Six of the Best: Mismatched team-mates

It's often said in Formula One that the only true barometer of performance is a driver's teammate. By such a standard, some drivers in the 2015 field, notably Nico Rosberg and Kimi Raikkonen, could be said to have had disappointing seasons.

It may prove some consolation though that no matter how badly outperformed any of the current crop have been, the performance gap has nothing on this selection of six of the most mismatched teammates in Formula One history.

1972 - Lotus: Emerson Fittipaldi & Dave Walker

There have been greater Grand Prix drivers than Emerson Fittipaldi, and there have surely been much worse Formula One racers than Dave Walker - but never have two team-mates been more grossly mismatched than when Fittipaldi and Walker lined up alongside each other for Lotus in 1972.

Walker holds the ignominious record of being the sole driver in F1 history to fail to score a point while his teammate won the World Championship. As Fittipaldi became the youngest champion in F1 history, with three poles, five wins and a lowest racing finish of third (discounting Canada where the Brazilian had to pit for repairs, finishing 11th) delivering 61 points for Lotus, Walker took a best finish of ninth, a best qualifying position of 12th, and contributed zero points to Lotus' winning effort in the constructors' championship.

What made the whitewash all the more startling was Walker's undoubted pedigree in junior formulae. The Australian had been 1969 British Formula Ford champion, and decimated the opposition in the 1971 British F3 series - winning 25 out of 32 races and earning a one-off drive for Lotus at the 1971 Dutch GP.

Team principal Colin Chapman saw enough in Walker to offer him a full-time drive alongside Fittipaldi for 1972. Walker may have been five years older than Fittipaldi, but there was no question about who was the senior driver. Fittipaldi was one of the up-and-coming men of Formula One, and he and Lotus, armed with a new sponsorship from John Player Special, expected to challenge.

Fittipaldi and Lotus fulfilled their part of the bargain, but it was a wholly one-sided team effort. Walker struggled enormously, with Lotus questioning the Australian's driving technique, fitness and mechanical sensitivity, while Walker in turn claimed that Lotus gave him inferior equipment to Fittipaldi (which, if true, would hardly be surprising given that Fittipaldi was fighting a one-man assault on both championships).

The writing was on the wall for Walker long before he was dropped for the Italian and Canadian GPs after Lotus discovered he had secretly tested for another Formula Two team. After an inglorious swansong at Watkins Glen, in which he qualified 30th out of 31 entries and retired with an engine failure, Walker was unsurprisingly given his marching orders - and replaced for 1973 with a more suitably competitive stable mate for Lotus and Fittipaldi; a Swedish tyro by the name of Ronnie Peterson.

1986/87 - Lotus: Ayrton Senna & Johnny Dumfries / Satoru Nakajima

Many of Formula One's greatest drivers have at some point in their careers enjoyed a period of dominance over a teammate - but few have specifically argued the case for a patsy on the other side of the garage, as Ayrton Senna did in ensuring that Lotus hired Johnny Dumfires to partner the Brazilian for the 1986 season.

Dumfries, or to give him his full title, John Colum Chrichton-Stuart, 7th Marquess of Bute, was an aristocratic Scot who turned his back on the family fortune to pursue a self-funded racing career of some repute - finishing 1984 as British F3 champion and runner-up in European F3.

Meanwhile, Elio de Angelis had left Lotus at the end of 1985 in frustration that the team's efforts were being concentrated on Senna. Senna, demonstrating characteristic political acumen despite his relative youth, vetoed the team's proposed hire of Derek Warwick as he didn't believe that Lotus could run two competitive cars, and so the team turned to Dumfries.

Unfortunately for Dumfries, Senna was reaching the peak of his powers, and the Brazilian wiped the floor with his new teammate. Senna took 8 poles, 2 wins and scored 55 points as he competed gamely for the title against the might of Williams and Alain Prost in the McLaren. Dumfries on the other hand had a best qualifying position of 8th, failed to qualify in Monaco and scored just three points in total across the season.

