7) Stefano Coletti
After being the relatively surprising choice to partner Raffaele Marciello at Racing Engineering in 2014, Stefano Coletti put all the doubts about his ability to bed with a number of excellent drives during they year, and ended up as a double race winner and sixth in the Drivers’ Championship.
After dominating the first half of the 2013 championship before having a nightmare ending to the season, Coletti returned for his fourth full season of GP2 Series racing, and showed that his confidence had returned and his pace was still on par with those at the front of the field.
He took a fourth place on his first outing for Racing Engineering in Bahrain and an eighth place in the Sprint race in Barcelona, but it was at the Red Bull Ring in Austria where the Monegasque driver began to show he was back on form. He finished fourth in the Feature race on the Saturday before contesting with Johnny Cecotto Jr for the win on Sunday, ultimately just coming up short. Another runners-up spot in the Sprint race at Silverstone followed, this time missing out to Felipe Nasr.
He took his first win of the year in the Sprint race at Hockenheim after gambling on starting the race on dry weather tyres one a wet track. He was able to stay on track, which was no easy feat on an initially soaking wet track, and then took advantage of a safety car to overtake long time leader Stoffel Vandoorne, who had started on wet tyres and switched to dry tyres.
He took another runners-up spot in the Monza Sprint race, before closing the year with his second win of the year in Abu Dhabi, clinching sixth place in the championship at the same time ahead of Arthur Pic. It is unlikely that Coletti will return for a fifth season of GP2, and could head off into pastures new in 2015, with the world of IndyCar a real possibility for the talented twenty-five-year-old, with a test with Schmidt Peterson Motorsports imminent.
