MPH: Mark Hughes on...

The real merits of individual drives in F1 tend to differ wildly from the perception. Heikki Kovalainen recalls his drive in Hungary last year in the Renault as his best performance of that season - yet he finished an unheralded eighth.

He was embroiled in a scrap with Mark Webber's Red Bull from the start of the race to the end, a fight that he won. The pair of them were flat-out all afternoon, and Heikki's adaptation to the changing track conditions and handling of the car as the tyres wore was perfect.

His in and out-laps were mighty, and he brought the car to a halt inch-perfect at both his stops, enabling his crew to turn him around in the minimum of time. He made the right calls on wing adjustment both times.

All in all, it was close to a perfect day's work. The Renault R27 could almost certainly not have done any better that day, regardless of who had been driving it. Heikki finished four places, and 40 seconds, ahead of teammate Giancarlo Fisichella. It was a great drive.

One year on, he won the race with McLaren. He graciously accepted all the applause, accolades and attention after his first F1 victory. Yet in truth it had not been a great day at the office. He began the final stint trailing 23sec behind the race-leading Ferrari of Felipe Massa, and would have been a similar distance behind his teammate were it not for the fact that Lewis Hamilton had been delayed by a puncture.

Without Massa's engine failure and Hamilton's puncture, Kovalainen was on course to have finished a very distant third, totally eclipsed by his teammate. Relative to the rest of the field, the McLaren MP4-23 is much superior to the Renault R27, and in contrast to the year before he had not done the competitiveness of his car full justice.

That's just the way it happens sometimes: results are only a very loose guide to performance. When they tally it's often no more than a happy coincidence. Heikki's best race of this year to date was probably Turkey - where he finished 12th!

Massa's was the obvious unrewarded great drive of Hungary. But that was easy to spot, given that he was out front controlling the race until his retirement. There was another far less obvious great drive, that of Robert Kubica. He was almost distraught at how bad his BMW had been, and was keenly aware that a lot of his Polish followers had made the trip to Budapest and he'd not given them much to cheer.

He'd raised their hopes with a second-row qualifying effort, but in the race just didn't figure at all, falling ever-further behind and getting shuffled further down the order at each pitstop. He limped home eighth for the final point, almost 50sec behind Kovalainen - a disaster. It was the quietest, least competitive race of his F1 career to date. The non-Polish spectators might not have even noticed he was there.

Believe it or not, it was one of his best drives. The BMW was, for some reason the team does not comprehend, diabolically bad at the Hungaroring: no rear end grip; no traction; no braking stability; horribly snappy handling over the bumps. The grip of new tyres would disguise it for a couple of laps, Robert reported, but then it would come back with a vengeance.

Teammate Nick Heidfeld reported the same story - from much further down the pack. Something was badly wrong, and it's extraordinary that a team of BMW's resources couldn't put its finger on exactly what, showing that there is still some black art left amid all the science of F1. At Hockenheim this car recorded the fastest race lap in Heidfeld's hands. Two weeks later at the Hungaroring, there were stages of the race when it was the slowest.

Which brings us back to Kubica's performance. For one thing, we see that his fourth-fastest qualifying time was a near-miracle. Yes, the extent of the car's problems was disguised on new tyres - but not totally. By just watching the F1.08 bucking around beneath him, you could see that he was driving out of his skin.

It began the lap understeering and ended it oversteering; it was horrible over the bumps, especially under braking, yet somehow he was maintaining momentum. He was on a pretty light fuel load - something that would compromise him in the race - but, even taking that into account, the car had absolutely no right being anywhere near the sharp end of the grid.

Heidfeld had not even made it out of Q1 - though in mitigation both his laps in that session were compromised, once by a mistake, once by traffic. But the fact that the car was so bad contributed towards the mistake. Kubica had not only got it through Q1, but had gone seventh fastest in Q2, just 0.3sec slower than the McLarens on the same tyre, thereby earning his place in the run-off, where he produced that very special lap.

Off the dirty side of the grid, he dropped two places initially, but made one of them up almost immediately by slicing up the inside of Fernando Alonso when the Renault driver was chopped by Timo Glock. The Hungaroring is not a place of overtaking opportunities, so at least his fifth position was relatively safe for the duration of the stint. By the end of it, though, he was already around 25sec off the lead, an average deficit of 1.4sec per lap. This was the car's true level.

He'd been within 0.4sec of the fastest during qualifying, even accounting for fuel loads. Yet, despite the unfolding horror story of the car during the stint, Kubica had kept relentlessly on it. His last three laps before coming in: 1m22.6s, 1m22.6s, 1m22.6s. The short first stint had to be paid for, and he was leapfrogged by four longer-running cars on account of not having had the pace in the first stint to get clear.

Kubica was now consigned to a long middle stint that compounded the problem. As the track rubbered in for the final stint and he switched to the super-soft option tyres, the car became marginally better. He had to back off a couple of times to get through the tyres' graining period, but set his fastest lap of the race on the very last lap, with the fuel load at its minimum and track grip still increasing.

There'd been not one lazy lap, his in and out-laps were perfect, he'd kept his tyres in one piece when it would have been easy to flat-spot them, and he'd stayed fully on it in circumstances where dismay would have been forgivable. And he came home with a point - probably the hardest-earned of his career. It was almost certainly a better drive than the winner's.