feasible that Leclerc is a new Prost - smooth, classy, elegant, unruffled.

'Saturday statistics' - which comprise qualifying and race one in GP3 - are interesting because they remove the skewing effect of the reversed-grid races. On this basis, Leclerc - in his rookie GP3 season with ART - is a more-dominant champion on 162 points to the 120 of Albon and 100 of Fuoco.

That paints a more-representative picture of a season in which Leclerc was four times on pole, six times in the qualifying top two. He joins an illustrious list of GP3 champions and if he doesn't follow predecessors Gutierrez, Bottas, Kvyat and Ocon to an F1 race seat there's no justice.

THE TOP 10 GP2 DRIVERS OF 2016

10 NOBUHARU MATSUSHITA
Team: ART Grand Prix
Starts: 20
Wins: 1
Championship position: 11th

Honda's man took a lot of brickbats for the way he fumbled the restarts in Baku, resulting in a chain of accidents and his ban from the following weekend in Austria. OK he screwed up, but it was a very long flat-out run to the startline and it would have been interesting to see if any calamities would have broken out if the F1 field had gone under caution.

Other than that he was a decent competitor, qualifying four times in the top five with ART. He romped the Monaco sprint race but his best drive was probably second in the Abu Dhabi feature race.

That allowed him to narrowly get our verdict for the final top 10 spot from Artem Markelov, who apart from his controversial Monaco win displayed an uncanny ability to eke out great tyre life during a strong early-summer run.

9 OLIVER ROWLAND
Team: MP Motorsport
Starts: 22
Wins: 0 (Best result 2nd)
Championship position: 9th

The season started brightly enough with MP Motorsport, with Rowland strong in Monaco and looking like he could win in Baku, then topping the points after a feisty double podium at Silverstone. The well-known Rowland racecraft was clearly on display.

Then it fell apart. There seemed to be a breakdown in communication between the driver and the team. MP went back to basics on its preferred set-up for the Abu Dhabi finale and Rowland's form improved, only to be undone by an error in his pitstop. When King tested the MP car post-season, he rated it at least as strong as any he'd driven this year.

8 LUCA GHIOTTO
Team: Trident
Starts: 22
Wins: 1
Championship position: 8th

Not much went right for the 2015 GP3 runner-up with Trident in the early races, but by July he was showing the kind of form that had Esteban Ocon seriously worried last year.

His performance at Silverstone, charging from the back of the grid after electronic problems to fifth, and then pressing King hard for sprint-race honours on Sunday, was superb. Ditto Hockenheim, where he went from 13th to second behind only Sirotkin, who had a controversial tyre change...

Ghiotto is perhaps not the greatest qualifier, but he repeated his terrific racecraft from GP3. He'll be a real contender if he returns in 2017, and the rumour mill links him with Arden.

7 JORDAN KING
Team: Racing Engineering
Starts: 22
Wins: 2
Championship position: 7th

Against the highly rated Rowland and Lynn, not many would have predicted him to be the top Brit in GP2, but that's exactly what King was heading for until the very last race of the season. He's not the fastest qualifier but seems unflappable and calm in the races.

This resulted in a great mid-season run of first-first-second in successive sprint races and left him only two points shy of Gasly (and joint second with Giovinazzi) on points scored in reversed-grid events. He showed greater speed later in the season and would shine with one more year; MP Motorsport is certainly trying very hard to get him on board.

6 ALEX LYNN
Team: DAMS
Starts: 22
Wins: 3
Championship position: 6th

His season - which ended with a third reversed-grid win that enabled him to equal his 2015 points position of sixth - was a lot stronger than it appears on paper. DAMS, which lost technical director Remi Decorzent over the winter to the DS Virgin Formula E team, faded dramatically this year after a promising start at Barcelona, and it was Lynn's perception that suffered the most.

But he comfortably won the intra-team qualifying battle 10-1 with Latifi (a driver who is capable of great speed on his day). And when he got the opportunities to win reversed-grid races - Barcelona, Hockenheim, Yas Marina - he converted them extremely well.

