Patronise F1

The second GP3 Series championship season featured an insanely open title battle, with wins being shared around a wealth of up-and-coming drivers and an eventual champion emerging having been nowhere for the first half of the season.

If there have been plenty of championships throughout all forms of motorsport that have been characterised as 'the title that nobody wanted to win', then the 2011 GP3 Series crown was perhaps 'the title that everybody wanted to win'.

The first ten races of the sixteen-race season saw ten different winners emerge, and with just a handful of races left to go, the list of potential champions remained almost as long as the list of competitors. Either this is a golden generation of future F1 stars, or everyone was pretty much as average as everyone else, either way it made for a classic season.

The closeness of the points standings meant that the championship was always there for the taking for any driver willing or able to string together a sudden string of results. And so it proved with Valtteri Bottas, the Finn securing four wins and a further second place in the final seven races to secure the title with a round to spare.

But Bottas, who credited a mid-season breakthrough by himself and his ART team regarding the tricky new Pirelli GP3 rubber as the reason behind his sudden upturn in form (he scored 50 of his 62 points in the second half of the season), was far from being the only 'one to watch' to emerge from the 2011 season.

For British fans, there was a wealth of talent, with no less than four race winners from Team GBR throughout the year, and at times it looked like the second GP3 champion would surely be from somewhere within the UK. But then they all showed solid signs of the good old-fashioned British choke as well.

After the likes of Alex Sims, Lewis 'Lewis 2.0' Williamson and Adrian Quaife-Hobbs dominated the Valencia and Silverstone rounds, all were within sniffing distance of the championship lead, with Sims leading the way by three points. From there, all three drivers suffered relative downturns in form. Sims scored just one points finish in the second half of the season, as did Williamson, as the rest of the GP3 field pulled away from them.

One British driver to nearly go the distance was James Calado, team mate to Bottas. He only won once all season, a reverse-grid sprint race in Valencia, but a virtually unbroken run of points finishes throughout the middle of the season saw him keep pace with the Finn right to the end, finishing a creditable second in the final standings.

GP3 sophomore drivers Nigel Melker and Nico Muller also ran strongly throughout the year, but only securing one win apiece and finishing behind ART's rookie duo in the standings will count as something of a disappointment given their prior experience of the GP3 machinery from 2010.

Elsewhere, there were wins for Indonesian driver Rio Haryanto, though he failed to follow up his own 2010 success in securing the prize Virgin F1 test available to the highest-placed of Virgin's sister Manor squad in the standings, losing out to Quaife-Hobbs. Still, he took two wins, and after some dreadful early-season form became one of the form men of the second half of the season.

Mitch Evans was also among the list of winners, the Kiwi protégé of F1 driver Mark Webber setting the early pace in the Aussie's own MW Arden squad. But his dip in form was more apparent than some of the others, and a combination of poor qualifying results and some bad luck saw him fail to score a point from round seven onwards.

Completing the list of winners, there were one-off successes for Hungarian driver Tamas Pal Kiss, Portuguese driver Antonio Felix da Costa and ART rookie Richie Stanaway, with all three taking advantage of the opportunity to leap to the front offered by GP3's second race reverse grid.

But while the wins were largely shared around, Bottas was the man who got closest to hogging the champagne. His four wins - the only other multiple victor was Haryanto - putting him clear of his peers this time out. He will be targeting a move to ART's GP2 squad for 2012, possibly joining the man he succeeded as GP3 champion Esteban Gutierrez.

After that, he already has links to F1 through the Williams team, while ART themselves have a tie-in with Renault backers Group Lotus. If he can prove himself on the next rung of the development ladder, an F1 graduation will be in the offing.

But after as crazy and open a year as this in GP3, only time will tell if Bottas really is the next big thing, or simply one in an evenly-matched group of youngsters.

Patty's top five GP3 drivers of 2011

1 Valterri Bottas
Granted, the Finn had access to the crack ART squad's resources, the French team having dominated GP3's inaugural championship with Gutierrez, and granted he entered the series with more motorsport experience than some, but you don't win titles by luck, and Bottas refused to allow his early-season toils to get him down, nor the pressure after his disappointing season for ART in the 2010 F3 Euroseries to make him crack, and he ends the season a worthy champion.