Dumfries was quietly dropped at the end of the year to make way for Satoru Nakajima, a Japanese debutant who was placed in the team at the insistence of new engine partner Honda. Nakajima fared little better than Dumfries, taking a best qualifying position of 11th, scoring 7 points with a best finish of 4th, and suffering the humiliation of qualifying 8 seconds slower than Senna in Detroit. In comparison, Senna won the internal qualifying battle 16-0 for a second consecutive season, taking a pole, two wins and 8 podiums en route to finishing third in the championship with 57 points.

Senna would be much more closely matched by Alain Prost and Gerhard Berger over the next five seasons, but the Brazilian would go on to repeat the level of supremacy he enjoyed over Dumfries and Nakajima with a third rookie teammate, Michael Andretti, in 1993.

1994 - Benetton: Michael Schumacher & JJ Lehto / Jos Verstappen / Johnny Herbert

Michael Schumacher's 'first' career in Formula One was marked by almost complete dominance over a succession of teammates. After comfortably outperforming Martin Brundle in 1992 and then obliterating Riccardo Patrese in 1993, for 1994 the highly rated Finn, JJ Lehto, joined Schumacher at Benetton.

Lehto had performed admirably for the Dallara and Sauber teams in three years scrapping around the lower midfield, but his Benetton career got off to the worst possible start when he injured his neck in a pre-season testing accident, missing the first two races.

Into Lehto's stead stepped Dutch test driver Jos Verstappen for his F1 debut at the season-opening Brazilian GP. Qualifying two seconds slower than Schumacher, Verstappen battled for the lower points positions before exiting the race in a spectacular barrel-rolling accident. Unfortunately, it would prove an apt metaphor for the sister Benetton's season.

Despite not being fully recovered, Lehto replaced Verstappen for the San Marino GP, but was eliminated after stalling on the grid and being hit violently from behind by Pedro Lamy's Lotus. Lehto's struggles on his return, scoring one point to Schumacher's 36 across a four race sequence from San Marino to Canada, saw him once again replaced by Verstappen from the French GP onwards.

Verstappen remained outclassed by Schumacher, and the gulf in class between the German and his teammates was illustrated when Schumacher was banned from the Italian and Portuguese Grands Prix. With Verstappen and the returning Lehto at the wheel, Benetton were reduced to a midfield team, qualifying 10th and 20th respectively at Monza and failing to score, and lining up 10th and 14th at Estoril, with Verstappen's fifth place the sole reward from the two races. In comparison, Schumacher's return at the next race in Jerez saw him comfortably win from pole position.

Lehto was permanently dropped after Portugal, and Schumacher's team-mates poor scoring returns had seen Benetton's Constructors' Championship aspirations dashed. For the final two races, Japan and Australia, Verstappen himself was dropped in favour of the more experienced Johnny Herbert to strengthen Benetton's bid to win the Constructors' title and offer more support to Schumacher in his title fight against Damon Hill.

To put the entire season into context, while Schumacher took five poles, eight wins and 92 points en route to the title, never finishing a race lower than second including his two disqualifications, the no. 6 Benetton claimed only 11 points, with two third places for Verstappen the high point in amongst a litany of retirements, accidents and underwhelming performances.

1980-81 - Brabham: Nelson Piquet & Hector Rebaque

Nelson Piquet may always remain one of Formula One's most underrated legends, a three-time World Champion whose legacy was tainted by an abrasive personality and a steady decline over the last few seasons of his career as he stepped into the background during the Senna-Prost era.

However, the Brazilian was undoubtedly a driver of prodigious skill, especially in his early years, as a collection of thoroughly vanquished teammates can attest. Perhaps the most mismatched driver to line up alongside Piquet was Hector Rebaque, a Mexican racer who partnered Piquet at Brabham in the 1980-81 seasons.

After an initially unsuccessful foray into Formula One, initially with the foundering post-James Hunt Hesketh team and then at the head of his own ambitious Team Rebaque project, Rebaque was plucked from relative obscurity to replace the Argentine Ricardo Zunino at Brabham from the 1980 British GP - after Zunino scored zero points to Piquet's 25 across the first half of the season.

Rebaque fared little better, outscored 29 points to 1 and 7-0 in qualifying by Piquet across the second half of the campaign - and offering nothing in the way of support for the Brazilian's ultimately unsuccessful championship bid.

