How do you decide the best driver of the year? Plenty of people have opinions on individual championships. But what about across disciplines?

The Race of Champions might do the trick. There were world champions, current champions, multiple champions; names like Loeb, Schumacher, Doohan, Prost, Vettel, Priaulx, Kristensen, Plato.

But the surprise Champion of Champions was Filipe Albuquerque. Surprising particularly because the last time he was champion of anything was 2006, with a couple of Formula Renault 2.0 titles. I last saw him driving for Portugal in A1GP – where he did a fine job – and since then he’s been racing sportscars in Italy. It’s not unlike when Heikki Kovalainen won the title in 2004.

So is Albuquerque the best driver of 2010? Could be. But perhaps a series of knock-out head-to-head races isn’t the most reliable methodology. Maybe we need to turn to science.

The Castrol Rankings could be the answer. Drivers in major domestic and international championships are ranked based on their performance, weighted by how important that championship is deemed to be. That might not sound scientific – you could almost accuse it of being entirely arbitrary. But no, it’s called the ‘Castrol Index Score’, and it uses a formula, so it must be very, very clever.

The FAQ assures us that the Formula 1 champion won’t automatically top the rankings:

“While this is likely if a driver dominates for a long period, an F1 season in which the top drivers are closely matched could always open up the possibility of a driver from World Rally Championship, NASCAR Sprint Cup or the IndyCar Series topping the Castrol Rankings.”

This F1 season was indeed very close at the top, and by contrast Sebastien Loeb was very comfortable in taking the WRC title. Nevertheless, it’s Sebastian Vettel atop the Castrol Rankings; Loeb is third, behind Mark Webber.

So clearly it’s a load of old nonsense, utterly failing to compare performances across championships in any meaningful way. Rendering it useless.

But it’s put together by autosport.com, and it’s amusing to see them trying in vain to create news out of it. Yesterday, for example, we had the revelation that the top placed DTM driver in the Castrol Rankings is the man who won the DTM title – Paul di Resta. Well, yes. Obviously.

So I think we can discount the Castrol Rankings as a way to decide the year’s best driver. Which leaves us with only one contender: the little-known Portuguese man. As many people have said already: hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque!