The class of F1 2011 provided plenty of entertainment, and some stonking performances, in the course of the most action-packed season in decades. After much head-scratching the ITV.com/formula1 editorial team have ranked the best of the best; let us know what your top 10 would be in the comments box below.


1. Sebastian Vettel

There could be no argument whatsoever about the identity of the man at the head of this list. Vettel barely missed a beat in 2011. It wasn't an absolutely perfect season, but it certainly wasn't far off. Sometimes when a driver is this dominant in the results, it is because their car advantage is huge and they have a clearly inferior team-mate. Webber was very nearly the 2010 world champion, yet this year Vettel moved up a gear and left him standing, with Webber's results proving that while the Red Bull was clearly an excellent car, that didn't mean anyone in it was automatically and easily going to steamroller the opposition. This year's rule package also should have made it harder than ever to put together a string of wins, with Pirelli, DRS and KERS creating so many potential banana skins – but Vettel had an answer for everything his rivals or the regulations could throw at him. And that's ominous for anyone hoping to knock him off his perch next season.

2. Fernando Alonso

So close to the title in 2010, yet only once a grand prix winner in 2011. But showing how well life at Ferrari suits him, Alonso kept his chin up, and kept pushing in his typical relentless fashion. There was very little to choose between him and Button when making this list, but in the end the clincher was that Alonso so rarely had even the slightest hint of an off-day. The Ferrari was definitely not a match for Red Bull, it often couldn't beat McLaren on pace either, and in Massa's hands it was sometimes in Mercedes territory – and never a podium finisher. Yet Alonso, powered by a never-say-die attitude that manifested itself most obviously in his assertive starts and opening laps, kept tigering a path towards the front. He couldn't always stay there to the end, but his tally of 10 podiums was at least twice as many as the car really deserved. This man will surely win a third title before he finishes with F1.

3. Jenson Button

Did anyone really truly believe that Button would be able to achieve what he has against Hamilton at McLaren? Last year was perhaps a little better than many expected, but still it seemed that Lewis would remain the team's star, with Button taking the occasional amazing win but generally being a touch slower. Yet by mid-2011, Button was the man you expected to see taking results for McLaren, as his silky style and experience paid dividends while Hamilton's campaign spiralled out of control. There were still days when Button's sensitivity left him a little off the pace in a car that wasn't quite right and he couldn't hustle to the front in the way that an on-form Hamilton or Alonso might have done. But those days were comprehensively outnumbered by the occasions when Button was surging through the field with incredible race pace or pulling off super-brave and surgically precise passes. And his charge to victory in Canada was among F1's best ever drives.

4. Heikki Kovalainen

While everyone talked about how relentlessly Vettel was maximising every opportunity his Red Bull offered at the front of the field, at the back, there was a genial Finn doing much the same in far less fruitful circumstances. Plenty of drivers have found themselves moving from top teams to backmarker squads over the years, but few have handled that transition as well as Kovalainen. If there was any disappointment at Lotus not meeting the targets they had set for themselves with their second F1 car, he never showed it – instead wringing all he could from the green machine at all times. Team-mate Jarno Trulli was comprehensively blown away again, and quicker teams were often unnerved by the presence of Kovalainen's Lotus snapping at their heels. Heikki says that unless a team with race-winning potential knocks on his door, he'd rather stick with Lotus/Caterham and help them work forwards than move to a midfield squad. Good for him.

5. Lewis Hamilton

There were times in 2011 when Hamilton was still at his incredible best, and he delivered several dazzling drives, headlined by his charge to victory in China. It was what happened in between those glory days that was the worry for McLaren, as he got involved in a string of collisions – the majority of them with Massa, but he did share the contact around – and underperformed on several occasions, seeing promising starts to races drift away. Myriad factors seemed to be involved, with questions raised over his personal life, management choices, and mental equilibrium as he had to face up to being regularly beaten by a team-mate for the first time and Vettel becoming the standout driver of the generation in the way Lewis had envisaged he would. All of that led to an unsettled Hamilton and a chaotic season for a man who is capable of such genius on his day.

6. Mark Webber

This wasn't a terrible season for Webber by any means, but it was such a huge disappointment after 2010. It appeared that a combination of the switch to Pirellis and the effect which the confidence boost of a maiden title had on Sebastian Vettel combined to turn last year's tiny gap between the Red Bull team-mates into a gulf. Webber managed just three poles to Vettel's 15, and one win to his team-mate's 11 (and that came after a gearbox issue for the German). But it wasn't just the on-paper statistics that made grim reading for Webber. In race after race he slipped backwards as his tactics didn't quite work out due to his troubles with the Pirellis, to which his style seemed ill-suited from the outset. There were some blistering charges at times, but these were always to make up for situations that Vettel just never seemed to end up in.

7. Paul di Resta

Di Resta may have been given some good preparation in 2010 as Force India's third driver, but he still faced an experience deficit to most of those around him, and had to retune his style to F1 cars after four seasons focused mainly on the very different saloons of the DTM series, which he won last season. Force India looked a long way off the pace in testing, but when the campaign got underway, they were immediately in the hunt for points, and with di Resta tending to out-qualify team-mate Sutil, it was the Scot who was leading their charge. Although he initially looked utterly composed and like he had been on the F1 grid for years, there were some shaky moments for di Resta and some clumsy collisions in races. But the raw speed that powered highlights like his amazing Silverstone grid slot proved his potential.

8. Adrian Sutil

At the start of 2011, things looked pretty bleak for Sutil. His new rookie team-mate Paul di Resta had breezed into a race seat and started relentlessly out-qualifying the well-established Sutil, and even though in the races there was less to choose between them, the perception was that the young Scot was edging Sutil towards the exit. Then when an incident in a Chinese nightclub left Sutil with criminal charges hanging over him, it seemed unlikely that he would last the season. But in the circumstances, Sutil remained commendably composed, and drove better and better as the year progressed. By the time it was clear that Force India planned to drop him for Nico Hulkenberg, Sutil had turned the tables on di Resta and produced a series of fine race charges, underlining to potential future employers – and Williams head that list – that he still had plenty to offer F1.

9. Nico Rosberg

Rosberg remains hard to assess. Mercedes occupied something of a no-man's-land for most of the year – not quite quick enough to get among the top three teams, but fast enough to stay clear of everyone else. There were days when Rosberg did manage to nudge his car further up, and other days when he found himself embarrassed by Force Indias or Toro Rossos. And when a team is in that sort of position, quantifying what the driver is achieving is tough. Was he flattering the car every race or should he have been doing more giant-killing? And were his regular slumps as races progressed due to having over-performed in the opening laps, or was that Rosberg struggling to maintain speed? The other factor was team-mate Michael Schumacher's improved form, for, unlike 2010, Rosberg did not blitz his legendary countryman all year, although the younger German still tended to be the man delivering results for Mercedes.

10. Felipe Massa

Massa has hung on to his Ferrari drive for 2012, but it is clear he needs to turn things around very dramatically to keep himself dressed in red beyond next year. There weren't many occasions in 2011 when he did anything conspicuously wrong or drove badly, and he lost several good results due to clashes with Lewis Hamilton that were the McLaren man's fault more often than not. Yet neither did Massa do anything spectacularly impressive: For much of the season he could be relied upon to qualify a significant margin behind team-mate Fernando Alonso and finish a similarly notable distance adrift in the races. That Massa this year became the first full-season Ferrari driver since Didier Pironi in 1981 to fail to take a single podium – in a year when Alonso stood up there 10 times – is a statistic that cannot be ignored.