Formula One Features

Being the sad guy in the corner of the pub with a pint and a copy of Autosport, I have had to fight endless battles with the pub bores over the years over whether or not Formula 1 was "just about driving around in circles". Then it was the "I'd watch it, but the same bloke wins all the time" routine.

Most young American racing drivers nowadays want to be big names in NASCAR. That is where the money is and where a young man can really make his name. But Ryan Hunter-Reay is not interested. He wants to be a Formula 1 star.

Paul Stoddart located his Formula 1 team (at least for a time) in the unlikely location of Ledbury, a pretty little town in the Malvern Hills well off the beaten track from the usual motor racing haunts.

Formula 1 is an industry in which people never look very fair ahead. There is always a crisis to be sorted out or a deadline to be met. Formula 1 is a world in which a talent for fire-fighting is usually more successful than brilliant long-term thinking.

In the early 1990s Bernie Ecclestone once referred to the midfield in Grand Prix racing as "Brundle, Blundell and Smundell". It was an uncharitable remark given that Martin Brundle was a driver who did just about everything in Formula 1, except winning a race.

Many thousands of words have been written in the last few days about Formula 1 being in a state of crisis. It is, but then it always is. Formula 1 will stagger on as it always has done because the sport is stronger than the constituent parts.

Have you ever dreamed of going to all the Formula 1 Grands Prix around the world, seeing all the great race tracks and meeting F1 fans from countries all over the world? Dreaming is easy, but back in 1991 one English fan called John Grainger decided that he was going to do an entire season of Formula 1 racing.

Motor racing was always - and remains - a sport for the rich. There are very few poor drivers in the sport, beyond a few dozen who by talent alone make it into the top drives across the world. The rest pay.

Lionel Froissart first met Ayrton Senna in 1978 when Senna left Brazil for the first time and came to Europe to race karts. The two remained close and moved up to Formula 1 in the same era, Froissart reporting on the F1 scene for the French daily newspaper Liberation.

At the end of her book on Mariette Helene Delangle, the mysterious racing driver "Helle Nice", Miranda Seymour explains that "the story will not I am afraid satisfy the experts". And she says that she would like it be become "the ground from which more detailed researches can be undertaken".

You might argue that producing a book in 2004 about a car which won the World Championship in 2000 is a strange thing to do, but that is to analyse this book in quite the wrong way. This is not a "news" book which is late arriving but rather a history book which is well ahead of its time.

Alan Henry is probably the best qualified of all Formula 1 journalists to write about Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley.

To be published in January 2004, David Tremayne's new book about speed record hero Donald Campbell is not strictly a motor racing book and perhaps we should not be reviewing it on grandprix.com. However we have concluded that most race fans will be interested in this extraordinary story.

If you have an annoying relative who is into motor racing, this book will guarantee total silence for the whole of the Christmas holiday.

Take a walk through the gardens at the Porte Maillot in Paris and you will find a large memorial to a man called Emile Levassor. Some people may know him as the partner of Rene Panhard; others may know him as a great automotive innovator but very few will ever have heard of his exploits as a racing driver.

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Paris-Madrid road race, the greatest of all the city-to-city races in the early days of the sport. It was also the most disastrous as the rapid development of the cars in the early years of the sport meant that speeds had increased to dangerous levels

Unless you are born and brought up in the sport - and many these days are - it can seem from the outside to be very complex and sometimes impenetrable. You may have watched Formula 1 on the television and thought: I would like to be a Grand Prix driver but you have no idea what to do about it. The answer is karting.

David Richards admits that he is pedantic by nature. He likes things neat and tidy. His offices are immaculate. Radiators and air-conditioning units are hidden. Apples must be green and healthy-looking. People must be presentable. The man himself is more of a free spirit and his Don Johnson, nearly-shaved look seems somehow incongruous sticking out of the top of a neat suit and tie. He seems a little weary. He has flown in from Japan the previous day and did not sleep much. He is two minutes late arriving but apologizes for it.

The last few months have seen major changes in the way in which Formula 1 will be run in 2003 with wholesale changes in the structure of events and some important reinterpretations of the technical regulations. The cars will remain fundamentally unchanged but certain electronic systems have been outlawed as the FIA has ruled that they contravene the rule which states that drivers must drive their cars "alone and unaided". Here are the major rule changes.

Formula 1 is a world which is never without issues and never without drama. But in recent times too many of the issues and too much of the drama has been taking place in the paddock and not enough of it happened on the race track. The sport suffered as a result but it did not suffer as much as some people would have you believe.

Patrick Faure is the boss of Renault Sport, the man to whom Flavio Briatore reports and the team's representative at the highest level within Renault and as one of the men behind the GPWC.

Max Mosley has always been an impressive politician and this week he gave evidence of that once again as he presented the Formula 1 team bosses with a new set of Formula 1 regulations - without changing the rules. This little piece of magic was achieved by taking the existing rules and simply re-interpreting what they meant. It was the work of a fertile legal brain and left the team bosses with little room to maneuver.

Spare a thought for the poor Formula 1 freelance journalists at this time of year. Money from last season has now stopped trickling in and this is the moment when we poor artistic individuals have to spend a fortune, booking all our flights for the coming season. They say that necessity breeds invention and in the finest tradition of starving poets, this is the time of year when many of us do our most colorful and creative writing: otherwise known as our tax returns.

There has been lots of talk this year about Formula 1 being in crisis, but currently I am more concerned with my annual crisis of getting through the forthcoming festive season while avoiding my relatives.