You make a very good point. Clearly Button needed the car to win the Championship, although I doubt anyone has won the championship in the past twenty years at least without driving the best car. But this is why it was so important that Button hammered home his advantage over Barrichello in the early part of the season. While Button took six wins out of seven, Barrichello was left in the dust. While Barrichello improved a great deal in the second half of the season relative to Button, the damage had been done.

You are totally right, however, that were you to choose one driver for your fantasy team, Button would not be the driver you choose. In fact, I expect him to be thoroughly beaten by Lewis Hamilton at McLaren in 2010.

That said, I think many people have made the same reflexion based on F1, as any other motor sport competition, is a mix between driver competence and machine performance, being the last one the most important factor of that mix.

During half of the season, Brawn cars were a rocket and no one could be at their level; Jenson delivered, he did the work he was asked for and won almost everything. In fact, the only race he didn’t won, was a rainy race, and rain equalize cars performance.

During the rest of the season, Brawn’s car were not one or two steps forward, but they were well placed in the top 3 teams, and what we saw was Jenson struggling with just two podiums in 10 races (Italy 2nd and Abu Dhabi 3rd)

So, for me (IMHO) the point is this championship has been more about the car than about the driver, despite (and I insist on this) Jenson deserves this title.

Jenson needed the GREAT advantage Brawn’s car had during the first half of the season to become WDC, and when the car was equalized with others, Jenson could not delivered any one single race in which one would have felt the driver was outperforming the car.

Talking about drivers, if some of us were a F1 one manager with unlimited budget (sorry Max, this is just a metaphor) and have to choose only one driver of the following list:

a) Alonso
b) Button
c) Hamilton
d) Raikkonen
e) Vettel

Do you honestly think there were somebody hiring Jenson instead anyone of the rest?

ps: Vee, nice to see you returning back. Maintain a blog alive is quite hard, congrats for not surrendering.

Merry christmas for everybody!

It’s a good point. The rules are the rules, and all the drivers know what the score is prior to the season’s start.

I keep telling people the same thing over and over again. By the definition of competition, whoever scores the most points is the most deserving champion. The only exception is if he and/or the team are discovered to be cheaters later on. No other argument cuts the mustard.