Was watching the 2001 San Marino Grand Prix on YouTube recently and it got me thinking - what cars do you think were better than their results suggested?
I'm going to get the ball rolling with the 2001 McLaren - the MP4-16. The results paint a picture of a car that was scrapping for second best with the Williams-BMW, with Coulthard finishing 58 points off Schumacher in the title race and Ferrari winning the Constructors title by an even bigger margin. But I've always suspected the car performance wise stacked up to the Ferrari in the same way the respective 2000 cars did.
Early in the season DC looked more than a match for Michael, winning well in Brazil and Austria, along with comfortable poles in Monaco and San Marino (where McLaren locked out the front row), while Hakkinen, despite having shocking reliability, was absolutely dominant in Spain, Great Britain, and the USA, and looked a match for the Ferraris in Australia and Monaco too. It's obviously pretty well known that Hakkinen was mentally checked out at this point, but with better reliability and the fire that drove him to 2, nearly 3, consecutive WDCs, I think he could have made it a much closer title race than it was.
It's pretty generally accepted that the F2001 was comfortably the best car in 2001, and I would agree with this. But I think the margin looks inflated by the brilliance of Schumacher, and that his only legitimate rival was Coulthard, who was never champion material?
What do you guys think?