Originally Posted by bystander:
“There wasn't much of a choice though was there.
Button is just an average driver who got lucky one year.
Vettel's another average driver who got lucky four times.
I reserve the right to back track next year if results prove otherwise.”
It's usually a rather futile exercise to speculate about this stuff because it's often a case of attempting to "compare apples with oranges" but it seems like one of the simplest criteria for judging a driver's performance is by looking at how their team-mate did.
In the case of this year, for example, the fact that both Merc' drivers finished 1-2 (with Rosberg finishing nearly 100 points ahead of Ricciardo in P3) certainly confirms that the car was a huge factor and that another driver might have also done well in that same car.
When we look at the results for 2009, however, we see that it was Vettel who finished behind Button and then Rubens finishing 3rd with Webber behind
him.
That would suggest that, good as the Brawn car was, Button was doing things with it that his team-mate failed to emulate.
Similar thing with Vettel too.
There wasn't a year where the RBR drivers finished 1-2 in the championship.
Every year Vettel won, it was a driver from a different team who finished in 2nd place rather than Vettel's team-mate.
If we assume that drivers like Vettel and Button are "average" (for an F1 driver, presumably) then we're left to conclude that their team-mates must be positively useless - which kinda makes you wonder how either of them continued to get a drive in F1 year after year.