For the entire season, Atlas F1 kept an eye on the battle between teammates with a simple measurement: comparing the qualifying times of each driver against his teammate's. Now that the season is over it's time to see who's hot and who's not...

Seventeen qualifying sessions, 23 drivers, 13 duels... Forget the World Drivers' Championship; put aside the Constructors' one - this is where it most counts: the Qualifying Differentials 2002 World Championship! And our newly crowned king is...

Yes, Australian Mark Webber trashed the opposition in his first Formula One season - having lead the Qualifying Differentials standings throughout the season, and having been the only driver who outqualified his teammate in all rounds. Even if we remove the best and worst result for each pair of teammates the final standings remain unchanged:

Webber even leads the mini-tournament, among those pairs who contended against their teammate for less than 15 rounds:

Interestingly enough, there were only three pairs in the "partial season" tournament. It proves, if anything, that this year has been very stable in terms of team configurations. Last year, for example, there were 11 pairs in the partial season graph.

Another interesting aspect of 2002 is how low the gaps have been between the teammates, with the exception of Minardi that is. The average gap for each race, though, varied according to location:

In terms of the number of times each driver outqualified his teammate, there is diversity across the field, as the below graphs shows:

And finally, for good measure, we are adding another fact to look at: Career Qualifying Differentials, where teammates that have raced more than one season are compared over their joint career:

The average for the above:

We'll be sure to update this long-haul QD comparison in a year's time, but in the mean time we'd like to extend our congratulations to Mark Webber on a Job Well Done, and we look forward to seeing him fight for the crown next year. See you in 2003!