Better late than never. I have finally got the chance to tap out the final part of my end-of-season driver rankings, although I am currently being distracted by the live web stream of the Race of Champions. Hopefully I’ll stay coherent enough for this section of my rankings to make sense. So here goes.

As before, the first number in brackets refers to their position in my mid-season rankings, and the second number is their position in last year’s end-of-season ranking.

11. Heikki Kovalainen (9; 6)

I have found myself becoming increasingly disillusioned with Heikki Kovalainen. Not so long ago he looked like a star of the future. Now I think Kovalainen simply does not know how to win a race. His one and only victory came in Hungary — but he did not deserve it, having inherited P1 as a result of Felipe Massa’s engine expiry.

Kovalainen may well complain that the McLaren team has focussed all of its efforts on Lewis Hamilton, particularly when it came to fuel loads in qualifying. That is true. But even taking this into account, I can’t help feeling that Kovalainen has been a major disappointment this season. In what was arguably the fastest car on the grid, Kovalainen finished just 7th in the Drivers Championship, behind both Ferraris, both BMWs and a Reanult. You can’t lie all of that at the door of having one or two laps extra fuel on board during qualifying.

Most of all, I feel that Kovalainen simply does not have that extra drive that it takes to win a race. I struggle to think of many moments during the season when I was particularly impressed with him. Indeed, I can think of a number of blunders — among them the moment during the Australian GP when he gifted Fernando Alonso a position by accidentally hitting the pitlane speed limiter at the start of the main straight. And he was totally hoodwinked by better drivers at least twice during the season. Double-overtakes initiated by Massa in Canada and Heidfeld at Silverstone particularly stick in my mind.

10. Jarno Trulli (7; 17)

This time last year I had almost totally written off Jarno Trulli. Having achieved little throughout his F1 career, he appeared consigned to midfield anonymity, with his greatest legacy to the sport remaining the dreaded Trulli Train.

However, I have to say that I have been quite impressed with Trulli this season. He appears to have made a mini-resurgence. Although he will never be able to count himself among the very best drivers on the grid, he has scored a number of impressive results this season.

A lot of this may be down to the improved Toyota car. But even so, I think there have been a number of times this season when Trulli has excelled, particularly when he finished 3rd at the French Grand Prix.

9. Mark Webber (4; 10)

The first half of the season in particular was a very strong one for Mark Webber. The Australian has been hit by far more than his fair share of bad luck throughout his career, but at the start of this season, with a competitive Red Bull car underneath him, it finally looked like things were going his way. From Malaysia through to Monaco, Webber scored five points finishes in a row, a career record.

Unfortunately, mid-way through the season his Renault-powered Red Bull car lost much of its advantage and the second half of the season returned far less, with just a handful of 8th place finishes. At least he can say he totally outclassed his team mate David Coulthard this season.

8. Timo Glock (16; -)

After a slightly underwhelming start to the season, Timo Glock finally began to fulfil his promise more towards the end. The first sign of life came with a 4th place finish in Canada, a very strong result at a tricky circuit.

A huge crash at Hockenheim was a worrying moment, but from then on Glock has finished in the points more often than he hasn’t. A second place at Hungary, immediately after the German GP, was a particular high point. And his 4th place finish at Singapore is certainly not to be sniffed at either.

Glock appears this high on my list mostly as a result of the second half of his season. After his abortive first shot at F1 at the struggling Jordan team way back in 2004 — when, to be frank, he wasn’t ready — Glock has had a second spell as a rookie. Now the 2007 GP2 Champion looks set to have a creditable career in motor racing’s top flight.

7. Kimi Räikkönen (2; 1)

Kimi Räikkönen’s oddly scruffy season has been widely-commented on. The season started off reasonably strongly, with four podiums in the first five races, including two wins. From that point onwards, though, it all came unstuck thanks to a combination of horrendously bad luck and unusually unfocused driving.

The first warning sign came with a dire performance during the Monaco Grand Prix, culminating in a hugely unpopular crash into Adrian Sutil. Then came a run of bad luck. He was taken out of the Canadian Grand Prix after Lewis Hamilton crashed into him in the pitlane. Then an unusual exhaust failure put paid to his hopes for a win in France. In the following race in Britain, his Ferrari struggled in the wet conditions. At Valencia he left the pitlane with the fuel hose still attached. As if that wasn’t enough, his engine blew a few laps later.

Amid this run of bad luck, the Finn lacked focus, appearing to lose his motivation. The only stand-out performance was in Belgium, and he even ended that race by crashing. A number of needless mistakes ensured that World Champion was in no shape to defend his title.

6. Nick Heidfeld (6; 4)

Unquestionably, Nick Heidfeld struggled this season in comparison to his BMW team mate. The German did particularly poorly in qualifying, with the finger of blame pointed at the difficult of getting heat into the tyres. To Heidfeld’s immense credit, he worked hard on fixing this problem and things very much began to look up in the second half of the season.

Even so, when you look at Heidfeld’s results, even at the start of the season they are extremely impressive. Four 2nd place finishes and a clutch of strong points finishes ensured that Heidfeld finished a creditable 6th in the Drivers’ Championship. The only reason Heidfeld’s season felt underwhelming was because his team mate was even better…

Even though most of the focus tends to be on the Drivers’ Championship, the Constructors’ Championship is the prize that reflects a team effort. Ferrari are the sort of team that, if it misses out on the Drivers’ Championship, it will pick up the Constructors’.

The last time McLaren won the drivers’ Championship, with Mika Häkkinen, the Scuderia scooped up the Constructors’ prize. That was in 1999, and it was a victory that signified a team very much on the rise. This year, it reflects a team that refuses to go off the boil, even though they threatened to do so.

Let us not forget the massive changes that have been made in the Ferrari team over the past few years. Michael Schumacher, the most successful driver of all time, retired. Ross Brawn took a sabbatical and re-emerged at Honda. Rory Byrne took a back seat. Now Jean Todt has left. The axis of Schumacher is no more.

This was Stefano Domenicali’s first year in charge of the team. He had a baptism of fire in Australia, an unmitigated disaster with both drivers suffering from some kind of engine failure. Even though that proved to be a blip rather than the norm, it was by no means a one-off. The team that propelled Michael Schumacher to five World Championships is no longer the slick operation it was a few years ago. We have caught glimpses of the Italians’ calamitous ways once again.

In addition to the Australian disaster, there was a Singapore snafu. Before Kimi Räikkönen crashed out, Felipe Massa left the pitlane with his fuel hose still completely attached, the traffic lights having turned green. The controversial traffic lights system also caused Felipe Massa bother in Valencia, when he was dangerously released straight into the path of Adrian Sutil. Then, the team was simply slapped on the wrist by the FIA. In Singapore, though, it completely ruined Massa’s race.

Ferrari say they will bring back the traffic lights system for next season, adamant that it saves them enough time to justify the risk of complete foul-up. But if it saves them a couple of tenths, is that worth the occassional loss of ten points? Given how close the championship ended up being, that traffic lights system transpired to be a very expensive mistake for Ferrari.

The Scuderia also often found itself completely unable to answer the McLaren challenge. Hamilton was unstoppable in Silverstone while the Ferraris were spinning like tops in the midfield. Similarly in Hockenheim, Hamilton managed to make Felipe Massa look like a small child. A final sub-par performance came in China, though at least that time round they still finished 2nd and 3rd, albeit a long way behind Hamilton.

There were also a few alarming reliability problems. Ferrari continued to (legally) develop their engines through the engine freeze, though this was at the expense of reliability as two Ferrari engines went pop in two successive races, in Valencia and the Hungaroring. Perhaps more startling was the loose exhaust that ruined Kimi Räikkönen’s race in France — and that was when the rot began to set in in the Finn’s season.

A question mark also remains over the ability of their two drivers. Massa is clearly competent as I outlined in my previous post, but he is no Schumacher as a number of errors, particularly at the start of the season, demonstrate. And Räikkönen’s slump into near-obscurity remains a mystery to all observers. Meanwhile, four arguably better drivers — Hamilton, Alonso, Kubica and Vettel — are all weapons in their main rivals’ armoury. Ferrari are retaining their pair until at least 2010, and you have to wonder if that is the right decision.

All-in-all, then, Ferrari have had an up and down season. They have had some wonderful highlights, and also some incredibly low troughs. But almost all teams have had a poor season for one reason or another. Certainly their main rivals, McLaren, cannot exit this season without taking a particular look at their strategy or the performance of their second driver Heikki Kovalainen.

