MPH: Mark Hughes on...

I've just received a copy of what is already guaranteed to be the most contentious motorsport book of the year: Alan Henry's Top 100 F1 Drivers Of All Time. Having once compiled a similar list that ran in another magazine a few years ago, I know exactly what he's letting himself in for here - a lot of abuse, only some of it good natured.

But of all the people who will know this in advance, Alan is the one - he has for the past couple of decades been the man who comes up with the Autocourse Top 10 at the end of each season.

I won't spoil it by telling you who he's put at number one, but I will say that his list doesn't look anything like mine did - and that neither of them will look anything like yours. You can pretty much guarantee that if you asked every F1 participant, journalist and fan to come up with such a list, no two would be the same. And because we are all so heavily into this sport, we are typically all too willing to argue the toss.

Of course there can be no 'correct' list. How can you compare drivers who never competed against each other, who faced very different challenges, very different competitive circumstances? You can't, ultimately. It's not even possible to definitively rate drivers who compete against each other every two weeks. The closest we can get to direct comparison is between team-mates - and even then the waters can get horribly muddied.

But that doesn't stop us from having a bit of fun trying. And we can make a few generalisations. We can say with a reasonable degree of certainty, for example, that Michael Schumacher was faster than his contemporary at Ferrari, Eddie Irvine. Even Eddie doesn't argue with that - and he's a guy who likes arguing.

We can say that Jackie Stewart was almost certainly faster than Denny Hulme but that Denny, just like Irv, was a pretty good driver. We can say that Fangio was better than Piero Taruffi. So moving on from those within-era comparisons, we can say it's highly unlikely that the ultimate level changed significantly between eras: if someone was at a level that made them the recognised best of their era, it's almost inconceivable that anyone in a different era was operating at a significantly higher level.

Therefore, it's not too much of a push to say that Schumacher was probably operating at a higher level than Hulme or Taruffi - three drivers who never raced against each other. And once we've accepted that - well, it's open season, isn't it? Anything goes.

If we want to get anal about it (of course we do!), we then need to define what we're talking about: just F1 drivers or grand prix drivers? It's an important distinction, of course, because if you restrict it just to F1 then you're taking out almost half a century of grand prix races before the term F1 was invented, just because those races didn't have the appropriate label.

Then, what of the 11 years of city-to-city racing before the first grand prix? Surely they count too? Then there is the problem of how people can draw up a list if they don't have a useful knowledge of the drivers that competed before they were following the sport, before they were even born.

Eddie Jordan once commented that he believed Schumacher to be the greatest driver of all time. When someone then said, "What about Rosemeyer", EJ retorted, "Who? I thought he was a tennis player." So how could we take his judgment seriously if he wasn't even aware of the existence of one of the leading contestants?

Then there's the problem of equivalence of challenge. In Fangio's day, and Clark's and Stewart's, and even, to a lesser extent, Lauda's, the price for getting it wrong was often a trip to the mortuary. In the past decade much less so, as the safety of racing has become a science. So that alters the scale of the challenge massively. But it's not Schumacher's fault that he was competing in a safer era than Clark, so should he be marked down for that?

And what about the competitiveness of the cars any given driver had at his disposal? Fangio was invariably in the fastest car on the grid. Nuvolari usually wasn't. But that doesn't necessarily mean Nuvolari was better, does it?

One of the complainants of my original list said it was absurd I'd rated a driver who'd competed in only a couple of grands prix above one who'd enjoyed a lot of success over 12 years. In reply, I pointed out that the first guy did something in those two races that the other never managed in 12 years of trying. And if you accept that, then where do you put Lewis Hamilton after just one season? But not everyone would be prepared to accept that - some people need overwhelming weight of numbers before they're convinced.

Then we're into philosophy: just because something hasn't been proved doesn't mean it's not true. And because what we're talking about can never be proven, then what's wrong with taking educated stabs at what that truth might be? That will surely get us a lot closer to the truth than waiting for irrefutable proof that we know can never come.

So, get yourself a copy of Alan's book. Read it. Disagree with it. Throw it across the room every so often in disgust. Let a few minutes of reflection pass, then go and pick it up again and read some more. Then throw it at the cat. Then pick it up again, etc...