There must be no worse feeling for a Formula 1 driver, or a racer in any of the world’s top series, than being hammered by a team-mate.
Rubens Barrichello may be in the best car, but were I a competitor in F1, there is almost no-one who I would least like to be right now. Well, perhaps Nelson Piquet Junior has to be considered.
Barrichello must be feeling a touch of embarrassment. He clearly feels that his championship-leading team-mate Jenson Button is having the best of it with regard to Brawn’s driver-focused resources, but that excuse just does not cut the mustard.
It has long since been agreed that the best way to rate a driver’s performance is by comparing it to another in the same car, and Barrichello’s stats look so poor against Button’s. While the Briton made it six wins from seven races for the season in Istanbul on Sunday, the Brazilian remains winless so far in 2009, and there are a couple of fifth places in there too. He would have finished lower than that in Istanbul had Brawn not retired his car late on.
The only other driver who is being bettered by a team-mate in such a blindingly obvious fashion is Piquet, who is forced to look across the garage at every GP weekend and see Fernando Alonso, widely regarded as one of the best pound-for-pound racers in the world. Double champion Alonso is a hard act to match, but Piquet never even comes close.
Heikki Kovalainen deserves a mention, seeing as he was so horribly outperformed by champion Lewis Hamilton last year, but the Finn is giving his fellow struggling McLaren driver more of a battle this time around.
It would be far preferable to be an Adrian Sutil or a Sebastien Buemi, in my opinion. OK, so there’s no hope of winning a Grand Prix, only the remotest chance of a podium, and even getting a point takes a combination of luck and massive graft, but there’s more reward in that than sitting in second place in the standings – with the prospect of a race win likely at some point – but firmly in the shadow of your team-mate.
If someone doesn’t show up for a game of five-a-side football, it’s better to be on the team with four. If you’re playing a game of tennis, it’s better to have the rickety old racket than the superb and slick new one. If you’re up against it, everything is more pleasurable. And, of course, if things don’t work out, you have excuses!
The point is that when drivers like Barrichello, Piquet, and even Kovalainen and Kazuki Nakajima, fail to do it for the team, they need only look at their team-mates’ results to see what they could, and arguably should, be doing.
All the claims of favouritism can be made, and some of them may have weight, but the records will only show how many less points these men bagged over the course of the season than the other lad in the same machine. And, in a competitive sense, that has got to be the worst place for a driver to be in.