Handwriting recognition is such a complex classification problem that it is quite usual now to make co-operate several classification methods at the pre-processing stage or at the classification stage. In this paper, we present an original two stages recognizer. The first stage is a model-based classifier that stores an exhaustive set of character models. The second stage is a discriminative classifier that separates the most ambiguous pairs of classes. This hybrid architecture is based on the idea that the correct class almost systematically belongs to the two more relevant classes found by the first classifier. Experiments on Unipen database show a 30% improvement on a 62 classes recognition problem.