As such, even though I cannot stand the Ferrari team, I have to concede that they have done a great job this year. They have had eight wins to McLaren’s six. And both of their drivers were regularly in contention for good results unlike McLaren. So congratulations to the Scuderia. I just hope they don’t win too often.

It is worth remembering that the 2008 season so far has been, by all accounts, an exciting season for on-track action. There have been plenty of overtaking manoeuvres of note. Felipe Massa’s double move on Kovalainen and Barrichello in Canada was a stormer that I won’t forget quickly. Nick Heidfeld managed two double overtakes at Silverstone. And let’s not forget Lewis Hamilton’s bold moves at Hockenheim.

Even races that were expected to be utter snooze-fests have contained their fair share of surprises. The French Grand Prix was spiced up by Räikkönen’s exhaust problem and even the Hungarian Grand Prix had an incredible sting in the tail.

This season the field is closer than it has been perhaps for decades — who knows, perhaps ever. I’ve had a look at this season’s qualifying times, and the average gap between the fastest car and the slowest car is 103.26%. That’s not bad going at all when you recall that around a decade ago it was fairly common for drivers to fail to qualify for being more than 107% slower than pole time.

The closeness of the field this year — not just from the fastest to the slowest car, but particularly the closeness of the teams vying to be 3rd or 4th fastest a the moment — is what has contributed to this season’s great racing and an intriguing championship.

It’s not an accident that the field has become so close in Formula 1. The relative stability of the technical regulations in recent years has meant that the teams’ R&D programmes are yielding diminishing returns. As one team boss told Grandprix.com recently:

We work 24 hours a day in the wind tunnel. But we have hit a wall. We have only managed to find three percent more downforce this year. We just cannot find any more.

It seems as though the teams have discovered almost all there is to discover about how to make their cars go faster — certainly in terms of aerodynamic factors. You can see this in the wide indifference the ’shark fin’ has met with. Team after team says that the shark fin has made little or no perceptible difference in performance — yet they all still run with it. One theory I have heard is that Red Bull simply designed the shark fin so make more space for the Red Bull logo, and that all the other teams have simply copied the design to make it look as though they’re still trying to experiment with aerodynamics.

Now the FIA proposes to do away with all of this ‘closeness’ nonsense by ripping up the rulebook and starting again. If there is one thing a radical overhaul of the rules is sure to do, it is to spread the field. We saw this in 1998 when McLaren rose from the midfield to become almost dominant. 2009’s regulation changes are far more radical, potentially opening the door for next season to be a snooze-fest dominated by one team that just happened to find the edge first.

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that such a radical change in the rules does not do very much in terms of cutting costs. Yet again, the FIA’s cost-cutting mantra is undermined by the FIA itself.

I have not even touched on KERS yet, which is bound to lead to huge gaps between different teams. You can see this in the reaction of some teams who are currently trying to get the other teams to agree to run without KERS until 2010. Those teams whose KERS programme is not quite up to scratch are desperate to delay the new system’s introduction.

This is inevitable as KERS is very much at the experimental stages of its development and different teams are trying out different techniques. One of these techniques will be shown in the long run to be the most effective, but we are yet to find out which that is. In the meantime, the teams that were lucky enough to strike on the right technique first time will crush their opponents.

Closer racing in 2009? Don’t count on it. Make the most of the great racing of 2008 while you can.

Well there has been a lot of controversy over who got penalised by the stewards at the French Grand Prix and who didn’t. And once again McLaren are at the centre of it all.

After the Canadian Grand Prix I pointed out that Lewis Hamilton was beginning to show a worrying inability to accept when he has made a mistake. They say you learn from your mistakes, but Hamilton would rather stick his head in the sand under the mistaken impression that this makes him “very strong mentally“.

Andy at Brits on Pole suggested that there are signs that a siege mentality is forming within McLaren. Asked about the three penalties that McLaren have been handed in quick succession, Ron Dennis said on ITV, “Draw your own conclusion.”

In fairness, Martin Whitmarsh quickly put a lid on the story. However, he still pointed out that it was the opinion of the McLaren team that the penalty handed to Lewis Hamilton during the French Grand Prix was not justified.