2 Alexander Sims
After the Nurburgring rounds in July, things were looking very good indeed for Sims. The Status driver led the standings by six points with six races to go. But the Brit would not score another point. Disqualified from fourth place in the next round after a trifling ride-height infringement, he then battled from the back of the grid to a pointless 9th place. Further bad luck peppered the final few rounds, but Sims showed enough quality earlier in the season to prove his talent.

3 James Calado
His runner-up spot in the championship is not to be sniffed at, but at times it appeared a position born more of dogged consistency than any burst of performance. Between round five of the series in Valencia and round fifteen at Monza, he only finished outside the points once, but he only took a single win. But for a couple more points here and there, he could have pushed Bottas all the way, but consistency will only get you so far.

4 Lewis Williamson
Lewis 2.0 showed flashes of being the next British superstar in 2011, but it was largely confined to a mid-season purple patch in which he accumulated all of his points for the season in a brief burst of seven races. Still, he may well have done better but for some patchy luck at either end of the championship, was quick ever since the start of GP3 testing in the pre-season, and will now be among the title favourites for the 2012 campaign.

5 Rio Haryanto
That the Indonesian was the only man aside from Bottas to win more than a single race perhaps means that he should be higher in the pecking order than this. But while he secured five top four finishes in the second half of the season, including his two wins, the rest of his championship campaign was largely anonymous. Still, he does clearly have talent, and will likely be one to watch should he graduate to GP2 next year, which will surely be the aim after two seasons here.e.

Patty's top GP3 moments of 2011

- A sensational fight in the damp (Germany feature race)
In damp conditions, with hot-headed youngsters squabbling for the race win, this should have been a crash-fest. But with Haryanto, Bottas, Williamson, Quaife-Hobbs and Calado all in the fight for the podium places in the closing stages at the Nurburgring, they produced some driving that their F1 peers would have been proud of.

- Monza slipstreaming (The whole Monza weekend)
The final two races of the season at the Monza track saw the GP3 cars put on a brilliant motorsporting show, as the super-tiny wings on the cars allowed for a pair of races that harked back to Monza's classic slipstreaming past. If you have a spare hour or so, follow the YouTube link to the four parts of the two races, and just enjoy.

- Rookie success at Spa (Belgium sprint race)
A sign that Richie Stanaway might be a name to look out for in the future, as the New Zealander, parachuted in to the third ART car for the final two meetings of the season, controlled the sprint race at Spa-Francorchamps in challenging conditions to take victory in only his second GP3 outing.

- Bottas goes all Sennaesque (Germany sprint race)
You haven't really made it as a driver until someone, somewhere has described something you do as 'Sennaesque', which is why James Allen was so keen to leap that hurdle with Lewis Hamilton early in his career. And here, in soggy conditions at the Nurburgring, Bottas tries his best to re-enact Donington '93 by carving up from 6th on the grid to the lead within half a lap.

Final Championship Standings

11 Michael Christensen (RSC Mucke Motorsport) 19pts, 12 Dean Smith (Addax Team) 18pts, 13 Antonio Felix da Costa (Status Grand Prix) 16pts, 14 Tom Dillmann (Carlin/Addax Team) 15pts, 15 Aaro Vainio (Tech 1 Racing) 12pts, 16 Tamas Pal Kiss (Tech 1 Racing) 11pts, 17 Conor Daly (Carlin) 10pts, 18 Simon Trummer (MW Arden) 9pts, 19 Gabriel Chaves (Addax Team) 8pts, 20 Richie Stanaway (Lotus ART) 7pts, 21 Nick Yelloly (ATECH CRS GP) 7pts, 22 Luciano Bacheta (RSC Mucke Motorsport) 4pts, 23 Callum MacLeod (Carlin) 3pts, 24 Alex Fontana (Jenzer Motorsport) 1pt.