The 2014 driver-by-driver review: Every driver's season reviewed and rated

There can only ever be one ultimate winner at the end of a Formula 1 season – in this case 2014 world champion Lewis Hamilton – but there’s always plenty of driver performances to admire throughout the grid.

So, with 24 men in total having started at least one race this year, here, in final Drivers’ Championship classification, is how they’ve rated...

Lewis Hamilton

Championship position – 1st, 384 points; Best result – 1st (x11)

The best man won as a deserved champion.

True, armed with the fastest car and one of the most dominant in the history of F1, Hamilton may have made hard work of it, but then again, that was the reason why his triumph was ultimately so impressive: it was hard work. Hit hard by unreliability, hit harder still by his team-mate in Spa to fall 29 points adrift of the title summit, Lewis’s response, headlined by six victories in the final seven races, was metaphorically and literally just champion. Even Nico had to admit, in the final reckoning, that he had been beaten by the better driver.

Only in qualifying did Hamilton lag behind, suffering defeat to a team-mate on a Saturday for the first time in his F1 career. Yet there was a pertinent mitigation to this loss with Hamilton invariably devoting his efforts in Friday’s practice sessions to honing his race-day set-up. The result, more often than not, was a comprehensive defeat of Rosberg when it counted. The final margin of title victory, 67 points, was perhaps a little harsh on Nico, but, nevertheless, it did not flatter the victor. If his triumph was over adversity and the negativity of unreliability and dubious driving, it was also a positive success story of spellbinding speed and belated maturity. He may have made hard work of it 2014, but he probably wouldn’t have made it all five years ago. PG

2014 rating: 9/10

Nico Rosberg

Championship position – 2nd, 317 points; Best result – 1st (x5)

If the unreliability boot had been on the other foot at Mercedes in Abu Dhabi, it would have been hard to argue that Nico Rosberg was a more deserving World Champion than Lewis Hamilton. The cold, hard facts from the season would have suggested as much: on the 14 occasions both W05s made the finish on race day in 2014, only four times did Rosberg finish as the lead Silver Arrow – and two of those times was when his team-mate had started out of position on the grid. However, on the flip side of that argument, it would also churlish to downplay Nico’s impressive achievements across a season in which he was finally able to definitively prove to doubters that he warrants a place at F1’s top table.

While it brought him no more than a fairly meaningless pole position trophy, Rosberg’s 12-7 defeat of Hamilton in qualifying – despite his own, largely forgotten, Saturday wobbles at the start of the year in addition to his team-mate’s mid-year mechanical problems – was no mean feat and important for his reputation given it’s the Briton who is habitually labelled as the outright fastest man in F1. While gently mocked as ‘Britney’ in his early days by Mark Webber, Rosberg also showed he had the inner steel to go with his flowing blonde locks, notably in his response to Hamilton’s early four-race victory streak, that perfect weekend in Brazil and, yes, even by keeping his nose in to ‘prove a point’