I can understand that the people at McLaren are a bit fragile these days after the FIA put them through the wringer in the way that they did last year. I particularly worry about Ron Dennis who is beginning to look like he constantly has to bite his tongue. He is probably trying to keep a lot of pent-up anger bottled in. This leads me to think that McLaren are slightly losing control of the situation and their ability to make rational decisions has been compromised.

Among all of the hyperbole, here are some facts. McLaren broke (or, more accurately, a McLaren driver) broke the rules three times in quick succession. First of all, Hamilton failed to see a red light in the pitlane in Montreal and caused an avoidable accident in the pitlane. Causing an avoidable accident is bad enough, but causing one in the pitlane — which is a highly concentrated area full of people — is simply unacceptable. The ten place grid penalty was fully justified.

Then in qualifying for the French Grand Prix, Heikki Kovalainen impeded Mark Webber’s qualifying lap. It was not intentional, but he did it nonetheless and the penalty was expected. Even McLaren expected this one, fuelling Kovalainen heavy for Q3 in an increasingly rare piece of clever quick thinking from McLaren.

Finally in lap one of the race Lewis Hamilton cut the Nürburgring chicane immediately after passing Sebastian Vettel. This is the most contentious one.

For Clive, Hamilton did little wrong. “Hamilton had gained the place before the chicane and so did not benefit from his slight error”.

However, this is far from clear cut. Undoubtedly Hamilton had edged ahead of Vettel. But was he completely clear of Vettel? It seems not. He was probably not far enough ahead to commit to taking the chicane properly. As Keith has noted, Hamilton has contradicted himself within a matter of a few words in one interview about the incident:

I believe I was ahead on the outside and I couldn’t turn in on the guy otherwise we would have crashed

So was he ahead or was he not? Hamilton says he was ahead, but at the same time he would have crashed if he turned in — which means that he was not ahead, but in fact side-by-side with Vettel.

The bottom line is that if Hamilton had tried that at a circuit like Monaco where skipping the chicane means going into the barriers, he would have been out of the race. Unless he is completely stupid, he wouldn’t have tried it at such a circuit. This means that he took advantage of the tarmac run-off at the chicane. For this reason he should have been punished.

For me, the fact that even the people on ITV were contemplating the fact that Hamilton was in the wrong sums up that this should not have been a controversial decision.

It is a well-known rule that if you gain an advantage by cutting the chicane (such as, for instance, taking a position, or keeping a position that was under threat) then you can expect to get a penalty. There are three possible penalties: drive-through, 10 second stop-go or a ten place grid drop. Hamilton got the most lenient of these penalties.

Of course, Hamilton could have avoided getting a penalty at all by simply giving Vettel the place back and trying to take him again. This is what drivers always do if they skip the chicane inadvertently. So why Lewis Hamilton did not do this puzzles me a lot.

There was always a risk following the incident that Hamilton would be penalised. Not a slim risk, but a significant risk. Given that, it would have been a lot more sensible for Hamilton to play it safe by handing Vettel the position back — costing him a few seconds at most — rather than waiting to be slapped with a drive-through penalty that would have cost him more like 30 seconds.

I can well understand why Hamilton didn’t hand Vettel the place back. It is because he simply cannot admit it when he is in the wrong. He simply does not have it in his bones to do the sporting thing even when doing so will be advantageous to him. For him, it is easier to sit back and imagine conspiracy theories rather than hold his hands up and say he was wrong.

This we know already. What worries me though is the fact that McLaren did not tell him to give the place back either. The team is there to — hopefully — make these judgements when a driver’s emotions get the better of him. Unfortunately, it looks as though the guys on the pit wall are also letting their emotions get the better of them.

There is another explanation. We saw McLaren take the safe option when Kovalainen was at risk of getting a penalty. But they failed to do so when Hamilton was in a similar position. Could it be that McLaren find it too difficult to tell Lewis Hamilton what to do?

We know for a fact that Lewis Hamilton doesn’t like being told what to do, even when the order comes direct from his boss Ron Dennis. We saw this in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix. Hamilton’s petulant behaviour set in motion a chain of events that would eventually lead to the $100 million fine.

