The marathon, which is a Formula 1 season, has drawn to a close. And what a season it has been.

Despite his awesome reputation as an engineering leader I don't think anyone expected Ross Brawn's first car with a new team to be so utterly dominant when the season started. Brawn played the rule-book flawlessly with the now infamous double diffuser and stole a march on his rivals. He has never been the superstar designer but there is clearly a book on engineering leadership to be written about his style because it has delivered results in three different organisations; Toleman/Benetton, Ferrari and now Honda/Brawn. His achievement in keeping the Honda/Brawn workforce engaged and committed when they must have known that the majority of them would not be with the team by summer cannot be underestimated.

Adrian Newey, his nemesis at McLaren in previous title battles, is clearly revelling in the set up at Red Bull. Perhaps even more impressively than Brawn he delivered the only car able to remotely live with Brawn GP's early season pace without any clever rule-book reading. Instead, the Red Bull approach was elegant in its simplicity without any one standout feature for their rivals to seize on. It was a great example of a car which was more than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps the team that most outperformed the resources at their disposal was Force India. I don't think that in their wildest dreams they would have predicted a pole position and a fastest lap to their names come season's end.

On the other side of the coin, the early season performances of Ferrari, McLaren and Renault were as disappointing as Brawn and Red Bull were towering achievements given the relative difference in resources available to the engineering teams concerned. At the same time the 2009 season had some of the biggest swings in fortune I can remember in the 20 years I have been watching Formula 1 seriously. After starting from a low base, McLaren were able to finish the season with 2 wins and 4 poles, which must have seemed a distinct impossibility when Hamilton was lining up 18th on the grid in Australia. Ferrari managed to drag a win and a fastest lap out of a car which they abandoned to the same fate as the 2008 Honda, a similar decision to that which ultimately resulted in the 2009 Brawn. Expect Ferrari to deliver a substantially improved performance next season as a result. Renault were not able to do quite the same job of making a silk purse out of a sows ear as their counterparts at Woking and Maranello but they nonetheless managed a pole and 2 fastest laps.

The turnarounds were in no small part due to the efforts of their drivers. In my pre-season piece I wrote that this could be the season where Hamilton demonstrates genuine greatness by driving above the equipment at his disposal. To a great extent he did exactly that in terms of driving performance at the Australian GP converting 18th on the grid into 4th at the finish. What a pity then that he sullied that stunning performance by lying to the Stewards about what had happened between him and Trulli on-track under the safety car. There is no excuse for that action, in the same way as there is no excuse for diving in football or for faking a blood injury in rugby. It was deceit pure and simple. The radio transmissions proved that and people who had been party to the radio transmissions could be heard pedalling the same lie to the press in the aftermath of the race. The book was thrown and rightly so, albeit with Ron Dennis as the apparent sacrifice in mitigation against a potentially much harsher sentence.

He and McLaren put that event behind them and knuckled down to improving their car and did a sterling job of doing just that. Even more impressive was that on days when the equipment was worth no more than a midfield position Hamilton was never anything other than 100% committed to getting the best he could out of the race. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than at Silverstone where he and Alonso raced for 14th with the same fervour as if they were racing for 1st.

By the same token, Kovalainen had another disappointing season. I genuinely thought that he would step up to the plate alongside Hamilton in a poorly performing car but yet again he was comprehensively outperformed over the course of the season.