So, here we are at the end of yet another Formula 1 season. By the time most of you read this column, Abu Dhabi will be the only pending GP, and, by the looks of it, we should have a title-decider at the Yas Marina circuit. This will be the 5th year in succession in which we’ll see the Driver’s title being decided at the season-ending GP (06 for Alonso, 07 for Raikkonen, 08 for Hamilton, and 09 for Button). By my memory, the season-ending title deciders have always been fun, and I have no doubt that Abu Dhabi too will be one helluva race (which is also why I am heading there for LIVE action)!

The 2010 F1 season has been unique and exciting. Reasons? We’ve seen new regulations come into effect, and actually work – i.e. the new points scoring system, and the ban on mid-race refueling. We’ve seen a mixture of performances from the various teams. The new ones have largely failed to perform – Lotus, Virgin and HRT haven’t exactly made a mark. Red Bull Racing, clearly the team with the fastest car, failed to convert their Qualifying form to Race Day victories – they should have clinched both World Championships by now.

At Ferrari, we saw Fernando Alonso win the season-opening Bahrain GP only to find himself languishing mid-season, and then resurging to leading the F1 Driver’s Championship. We also got to see some classic race-fixing action by the Italian squad! Plus, we saw Michael Schumacher and Mercedes re-enter Formula 1 – not the best of comebacks, but they will remain the most watched team-and-driver combination in 2011.

McLaren and Lewis Hamilton, just when you write them off, emerge ever stronger. After successive failures in Italy, Singapore, and Japan, they brought it all together in Korea to finish second, and keep their championship hopes alive. Lewis has a strong chance to fight for the Driver’s Championship, while McLaren have an outside chance to beat Red Bull in the Constructor’s Championship. I would also rate Jenson Button’s debut season at McLaren quite highly – his tactical brilliance led them to victory at venues that they would never have expected.

The team that progressed the most in 2010 would clearly be the Force India F1 team – from bringing up the rear of the grid last season, to fighting Williams for 6th place in the Constructor’s Championship. While they’ve been a little sporadic off late, the Indian F1 team has certainly impressed the F1 paddock.

The performances of Renault and Robert Kubica also deserve special mention. The French manufacturer has been dabbling with an exit from the sport for some time now. But that aside, their performance has been very strong and extremely consistent all season. Russian rookie Vitaly Petrov was patchy during the entire season, but could still be the F1 2010 ‘rookie of the year.’

The other rookie worth discussing is Kamui Kobayashi. A Toyota product, we thought he too would disappear from the grid with the Japanese manufacturer last year. However, he has demonstrated his raw speed once again in a lowly-developed BMW Sauber Ferrari. He not only out-qualified his illustrious teammates, Pedro de la Rosa and Nick Heidfeld, but beat them on Sunday as well with his race craft – his brilliance displayed by a charge up the grid at his home Grand Prix in Japan.



The new teams, however, haven’t been as lucky this year. While none of them were able to pick up even a single point this season, the only team that could look to do better next season would be Lotus Racing. Tony Fernandes, with the talkative Mike Gascoyne, has been expanding their engineering team, investing in wind tunnels, as well as setting up a junior racing team. They seem to be taking all the right steps to becoming a formidable team – but will they succeed? Only time will tell. Virgin Racing are still hell bent on an only CFD design car, and the only reason I wish they do well is because of their bold approach. Wouldn’t it be great if you proved the much established F1 teams completely wrong in your second season itself? Great yes, but that’s also what I would call wishful thinking!

HRT Racing, the last of the new teams, doesn’t appear to have quite as positive future prospects. Evidenced by the fact that they’ve made their drivers play musical chairs all season, the team has lacked a sense of direction, and of course the millions of dollars to run and develop a competitive racing car. Will they even line up on the 2011 grid?

So, while we’ve just about captured the highs and lows of the 2010 season – let’s think back to one of my columns from the start of the season. It focused on two big changes in regulations – first, the ban on mid-race refueling, and second, the new points scoring system.

The mid-race refueling ban has been well accepted. While the season-opening Bahrain GP was labeled a snore-fest because of the lack of pit-lane action, the teams and drivers have coped well since, and have managed to improve the on-track action during the course of the season. I would prefer to see more tyre strategy come into play next year however. While I hope that Pirelli engineers compounds that offer high levels of grip, I also hope that their tires need to be changed at least twice during a GP. This year, the only GP where the teams attempted different tyre strategies to get the better of one another was the Canadian Grand Prix. Also, Jenson Button and Michael Schumacher were the boldest racers when it came to attempting different tyre strategies to make up ground.

The new points scoring system has, on the face of it, created a very competitive season with a number of drivers taking the lead during the course of the season. But let’s actually plot a comparative championship table to see if it throws up a different scenario. An analysis is here for all to see, and, as it turns out, our championship leaders would have remained unchanged. The top six would include Fernando Alonso (93), Mark Webber (88), followed by Lewis Hamilton (87), Sebastian Vettel (86), Jenson Button (77), and Felipe Massa (57). Funnily enough, it looks eerily similar to the situation that we currently face. The only driver who would really lose out would be Scuderia Toro Rosso’s Jamie Alguersuari, who would not have opened his Championship points account had the 09 scoring system been in use.