In the noisiest of sports has come the quietest of coronations. It has been as silent as a nod of assent, a tap on the nose and a knowing half-smile. Formula One has staged just eight of its 20 races this season but in the paddock, the champion driver has already been acclaimed; he is Fernando Alonso.

Alonso leads the drivers' championship going into the British Grand Prix this weekend, a race he won last year in the only success of a disappointing Ferrari campaign. Few people might have expected the Spanish driver to be leading the standings by this stage. At the start of the season the Ferrari car was so bad that it looked ready to fall apart, as cars used to do before bewildered circus clowns. The men from Maranello hung their heads in shame.

Alonso, though, managed to overcome the problems. In the first race, in Australia, he did well to qualify 12th before manhandling his jalopy into fifth place. In the next, in Malaysia, he qualified eighth and somehow won the thing.

In an admittedly improved car, he finished ninth, seventh, second, third, fifth and first again in subsequent races. So he is the only driver to have won more than once and the only one to have scored in every round, which is why he leads the world championship table by 20 points.

Alonso has retired only once in the past 33 races and has been in the points for all bar that race since the Belgium Grand Prix in 2010. So good has he been that the debate has been focusing on how he measures against the best drivers in history rather than how good his performances have been this season.

"He is simply one of the all-time greats," Ross Brawn said on Friday, as the Mercededes team principal sheltered under a vast umbrella at Silverstone. "He wins races he shouldn't win, races that he's got no right to win. And that's the mark of a great driver. He's not had a great car this year but he's on top of the championship. He has managed to get there because of what he is, the driver he is."

And this, remember, is a championship that has become a lottery. In order to make things more interesting than last season, which was largely a celebration of Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel, they have slowed down the cars by taking away their downforce and giving them rubbish rubber instead of real tyres. If they slow it down much more Marussia, Caterham and HRT will come into the reckoning. Many – including Alonso himself – have complained.

But it is a lottery in which the Spaniard always seems to be clutching a significant ticket. When the Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was asked who would pose the major threat to his team this season he said, diplomatically, that there were several drivers. But when pressed to pick out a single name he shrugged, smiled slowly and said: "The driver, obviously, is Alonso."

With rain expected at Silverstone this weekend, the former world champion Heikki Kovalainen summed it up as well as anyone when he said: "Whatever the track, whatever the conditions, there is always one common denominator: Fernando is always near the front."

It is tempting – and many have been tempted – to view Lewis Hamilton as at least Alonso's equal. After all, in Hamilton's thrilling rookie season of 2007, he unsettled Alonso with his aggressive speed. Alonso, the world champion of the previous two years, did not expect such an exuberant challenge.

But we still await Hamilton's development from being brilliantly fast, and an exemplar of overtaking, into a fully rounded driver. Alonso, surely, would not have got himself into that terminal tangle with Pastor Maldonado in Valencia.

This is not to say that Alonso will win the championship. No one would bet against Vettel making it a hat-trick of titles, especially while the old wizard Adrian Newey remains at Milton Keynes.

Vettel, too, will surely go down as one of the all-time great champions, may even surpass Alonso. And Silverstone's fast corners could well be the setting for the McLarens, with Hamilton and Jenson Button, to make a vivid statement.

But whatever happens on Sunday, and whoever sits at the top of the world championship after the final race in Brazil at the end of November, a judgment has already been made by the paddock in favour of the man from Oviedo.