Perhaps McLaren found it easier to let the punishment come along rather than deal with Hamilton’s petulance and sulking after being asked to give the position back. If that is the case, it is deeply worrying for the future of Lewis Hamilton’s career. If anyone is in a position to kick Hamilton’s mental attitude into shape it is the McLaren team. But they appear to have given up.

There is another possibility — that McLaren have actually adopted Hamilton’s approach to racing. We can see this in Ron Dennis’s implication that the only possible explanation for their downfall is that everyone is out to get McLaren.

Now it is true — as Clive and Milos have both noted — that arguable two other drivers should have been given penalties in France.

One was Jarno Trulli’s “wheel bashing” incident. I am not so sure about that myself. Trulli claims that he did not bash wheels and Kovalainen hasn’t said a word about it. I think they probably came very close, but it was 50/50 for me. Kovalainen’s attempted move was extremely optimistic. Meanwhile Trulli was trying to take an optimal line into the chicane. It’s not as though Trulli swiped at him having come from the opposite side of the track. He just edged over to get a wider angle into the corner. It was aggressive driving from both drivers, but not dangerous in my opinion — and if it was then the blame is 50/50.

As for Kimi Raikkonen, the dangling exhaust pipe was simply unacceptable. It was a blatant safety risk. What if the exhaust pipe snapped off and hit another driver on the head? What if the exhaust pipe went into the crowd?

What on earth is the black and orange flag for if it isn’t for this sort of situation? I find it difficult to imagine how that car could have been more dangerous. Maybe it could have spurted fuel onto the driver behind. Perhaps the rear light could have turned into a death ray.

The FIA should take a good look at themselves for that one. But if there is a conspiracy, it is the same old Ferrari International Assistance rather than anything against McLaren if you ask me. And I say this as someone who thinks the FIA’s treatment of McLaren last year was nothing short of outrageous.

McLaren’s apparent paranoia bodes very badly for Hamilton’s career. Unless he and McLaren can become more pragmatic about the situations they find themselves in, this sort of thing will keep on happening.

But now in the face of the good old fashioned British media backlash, Hamilton now faces the biggest mental test of his career at Silverstone on the 6th of July. His first home grand prix was the scene of Hamilton’s first jitters, when he was impatient in his pitstop. Since then he has begun to look like a nervous wreck in high-pressure situations.

Hamilton calls himself “very strong mentally”, but in fact he is one of the least mentally strong front-end racing drivers I can ever think of seeing. He mistakes stubbornness for mental strength which is part of the problem. He needs to learn to be genuinely strong rather than just petulant.

Magny-Cours was always set to be a boring race. The circuit is not known for its competitive racing, and it’s difficult to imagine a more favourable circuit for Ferrari. The red team did indeed pull off into the distance, but that didn’t stop it being a more interesting race than expected.

Kimi Räikkönen looked good for the win at the beginning of the race. But just when you think you’ve seen everything in F1, something new and unexpected happens — and once again Räikkönen was at the centre of it all for the third race in a row.

Kimi Räikkönen’s season is fast turning into a story of Mark Webber-esque bad luck. First there was his crash in Monaco which was partially his fault but which he had little control over. Then he got the surprise buttsecks treatment in Canada.

Now in France he has suffered from an odd exhaust failure. The component was flapping around in the air causing all sorts of damage to the right rear of his car — both in terms of physical knocks and the kind of heat the exhaust must have been giving off. Initially the problem was causing Räikkönen several seconds per lap but over time he managed to adapt to it. But the exhaust eventually flew off which leads me to wonder if it might have been safer for the stewards to order him to pit to have the exhaust removed before it flew off into the path of another driver.

Despite Räikkönen’s woes, he still managed to finish 2nd which rather underlines Ferrari’s dominance at this circuit. Felipe Massa, in an uneventful race for him, took the win and at the same time takes the lead of the Drivers Championship for the first time in his career. He is the first Brazilian to lead the world championship since Ayrton Senna.

Massa is in fact the fourth different leader of the championship in four races. The championship is very close at the moment — just ten points separate the top four drivers. It is doubtful, however, that either Kubica or Hamilton can prevent Ferrari from running away with it at this stage, with many of the up-coming circuits suiting Ferrari and some of McLaren’s best circuits having been visited already.

