Jonathan Noble: Off Line

Points mean prizes in Formula 1, don't they? For the top four men in the fight for the world championship, they have a pretty simple target for the end of the campaign: finish with more points than their rivals.

It will matter little how the title is achieved, or who has the better luck, or who deserves it more. All we will be looking at is how big the numbers are next to the names of Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen by the time the chequered flag is waved in Brazil.

Further down the order, though, things are much more complicated. And it's not just the end-of-season points tally that's going to be the judge of whether drivers have done a good job this year.

Heading out of Turkey on Sunday night, a quick glimpse at the drivers' championship table showed that an interesting pattern had emerged, with the top 14 drivers all neatly slotted in two-by-two, in true Noah's Ark fashion, with their respective team-mates.

And glancing down the list you would say that, on the whole, the order and the gaps within those 14 men pretty much reflect the job each has done relative to their team-mates this year. But there are, of course, notable exceptions.

At Williams, Alex Wurz is currently on 13 points, four ahead of his team-mate, Nico Rosberg. Yet despite the Austrian's podium finish in Canada, and near-podium at the Nurburgring, it's not his name that's been linked with moves to McLaren and Toyota - and left his own team making it clear that he has a contract and is there to stay.

Rosberg's continued strong form this year has singled him out as one of the regulars in the top eight, yet even he admits to frustration at the reliability problems that have cost him points this year.

"In the moment [when the car stops], it's horrible. At Indy it was like four laps to go, after a great race, and it stops," he says. "A week later, if the result isn't there, who remembers what you did? It doesn't count. But then the only choice you have is to say okay, you did a great race and that's what counts."

But Rosberg is wrong in thinking people only take notice of results. It's the same story for Super Aguri's Anthony Davidson, who remains frustrated that team-mate Takuma Sato (they are the first men to break the top 14 team-mate symmetry) has taken all the points at the team despite some strong performances from himself.

Davidson showed at Istanbul, with a brilliant lap in qualifying (the best of his F1 career, he later claimed), that people do still sit up and take notice for more than just getting some points under your belt.

"I feel I'm on the up," he says. "I just hope people are still noticing and realising so far into the season, because people are too quick to make up their minds. It's a bit of a fashion thing at the end of the day, as well. "I've not had the highlights that Taku has had with points, and I'm not taking anything away from him, but we need a bit of luck to score the points.

"I should be sitting here with points right now after Canada [where he hit a groundhog while running third]. I should have points guaranteed, and it's that sort of thing that makes you less fashionable in the paddock. It's quite a fickle game. Hopefully with flashes of brilliance like qualifying here, people can take a step back and still see."

Don't worry, Anthony. They do. In a sport where the number on the stopwatch and the points on the board say so much, it is good to see that impressive driving can still count for much more.