5 NORMAN NATO
Team: Racing Engineering
Starts: 22
Wins: 2
Championship position: 5th

Since his very strong Formula Renault 2.0 season of 2012 this Frenchman had slipped below the radar firmly into journeyman territory. But with Racing Engineering he looked a proper talent, taking two wins and robbed of a third in Monaco, a place where he always shines.

He also outscored the very capable King in the intra-team qualifying battle by the margin of 10-1, including a very well-worked pole at Silverstone. A nice guy who can have a very strong future as a professional driver.

4 SERGEY SIROTKIN
Team: ART Grand Prix
Starts: 22
Wins: 2
Championship position: 3rd

He pipped Marciello to third in the points at the final round on countback (Sirotkin had two wins to the zero of Marciello) but in reality, with an ART car, he should have finished closer to the Prema drivers. Three pole positions (a higher tally than Giovinazzi) prove his speed, and his early-laps fight to take the win in the Hungaroring sprint race proves he has the racecraft.

But there were also costly errors, such as his crash in Monaco while chasing Nato for what should have been the win. Impressive, but maybe he would benefit from one more year at this level.

3 RAFFAELE MARCIELLO
Team: Russian Time
Starts: 22
Wins: 0 (Best result 2nd)
Championship position: 4th

He was error-prone when he won his F3 title in 2013, but since then Marciello has matured into an extremely rounded, solid and rapid contender. He didn't win a race in 2016 with Russian Time, but his 19 points-scoring finishes from the 22 races is a wonderful record in a series as unpredictable as GP2.

His best shot at a win was possibly the Red Bull Ring, but the rainstorm and red-flagging of the race left him on the wrong strategy and instead he trailed home the shock Campos Racing one-two.

There were perhaps a couple of other times when he could have taken a win, but he did seem to suffer with tyre degradation and perhaps, with an eye on endurance racing, he knew he wasn't driving for his career to the same extent as others.

2 ANTONIO GIOVINAZZI
Team: Prema Racing
Starts: 22
Wins: 5
Championship position: 2nd

If you took all the positive stereotypes of an Italian racing driver - passion, charm and aggression - that would be Giovinazzi. And he doesn't exhibit the negative cliches such as flakiness or unpredictability. Don't underestimate his contribution to Prema's success. Sure, Gasly's experience helped Giovinazzi, but the rookie's speed also pushed Gasly on.

He was the most exciting driver out there, as brilliant wheel-to-wheel stuff with Rowland at Silverstone and Sirotkin at Sepang attest, plus his mugging of Gasly in Baku.

You could point to incidents that denied Giovinazzi the title: he could have been eighth - and earned reversed-grid pole - at Barcelona but was penalised for an incident with Marciello; he lost seventh - and reversed-grid front row - in Monaco due to a penalty for cutting the chicane.

Then again, he lucked in at Monza with the safety car; if his qualifying times hadn't been wiped for illegal tyre pressures, he wouldn't have been in a position to benefit and win.

1 PIERRE GASLY
Team: Prema Racing
Starts: 22
Wins: 4
Championship position: 1st

There were never any question marks over his speed, but Gasly had a few rough edges that needed smoothing before he hatched mid-season as a fully fledged title contender.

The desire - which led to mistakes or being too hard on the tyres - was tempered and, once he broke his duck at Silverstone, he was tough to stop. That was also the weekend when he ended three successive outqualifyings by Giovinazzi and he finally pipped his Prema Racing team-mate 5-4.

The biggest technical change to the five-year-old Dallara GP2/11 this year was the switch from Hitco to Carbone Industrie brakes and this undoubtedly shook up the competitive order. Led by former ART technical director Guillaume Capietto, Prema worked hard on this and others were astounded at its drivers' braking ability as early as Baku in June.

Gasly made full use of this and, although Giovinazzi had some moments of bad luck, so too did the Red Bull junior: a Monza win went begging, for example, due to the safety-car screw-up. His title-clinching pole and win in Abu Dhabi was a masterclass. Deserving champion.