Rebaque was retained for 1981 however, and although his campaign was a vast improvement on his efforts in 1980 his was still a largely disappointing supporting role in what would turn out to be a championship-winning car.

Piquet took four pole positions, three race wins, four further podiums and 50 points in total en route to snatching his first title in a tense three-way showdown at the final race. Rabaque on the other hand scored 11 points across four points finishes, with a best grid placing of 6th, but suffered the ignominy of failing to qualify in Monaco as Piquet placed the sister car on pole, and was only ever a peripheral figure on the fringes of the Formula One frontlines as his teammate battled for the championship.

2009 - Williams: Nico Rosberg & Kazuki Nakajima

It was an unfortunate case of history repeating for the Nakajima family in 2009, as Kazuki's season at the wheel of a Williams-Toyota alongside Nico Rosberg was every bit as chastening as his father's experience partnering Ayrton Senna in 1987.

Eschewing the family's Honda connections, Nakajima, Jr. had joined the Toyota stable as a young driver, wishing to shield himself against accusations of nepotism as he progressed through the junior formulae. After joining Williams as a test driver in 2007, Nakajima was promoted to a race seat for the season finale in Brazil following the sudden retirement of Alexander Wurz.

Nakajima's first full season of Formula One was promising, with the Japanese enjoying three points scoring finishes across the first six races. Although his campaign tailed off and Nakajima was outqualified 14-4, the Japanese still took a respectable 9 points to Rosberg's 17, making a telling contribution to Williams' total haul.

In 2009 however, Nakajima's contribution nosedived dramatically. Nakajima's was partially a hard-luck story, with the Japanese losing a points finish in Turkey due to a delayed pit stop, seeing his career-best fifth place grid position at the British GP squandered through poor strategy, losing out in close 9th-placed finishes at both the Hungarian and Singapore GPs and being taken out of points contention at the season-ending Brazilian GP by rookie and fellow countryman Kamui Kobayashi.

However, although Nakajima's struggles could be partially attributed to poor fortune, the bottom line stats made harsh reading. While Rosberg took 11 points finishes for a total of 34.5 across 17 GPs, including a streak of 8 consecutive scoring races, Nakajima failed to score in any of his 13 finishes all season and was the only non-points scoring driver who entered every race.

1963 - Lotus: Jim Clark & Trevor Taylor / Peter Arundell / Mike Spence / Pedro Rodriguez

Jim Clark's Formula One career is synonymous with Lotus, and the team was run through much of the 1960s as a de factor one car outfit with a singular focus on Clark and extracting the maximum from his remarkable abilities.

Only Innes Ireland, who was sacked by Lotus team principal Colin Chapman after the 1961 season so the team could better concentrate on Clark's prospects, ever ran the Scot close, and many of the drivers who followed as Clark's teammate were only ever there to nominally make up the numbers.

Clark's first championship-winning season in 1963 was one of the greatest in Formula One history, with the Scot claiming 100% of the maximum available points by taking seven wins in a season in which only a driver's best six results counted. Clark also took seven pole positions from ten rounds, and collected three Grand Slams (pole, fastest lap, win, led every lap), including his iconic wet weather demolition job on the field in the Belgian GP at Spa.

On the other side of the garage however, it was a different story. Trevor Taylor was Clark's full time teammate in 1962-63, and although he demonstrated some pedigree with a second place finish at the 1962 Dutch GP, it would be his only score in a season that saw Clark take six poles and three wins in finishing second in the championship.

Taylor's 1963 season was even worse in comparison to Clark, scoring only one point at the season's opening race in Monaco, losing out 9-0 in the internal qualifying battle in placing no higher on the grid than seventh, and contributing almost nothing to Lotus' points tally in winning in the Constructors' Championship.

Taylor wasn't the only teammate that Clark would leave chasing shadows in 1963 however. At several races during the season Lotus ran a three-car entry, and accordingly none of Peter Arundell, Mike Spence or Perdro Rodriguez could better Taylor's efforts - with Spence's 13th place in Italy the best result the trio of stand-ins could muster between them.