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"           The 2009 F1 season was like a ride on a Ferris wheel: For a while, you might be up on top, sitting in your sunny gondola and enjoying the view, but soon the wheel would move, and you&amp;#039;d be on the way down. If you started at the bottom, your turn would come at the top. No one rode out the whole year from the same vantage point, high or low.   In the past, it seemed safe to assume that a driver at the bottom of the championship standings had a lesser car. But it also seemed safe to assume that he was a lesser driver: This was how he&amp;#039;d wound up in that car. Give him a Ferrari or a McLaren, and he would do better; but he would not be contending for the championship.   But this past season, the previous year&amp;#039;s top drivers were often fighting at the back of the pack. And Jenson Button, who finished 18th in 2008 and scored three points, scored 95 this year in becoming World Champion. Such abrupt shifts in fortune suggest the degree to which a driver is at the mercy of his car\u2014and the degree to which a car&amp;#039;s performance can distort our perception of a driver. The unprecedented flux in the driver market at the end of 2009 reflects this uncertainty about the drivers&amp;#039; relative abilities. At any rate, the championship standings alone no longer seem a reliable measure.   My pick for No. 1, Lewis Hamilton, spent the first half of the season stuck in a gondola\u2014call it a McLaren MP4-24\u2014at the bottom of the Ferris wheel. A sweeping rules change before the season did not give McLaren the edge that its vast resources would have predicted. Things to blame ranged from a late start on the design to the extra work imposed by developing KERS, the optional kinetic energy recovery systems that convert braking energy into bursts of acceleration. But part of the aero package\u2014the downforce-generating diffuser at the back of the car\u2014became the scapegoat.   Until McLaren fixed the diffuser and its constituent parts in midseason, the car lacked downforce at the back, presenting Hamilton with the daunting prospect of an unexpected loss of grip in high-speed turns. In the midst of his struggles with the car, he wound up in a controversy over lying to the stewards, which he did at the direction of the team. But these dark early days of the season revealed another dimension to his character. As he faced the impossibility of defending his championship, he showed that he enjoyed driving for driving&amp;#039;s sake. He never complained about the car, never flinched as he pushed through fast turns, and reveled in his ability to keep it on or somewhere near the road.   The difficulty of controlling the car put his prodigious car control into sharper relief. He made mistakes, like squandering the chance Monaco&amp;#039;s slow turns gave him to win. But when the car improved, he took full advantage. At Singapore, he led from the start, controlling the pace, nursing his tires. Following team directions, he managed to reprogram his KERS from the cockpit. At Abu Dhabi, he took the pole by an astonishing 0.7 seconds. In the intra-team battle\u2014particularly significant this year\u2014his domination of teammate Heikki Kovalainen increased as the season went on. Since Hungary, which Hamilton won, only one driver scored more points.   That was Sebastian Vettel, my pick for second. Vettel is Hamilton&amp;#039;s equal in raw talent, but he&amp;#039;s a year behind in polish. It was his mistakes, rather than lack of speed, that cost him the championship. Australia, Malaysia, Monaco and Hungary all ended in grief. But he gave Red Bull four wins, including its first ever. And he beat his teammate, Mark Webber. In the past, Webber had gotten the best of every teammate he ever had, and while notoriously bad luck had kept him from winning a GP, his qualifying performances were consistently scintillating. But in 2009, Vettel, despite being new to the team, outqualified him 15 to two.   During the season, Vettel went from boyish delight at winning races to frustration at losing the championship. His driving also matured. The Vettel we saw tangle with Robert Kubica in the first race was not the same as the case-hardened, astute tactician who stalked Hamilton at the last race, in Abu Dhabi.   Hamilton and Vettel were the fastest drivers, but the story of the championship revolved around Jenson Button, my pick for third. He drove for Brawn GP, an entity Ross Brawn, the man behind Michael Schumacher&amp;#039;s seven championships, created at the last moment from what had been the Honda team. Brawn traveled light: no corporate structure\u2014he made all the decisions himself\u2014and no KERS. Brawn&amp;#039;s aero boys spotted a loophole in the diffuser rules through which Button drove to six wins in the first seven races. Six out of seven! Only Jim Clark and Michael Schumacher had achieved such a fast start, and it was all the sweeter for Button because in nine years he had won only one race and was being called a has-been that never was. Now he was at the top of the Ferris wheel&amp;#039;s arc, gazing at a vista of opportunity. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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