And that's what put Sato ahead, both in the points and in these rankings. Time and again Davidson caught the eye, in practice, in qualifying, even on race day when running long put him in the points just before his stop, but in the final reckoning he just wouldn't be there. Sometimes that was down to bad luck, like in Canada when he hit a beaver, but you also felt that Anthony just wasn't capitalising on his opportunities. He had no top ten finishes, and in races when they both came home, Sato won that one easily 7-2.

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Plus he suffered from poor reliability and collisions with others that weren't his fault, and he threw away a sure 4th place in Canada. By Turkey he had gone nine races without finishing, his career was on the ropes, and he now had Sebastian Vettel as his team-mate. Tonio responded well, matching and beating the wunderkind, only for Vettel to steal the glory in Japan and China, whilst Liuzzi's equally good drives, and the fact that he had made Q2 a commendable ten times throughout the year, were sadly overlooked.

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Adrian showed flashes of brilliance, especially at Monaco where he topped the wet Saturday practice, he was an absolute star at Spa, and he scored his first point at Fuji - so there could have been no doubt about his inherent speed. But his season was littered with errors, from spins to drive-through penalties, from crashes on his own to collisions with others, and there seemed to be no improvement or tempering in that department. That lack of growth stopped bigger teams from snaffling him up for next season.

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That meant he kept being saddled with one-stop fuel loads, which combined with F1's ultra-reliability and Alex's somewhat diminished racecraft, meant he never got very far. The exceptions were, of course, three excellent points-scoring drives at Monaco, Canada and the Nurburgring including a podium, on days when experience meant more than raw speed. It kept him ahead of Rosberg in the points for a long time which always seemed unjust, and in the end his retirement from the sport was honourable and fitting.

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His experience, especially on Bridgestones, meant that he found a level of performance quickly, but - here's the rub - he plateaued there whereas Button kept pushing. In the first six races, he out-qualified Button 4-2 and out-finished him 4-0. In the remaining eleven outings, the qualifying and race results were turned 7-4 and 4-2 respectively in Button's favour. It meant Rubens suffered his first pointless season in fifteen years, although only poor strategic calls cost him in Monaco, Canada and Japan.

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Maybe it was the growing ascendancy of Kovalainen in the team, as the Finn's consistency in the second half of the year was relentless, and he eventually outscored Fisi 30 to 21 and pipped the Italian 9-8 in qualifying. Maybe it was Giancarlo's disillusionment at how Renault post-Alonso and post-Michelin was such an average place to be. Whatever the reason, the fact is that his year waned and spiralled into the midfield mire. Fisichella himself seemed to just give up, and that was seriously unimpressive.

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But, in typical Toyota and Trulli fashion, that meant running disadvantageous two-stop fuel loads with a car that didn't have the race pace to make the best of it, and race after race Jarno seemed to fall into this dispirited heap that we have become far too accustomed to. Eight times he finished lower than where he started, and he went an excruciating stretch from France to China without a point. It doesn't need saying, but whatever happens on Saturday, it's race day that counts.

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The unevenness of Ralf's season told its own story. He scored points in the first, sixth and eleventh races of the year, and he only qualified in the top ten in the first two races, in a midseason burst from the Nurburgring to Hungary, and then in China. But interspersed amongst all that was hardly anything of note in races, and five failures to make it past even Q1 in qualifying. It may just be that Ralf is a misinterpreted soul, but by year's end few seemed sorry if his place in the sport was taken by a hungrier man.

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That was hardly likely to alleviate tensions - the only thing that could have saved the relationship was if the combination put results on the board. But apart from a fine drive at Monaco on a one-stop strategy, there was very little positive to report, especially when four of his seven DNFs were due to collisions or spins, including two very avoidable clashes with Alexander Wurz. Basically, his replacement by Sebastian Vettel proved an inconvenient truth, that Scott did not have what it took to live up to his surname.

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Then there were his lazy errors, for example his crash in Melbourne, his drive-through penalty for ignoring blue flags at Barcelona, and most notably his pit-stop faux pas at Magny Cours when he pulled the fuel hose out of the rig having driven off before he was released. When his main sponsor defaulted on payment, the raison d'etre for keeping him in the Spyker team disappeared, because on merit and ability he had shown that he was no longer young enough nor quick enough.

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Yamamoto was never anything other than slowest in qualifying, but he had a better finishing record than he did last year, reducing his number of errors even though there were still many. Although he finished a decent 12th in the torrential conditions at Fuji, one suspected that someone with more ability plus local knowledge could have done better. At times he matched team-mate Adrian Sutil in free practice, but when it counted in qualifying he was usually 1 to 1.5s behind, and that was far too big a gap.

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