No Man's Land

After the frenetic ups and downs that characterised the final few races of 2007, the pre-season outlook for 2008 pointed to a more settled and predictable year.

With Fernando Alonso ensconced back at midfield team Renault, reigning champion Kimi Raikkonen looked a solid bet to emulate Michael Schumacher, Mika Hakkinen and the Spaniard in consolidating his first championship win by immediately wrapping up a second title.

Raikkonen's Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa was still generally considered too erratic, and new McLaren signing Heikki Kovalainen too green, to sustain a season-long championship campaign.

That left McLaren's Lewis Hamilton as the major obstacle for the defending champion.

While Hamilton had the luxury of a less antagonistic teammate for 2008, there were also questions around his and the team's ability to take the fight to Ferrari.

Would McLaren retain its competitiveness and focus in the aftermath of Spygate? Would a team with two relatively inexperienced drivers be able to maintain essential development progress over the course of a full season? Would Hamilton be able to sustain the form of his impressive rookie season, or would he succumb to the traditional sophomore slump?

By the end of the first grand prix, in Australia, McLaren and Hamilton had answered the questions in emphatic style. But, as Raikkonen learned in 2007, a convincing victory in Melbourne can very quickly be nullified as the opposition resolves its teething problems with new cars.

True to expectation, Ferrari quickly solved the engine issues that had plagued the team in Australia. For his part, Raikkonen fought back superbly, racking up two wins and two more podium finishes in the next four races to gain the championship lead.

At that stage, it should have been game over. Massa had once again given the field a head start with early season unreliability and mistakes, Kovalainen was admirably fast in qualifying but nowhere in the races, and Hamilton was angrily fending off media allegations that he'd lost form.

In his first year at Ferrari, Raikkonen had come on strong during the second half of the season, winning four times and only finishing off the podium once in the final 10 races of the year. A repeat in 2008 would surely secure his second title at a canter.

But, in the post-Schumacher era, Formula One has rarely worked according to script. Raikkonen's promising progress was soon brought to a grinding halt, physically and figuratively, by a pair of disastrous collisions.

In the first, the Finn played the villain by clattering into the back of Adrian Sutil at a wet Monaco, ruining what would have been the Force India team's best result of the season - fourth.

If Raikkonen wondered whether karma might deliver a payback, he didn't have long to wait. At the very next race, in Canada, an extraordinary lapse of judgment by Hamilton shunted the reigning champion out of contention while he waited at a red light at the end of the pitlane.

From there, the championship territory became a no man's land that was occupied briefly by several drivers but owned by none - right up until the last corner of the final race.

Robert Kubica © XPB

For the remainder of the season, each grand prix raised the expectation that one of the protagonists would boldly step forward to take incontestable ownership of the championship lead. But it was the title that, seemingly, nobody wanted.

First Raikkonen, then Hamilton, then Massa took turns in producing stunning drives to snatch the initiative - only to hand the advantage right back to their rivals (usually in the very next race) through inexplicable mistakes and sub-par performances.

Even BMW's Robert Kubica had a brief stint at the title helm thanks to his surprise maiden grand prix victory in Canada. But Kubica, too, was stuck in no man's land, consistent enough to keep racking up solid points finishes but rarely fast enough to threaten the McLaren/Ferrari duopoly at the head of the pack.

When Hamilton eventually scraped home to the required fifth place in Brazil, the triumph of his first F1 title was mixed with a huge sigh of relief. He had, after all, narrowly avoided the humiliating feat of being the first driver in history to blow a healthy lead at the final race in back-to-back seasons.

While Hamilton may reflect that his over-anxious mistakes in Bahrain, Canada and Japan (among others) made life unnecessarily difficult for himself, he did at least get to lift the title. Both Raikkonen and Massa must be kicking themselves at how they managed to lose it.

Raikkonen must be the only driver in history to have recorded nine fastest laps in an 11-race stretch (between Turkey and Singapore) without winning any of them. His meagre haul of just 28 points in those same 11 races simply defies belief.

Paradoxically, Massa - the driver rated most likely to fail through inconsistency - could at least claim that his downfall was not of his own making. The engine failure in Hungary and botched pitstop in Singapore arguably cost him the championship. But, equally, he could look to his mistakes in Australia and Malaysia and sub-par performances at Silverstone and Monza, along with fortuitous wins in France and Belgium.

Perhaps the driver with the greatest reason to feel aggrieved was Alonso. Consistency was a key strength of both his championship titles in 2005 and 2006. Given a top car in 2008, he would probably have strolled to a third title. But Alonso himself must bear some accountability for his departure from McLaren.

The erroneous implication from such a mistake-ridden championship is that there is a lack of class in the current field. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consistency is the only quality that the top runners lacked. In terms of astoundingly dominant and memorable drives, 2008 was a bumper year.

Hamilton's signature wins at Silverstone and Hockenheim, Massa blitzing the field again at his favoured circuits, Sebastian Vettel's polished and composed maiden victory at Monza, and even Alonso's lucky (but well-deserved) brace of wins late in the season are all indicative of an exceptionally talented field. And this in a year when the real Raikkonen failed to pitch up, and rising stars such as Kubica and Nico Rosberg are just getting into their stride and waiting for genuinely race-winning machinery.

Felipe Massa at speed in Singapore © LAT

Against that backdrop, the lack of standout rookies in 2008 was not a major concern. Toro Rosso's Sebastien Bourdais and Williams's Kazuki Nakajima both battled gamely against highly-rated teammates, without making a solid case for stardom.

Nelsinho Piquet received an exceptionally tough assignment for his rookie year - trying to compete in a team centred solely on Alonso. Although he ended up as the only driver who failed to outqualify his teammate at any race, Piquet did at least enjoy the consolation of recording the team's first podium of the year in Germany.

If the rookies failed to grab the imagination in 2008, the new circuits were similarly unremarkable. While Valencia and Singapore undoubtedly boast the modern facilities required to host F1 events, and while Singapore has the added novelty of night racing, neither circuit stood out in the same way as other recent additions like Turkey or Malaysia.

Fortunately, in another year when overtaking was extremely difficult, the weather intervened regularly to spice up the racing. Monaco, Silverstone, Monza, Spa and Interlagos were all potentially processional affairs turned into instant classics by the damp and greasy conditions.

Less welcome were the continued frequent safety car interruptions and occasionally inexplicable stewards' decisions that influenced the season. Battling to control a car with the wrong tyres on a damp circuit brings out the best in the drivers. Drive-through penalties and the lottery of safety car timing produces contrived results that have little or nothing to do with skill.

Still, despite (and perhaps partly because of) these random interventions, the Formula 1 field put on a cracking championship display in 2008. The show is set to improve even further in 2009, with the long-awaited reversion to slick tyres and reduced aerodynamic grip.

The new regulations have, in turn, signalled the 2009 pre-season championship predictions as a no man's land. Even with most teams featuring unchanged line-ups, the prospects for the new season - both in terms of drivers and teams - are wide open.

There is no clear favourite, and any of half a dozen candidates could dominate. Or, as in 2008, the eventual winner could scrape home by the narrowest of margins. It's going to be a long and impatient wait until Melbourne 2009.