Whatever happened to....

There are lots of F1 drivers that spent their entire career at the back of the grid, waiting for the call from a top team that would fire them to the top of the grid and superstardom.

Inevitably the call never came and they ended up disappearing into obscurity.

As part of an occasional series, I'm going to focus on one or two of these individuals and find out whatever happened to them.

First up is Esteban Tuero.

Tuero joined the F1 grid in 1998 as one of the Minardi drivers (his team-mate being Shinji Nakano) and despite concern the he was too young (at 18 - the 3rd youngest F1 driver ever at the time) and inexperienced, he managed to stick his car in 17th place, ahead of his team mate and other such as Jan Magnesson and Olivier Panis.

What followed was a pretty solid F1 season where he did a good job in a medicore car and generally silenced his doubters.

Come the final race of the season, he collided with Tyrrell driver Tora Takagi and injured his neck. (Incidentally, there is a theory that Schumacher's title ending puncture was caused by shards of carbon-fibre from this collision).

The neck injury healed but on the eve of the 1999 season, Tuero announced his announcement and prompted a bunch of speculation about his reasons for retiring, none of which he's willing to comment on.

What happened after F1 isn't clear but he popped up at the FIA GT Championship at Silverstone yesterday, driving a Ferrari 550 alongside other one-time F1 driver and future topic in this series, Gaston Mazzacane.

Are BMW true title challengers this year?

In a word, No.

They're made good progress this year and it's really been steady progress ever since they bought into the team, but are they at the stage where they can challenge for the championship? I would say not. They're not fast enough to trouble Ferrari and while a win or two isn't out of the question, they just don't have the experience or the strength to keep up the relentless pace of development that Ferrari and McLaren can do.

Can they beat McLaren though?

Maybe. While McLaren are a stronger team, they are somewhat hobbled by having to limit their development, and their showing in the past two races hasn't been outstanding - Hamilton in particular had a very scrappy race in Bahrain and the ultimate pace of the team in Malaysia wasn't outstanding.

However, if I was forced to say right now whether I thought BMW would beat McLaren, I'd have to say no. BMW have great qualifying pace but their race pace isn't quite as outstanding. What's more is that McLaren are a formidable team and they can fight back from their current slump having been in this position many times before. This is new territory for BMW and I'm not sure they're always going to make the right decisions - especially when the pressure is on at the end of the season.

However, having three teams in the mix is great for F1 and whatever happens will be great for us as viewers.