Hamilton has beaten a double WDC in his rookie year. Raikkonen is struggling to beat Massa, who never had an edge over a teammate before. This might be an answer to your question. You can use flawed arguments, but in your heart you know well how low is Raikkonen's performance this year considering the winter expectations and predictions about his "piece of cake WDC without TC".

Aaaand an other indication: Hamilton scored the most points since he entered Formula-1. Pretty impressive from a sophomore, isn't it? How can anyone seriously rank him below.. well, anyone from the current field?

Ahh, flawed arguments. Expectations by some of the Kimi fans = proper argument? Without TC, I expected Hamilton to win every race this season. That means he sucks. Do you apply this logic to Renault 2005-06, BTW?

There are lies, bigger lies and...

And nobody ever had the winning car 100% of F1 career time, don't you remember? Yes, he's a great driver who had best preperation to F1 in history but still 80%-85% of F1 success depends on the car. Nothing has changed in this matter.

Regarding the car every driver had available Robert Kubica is rational choice. After 7 races out of 9 (after 9th race we have half of the season and we choose the best driver of the first half of the season in this thread) he was leading the Championship with the car 0.5s or more slower than top runners.

Lewis 1st, Robert close 2nd. Rob did an excellent job in the very beginning mostly because of great speed and consistency but nowadays he drives like a journey man because of the car. Massa also 2nd and very close to Lewis! Kimi is 3rd. He should raise his game in qualifying. Race pace is not the problemo. Special mentions to Fernando, Kovy and Nick!

Read the thread's title. We choose the best driver of the first half (9 races) of the season.

Hamilton -brilliant

Cant beleive 20 have vote for Kimi :\

At the moment Michael is probably far from his best years - and I'm afraid he's too old! He was phenomenal most of the time but he lost the plot in 2005 and the spark in 2006.

Fine! I'll give my spiritual vote to Robert !

Hey, you can give your vote to anyone you want to!

Great, but we're talking about first half of 2008 here.

Stats don't lie. It's a matter of interpretation though.

What is the lie here?

Hamilton: 109+62=171
Raikkonen: 110+57= 167 (165 w/o Brazil teamorder)
Massa: 94+54=148 (150 w/o Brazil teamorder)

These are the drivers who sat in a topcar in the last 28 races. Generally we can agree that Ferrari had the better package in most of the races, reliability issues were balanced, however Raikkonen seemed to be the luckiest out of the 3 in this period, and Massa the unluckiest.

With this measure I think it's pretty safe to say Hamilton is the best one, and Kimi is the one who didn't match the expectations. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but this should be quite obvious.

Ok, so you were trolling. Now I get it

Hamilton all the way. No one has been quick and error free in post TC conditions. Hamilton has made a decent car look dominant on occasions and has delivered two memorable wet weather drives. Without Hamilton, F1 would be all the poorer and this board all the quieter and more civilized. Without Hamilton, Alonso would be well on the way to his fourth WDC on the trot and none of us would be any the wiser.

The two other drivers that have impressed me personally are Kubica and Webber.