2004 F1 World Championship Ten Best Drivers & Teams

[motorsportnerd]

With only one race left in the 2004 F1 World Championship, I believe that now is a good time for UCP members to nominate their ten best formula one drivers and to rank the ten F1 teams in order of best to worst of 2004. I will use these lists to work out an overall ranking the ten best drivers according to UCP members and the best and worst teams according to UCP members.

I suggest that each UCP member who follows F1 rank the drivers they believe to be the top ten drivers of 2004. Rank the drivers in order and try to rank them based on their racetrack performances, not whether you like or dislike them.
Some people may wish to wait until the Brazilian Grand Prix is completed before submitting their top ten list. I'll give everyone a period of two weeks in which to submit their list. I will then work out who the top 10 drivers are based on the lists submitted by UCP members. Each time a driver is nominated by a UCP member, they will get points based on their ranking by that member. A simple points system of 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 will suffice, with the driver who earns the most points being the driver that UCP members rate as the number 1 for 2004, the driver with the second most number of points finishing 2nd, etc. If you feel that you must rate two drivers equally for, say 3rd best, then both drivers will earn 8 points.
An example of how the points system works: 4 UCP members rate Takuma Sato as 3rd best driver, 3 members rate him as 6th best, 1 member rates him as 10th best. Sato would earn 40 points from UCP members. Meanwhile, Giancarlo Fisichella is rated as best driver by 1 member, 3rd best by 2 members and 5th best by one member. Fisichella would earn 32 points.
I hope that's not too confusing. Lets get as many top ten lists in as possible in the next two weeks and then we can declare who the top ten drivers as ranked by UCP members are.
It will be interesting to see how close the UCP top 10 list is that published by the authoritive Autocourse annual at years end. (NOTE: Autocourse will exclude Ralf Schumacher from qualification for the top ten list as he did not start enough Grand Prix this year due to injury and the editors will therefore feel they cannot rate him properly. They did this in 1999 when Michael Schumacher missed a number of races through injury. I think that UCP members should feel free to rate him in their top 10 if they wish. If Ralf ends up in our top 10, we will automatically be in disagreement with Autocourse).