Mark Hughes' Top Ten

9. Rubens Barrichello

There was nothing that suggested Barrichello - the most capped F1 driver of all time - wasn't operating at the same level as when he won grands prix for Ferrari. Despite being given a dog of a Honda for the second consecutive year, he remained positive and continued giving his all.

His flowing style and ready improvisation - which caught Schumacher's attention from time to time at Ferrari - allowed him to adapt to the car's limitations more readily than his teammate, even though the two-year pattern suggests that Jenson Button is faster whenever the car is working well.

He gave Honda their only podium this year with an inspired choice - his own - to switch to extreme wets at Silverstone. He's also possibly the best analyst of a car's behaviour, and the team learned things from him that Button had not uncovered. If, as seems likely, he's not with the team next year to benefit from improvements, it will be a great pity.

8. Jarno Trulli

Jarno wore his mantle of team leader very gracefully, could still produce a special qualifying lap, worked well with the team, was as error-free as Kubica and showed he still has the necessary desire.

With a Toyota that no longer over-worked its tyres, there were none of the races where his pace fell away. There was occasionally a 'Trulli train' but only because he'd either transcended the car in qualifying or had a very heavy fuel load - such as in Singapore.

His drive there with a heavy, one-stop fuel load, with a car that hated the severe bumps, was heroic. A cruel hydraulics failure put him out near the end, losing him a likely fifth. It would have been easy to have put the car into the barriers, yet he'd been flawless, racing hard with unerring precision. This was probably his most impressive season to date.

7. Kimi Raikkonen

He's here only because on his good days he could still reach a level attainable only to the very few, as we saw in Malaysia, Spain, France and Belgium, even if he was robbed of wins in the latter two through events outside his control.

In a car working the way he needs it to, with a front end that responds instantly, he is still devastating. In qualifying at Magny-Cours - plenty of long corners to get temperature into the front tyres - he took a comfortable pole and teammate Massa unable to live with him. But, in fact, had Kimi not abandoned a lap (because Massa had failed to beat his initial effort) he would have been 0.6 seconds quicker still! It was a huge performance and he retained it in the race until his exhaust overheated.

It's tantalising to ponder how he would have fared against Hamilton in an identical McLaren, for the MP4-23's very different handling to the F2008 would surely have suited him to the ground. As it was, he was unable to adapt himself to the Ferrari's qualifying characteristics at most of the tracks and over the season was flat out-performed by Massa.

6. Mark Webber

On cue, Webber delivered a great qualifying lap, having a super-sensitive feel for the tyres' grip and the ability to brake super-late without locking up.

Mark Webber qualifies the Red Bull on the front row at Silverstone © XPB

The Red Bull RB4, with its forward weight and aero distribution, was a car that particularly suited his style, but he's been quick in every F1 car he's ever driven. Like Trulli, he's still trying to shed a reputation for not being as strong a racer as a qualifier. This year he again refuted that reputation with his performances, yet the stigma remains.

In the first half of '08, a Red Bull was capable of lower-end points - and Webber scored them, with terrific, if overlooked, drives. In the second half of the year, the car was leapfrogged, notably by Toro Rosso, and was no longer a potential scorer, yet his sequence of three eighths and two ninths was probably the maximum the car was capable of. He was robbed of what would have been a fortunate second - possibly a win - in Singapore by a bizarre electrical failure in the car's transmission. Says everything about his luck.

5. Sebastian Vettel

The youngest GP winner maximised the unexpectedly great opportunity a Toro Rosso offered him. There is something Schumacher-like in the fuss-free way he hustles the car, the effortless speed in the wet and the special car control when he overdoes entry speed.

It took a time for him to avoid early-lap skirmishes (not all his fault), while his technical feedback needed to - and did - improve quickly. The STR3 became competitive in the season's second half as the team understood it better, with the pairing becoming a fixture in Q3.

His crowning moment came with that great victory from pole at Monza. Had Ferrari and McLaren got their acts together in Italy, it would likely have been a great drive to fifth, but he made only one notable error all race in tricky conditions - and his car control rescued him from that.

4. Felipe Massa

Felipe reached a new level this year, one that few would have bet on. The errors and lock-ups became fewer, he gained in confidence and retained his real strengths - fast-corner commitment, great in the braking zones and carrying momentum with an understeer balance (crucial with this car).

Guided by race engineer Rob Smedley, his approach matured and Ferrari began to really get behind him. In the team's eyes, he began the season still as 'the kid' but ended it as 'the man' and the way he coped with the pressure of the title fight, not to mention the dignity he showed when he lost it, was deeply impressive.

He produced some huge qualifying laps, none more so than at Singapore, where he was 0.6sec clear of the field. Perhaps even better than that was his pole-lap at Monaco, a place he'd always struggled at. With coaxing from Smedley - "you're driving like a girl!" - he pushed harder than he thought was possible into Ste Devote and found a whole new world. It was perhaps the most significant moment of his season.

3. Fernando Alonso

There was a period mid-season where he looked far from 'the most complete driver in F1', as some labelled him. When he wasn't crashing, trying too hard to overcome the limitations of the Renault, he was skipping debriefs, so disillusioned had he become.

He began the year in great form, hustling Kovalainen's McLaren and beating it to fourth place in Melbourne, but his mid-season doldrums began around Monte Carlo where he lost patience at Nick Heidfeld's pace and tried a move that was never on. He was in similar bull-in-a-china-shop mode in Germany.

Double winner Fernando Alonso © XPB

But he returned from the summer break refocused and, when the R28's development programme began finding it some real pace, he started to look once more like the Alonso of old. His victory in Singapore owed everything to the fortuitous timing of teammate Piquet's accident, but his follow-up win at Fuji showed him at the absolute top of his game, not only driving magnificently but actually dictating strategy calls from the cockpit. Then, he did indeed look like 'the most complete driver', and he only misses out on the top spot because of that mid-season lull.

2. Lewis Hamilton

Some might consider it churlish not to place the world champion at number one, but the sport is way too complex for that to automatically follow. Given the car at his disposal, the towering ability he displayed at his peak and the setbacks suffered by main rival Massa, Hamilton made hard work of clinching that crown.

Look no further than the emotion that can cloud his judgement for the reasons why. He made more fundamental errors through the season than any recent world champion. But he also scaled some very special heights. Maybe the two things are different sides of the same coin, or maybe the errors were simply a function of his relative inexperience.

Whatever, he's a fantastically exciting performer and has already produced drives that will be remembered for as long as people talk about motor racing. His drive in the Silverstone rain stands as the seasonal highlight of pure virtuosity and he will, in time, become more formidable precisely because of the legend that will grow around him and the way a great team has coalesced around him.

1. Robert Kubica

He routinely extracted every last bit of performance from a car not in the same league as the McLaren and Ferrari, yet was the safest pair of hands in the business. He made no significant errors all year, despite regularly transcending the BMW and one inevitably wondered if he wouldn't have dominated the championship had he been in either of the top two cars.

His peaks were maybe not as high as Hamilton's, but they weren't so far away. It was a performance all the more remarkable given his apparently combative relationship with his team. Leading the world championship after Canada, almost half way through the season, he was deeply frustrated the team didn't seem interested in throwing everything towards keeping him there.

He's a simple soul, has no time for anything he thinks isn't going to make him faster - and maybe that could turn out to be his only weakness, for sometimes it's a more relationship-driven complex game than he seems to realise. But for relentless performance in a year in which the two title contenders made several errors, he has to be top.