Speed Reader

"Even before I wrote the first words of the narrative, I was being warned by my journalistic colleagues that I was attempting the impossible," writes Alan Henry in the introduction to his latest book, an annotated list of his all-time top 100 F1 drivers.

Impossible, and also rather pointless.

Lists like these are too heavily steeped in the bias of their author to be of any real use to anyone other than as a conversation point, and even then, racing fans have been arguing about the relative merits of individual drivers for years without needing a book to help them.

And of course reviews, like top 100 lists, are entirely subjective. So the fact that lists and rankings bore me senseless means that this particular book was on the back foot before I even turned to the first page. No apologies for that, but I figured I should make that point early so that you can keep it in mind as you read on.

This is a tricky book to critique. There's no point in engaging with the rankings themselves - everyone is going to have different views on which drivers merit inclusion, and how they should be ordered. Inevitably, I agree with some of Henry's judgements, and disagree with others. That's to be expected.

But some of the rationale behind the decisions start to look a bit wobbly when placed under scrutiny, and this starts with the title itself. Calling the book 'The Top 100 F1 Drivers of All Time' creates a set of parameters that Henry immediately undermines by including drivers from the pre-war era - i.e., before there was any such thing as F1.

Does this matter? Certainly, there is no denying that the likes of Tazio Nuvolari and Bernd Rosemeyer deserve to be ranked alongside more recent greats, and had they been of a later era, would quite probably be listed among the rollcall of world champions.

But they weren't. And by including them in a list that claims to rank 'F1 drivers', Henry effectively moves his own goalposts.

Elsewhere, I was bemused by the fact that one driver who scrapes into the top 100 only contested 12 Grands Prix - with no particular distinction - and by Henry's own description, quit F1 because he found the pressure too great. Yet he had a standout career in Sportscars.

So is he really one of the best F1 drivers of all time, or a great Sportscar driver who made a brief and unspectacular side trip into Formula 1? If you start to include drivers who were footnotes in F1 but stellar elsewhere, you open up a whole world of drivers who could have been contenders for inclusion.

Some of the biographical information is a touch inconsistent, particularly with regard to current drivers. The description of Jarno Trulli goes up to the end of the 2005 season, which is described in great detail - and then stops dead. Ralf Schumacher fares slightly better, making it to 2006 before being left hanging.

Meanwhile, Jenson Button's biography tells us virtually nothing about his early career, and instead focuses upon the plight of Honda, complete with some rather incongruous quotes from Bernie Ecclestone.

On the other hand, events as recent as Lewis Hamilton's failure to convert his fabulous rookie season into a world championship makes it in. It's hard not to wonder whether bits of the book were written over a few years, and not properly updated prior to it finally being published?

Elsewhere, the arguments used to define a driver's worthiness are also unnervingly prone to change. Michael Schumacher is mauled for he and Ferrari's strategy of hiring a subservient team-mate during the German's years of dominance, yet there is no reference to the fact that Eddie Irvine relied upon similar help during his fruitless title bid in 1999.

(Mika Salo stepped in when Schumacher was injured at Silverstone, and sacrificed what would have been his only Grand Prix win to Irvine's cause in Germany.)

On a slightly different note, it seemed both unfair and premature to describe Fernando Alonso's image as having been "terminally blighted and his reputation as possibly the most complete performer in F1 lay in ruins" following what happened at McLaren last year when the Spaniard has not yet had an opportunity to redeem himself.

Still, I guess a subjective list required subjective justifications, so maybe these are not valid criticisms.

As I said at the start, I have tried to avoid talking about the actual rankings themselves because such lists are simply a representation of one person's opinion, and Henry is as entitled to arrange drivers in whatever order he likes.

But I was frustrated by the way that he seemed to keep sidestepping his own concept, and making it hard for the author and reader to approach the book from the same starting point - which is essential if something like this is going to work.

'The Top 100 F1 Drivers of All Time' is scheduled for release by Orion in two weeks.