BMW in particular struggled badly this weekend. Kubica certainly was struggling with handling problems during practice. And notably, Heidfeld struggled to get through to Q2 during qualifying, setting three laps in a row that were only good enough for 18th on the grid. He did surpass that eventually, but lined up on the grid way back in 11th. His race ended in 13th. It was a far cry from his second place in Canada.

Meanwhile, plaudits have to go to Kubica for wrestling the car into 5th. He had some moments during the race where he looked quite fiery, but he had little potential today to make much of the race.

This underlines just how close Formula 1 is this year. Moving from one circuit to another results in sometimes dramatic changes in the order through the field, particularly from the third-best car down to the eighth-best.

Toyota, however, are showing consistent improvement. I wouldn’t have trusted Jarno Trulli to hold on to third place. At this very circuit in 2004 he managed to lose a position to Rubens Barrichello on the penultimate corner of the race, cementing his reputation as a poor race driver who lacks full concentration over a full race distance.

However, this year he managed to hold off a late charge from Heikki Kovalainen (and, at one point, Robert Kubica) to take third position. It’s Toyota’s first podium for over two years and it is fitting that it should come in the week that the team mourns the loss of its founder team principal, Ove Andersson.

As for Heikki Kovalainen, he had a fantastic race. Starting tenth on the grid following a 5-place grid penalty after impeding Mark Webber during qualifying, Kovalainen stormed his way through the field to take fourth. Just as it was beginning to look as though Kovalainen did not have what it takes, he has managed to salvage something from what was becoming a disastrous weekend for McLaren.

His team mate Lewis Hamilton certainly did not storm through the field. He needed to take pole position for his strategy to work, but it backfired as he qualified third — which meant starting 13th on the grid. On soft tyres and a light fuel load, Hamilton was aggressive at the start and overtook many cars.

However, his first overtaking manoeuvre raised eyebrows. It was a brave move on Sebastian Vettel, but it was a touch too brave and Hamilton ended up cutting the chicane slightly. At that point Hamilton should have let Vettel pass again because Hamilton clearly gained an advantage by cutting the corner. Ron Dennis protests that Hamilton had clearly passed Vettel by that stage, but I have to disagree. Hamilton would never have made that move stick if he took the chicane correctly and the stewards were right to give him a drive-through penalty.

I think Red Bull can be reasonably pleased with their performance today. Mark Webber took another points-scoring position in 6th while David Coulthard was perfectly positioned to take advantage of any front-running retirements in 9th. This was arguably the team’s best result all season.

Renault are also looking like they have more speed in their car now. I think Alonso had the pace today, but his race was seriously compromised by yet another dodgy strategy from Renault. Alonso was very light at the beginning, and was the first to stop after just 15 laps. The team then switched him to a two-stop strategy, meaning that Alonso had to deal with a heavier car and spend longer on the (sub-optimal) soft tyres.

Alonso’s race of unfulfilled potential was underlined by the fact that his much-maligned team mate Nelsinho Piquet overtook him very close to the end after a traffic-related confusion. Piquet certainly looks as though he has turned a corner now. He was on the pace much more consistently all weekend, and did not make any silly mistakes during the race. This could be the turning point of Piquet’s career and he can now point to the fact that he has beaten the most successful active F1 driver in equal equipment.

I have no idea what happened to Toro Rosso during the race. Sebastian Vettel in particular looked great earlier on in the weekend, but it just didn’t come together for him during the race.

I am starting to wonder about Sébastien Bourdais. After a great start to his season in Australia, Bourdais has been anonymous at best and his middling performances are beginning to make him look as though he is not F1 material. Today he finished 17th, ahead only of the Force Indias, and as far as I could see he had no problems. What was that all about?

Williams must also be desperately frustrated with their performance today. Nakajima and Rosberg finished in 15th and 16th, way off the pace. For a team that was touted as the third-fastest in winter testing, this is just not good enough. This season was supposed to be so much better for Williams.

Honda also had a dire race. Jenson Button was the only retirement after he was involved in an accident while Barrichello could only manage 14th. Just as things were looking up to Honda, they suddenly find themselves firmly at the rear of the grid again.

The British Grand Prix is next. I reckon Ferrari will storm away with that one as well. Let’s see. We’ve been treated to some good races recently. Even the French Grand Prix had more drama than anticipated — even if the predicted rain came to nothing.