Toyota as an F1 team chose not to follow received opinion from the word go. They set up their base in Cologne, of all places, they took on the monumental task of building both chassis and engine and they spent a year testing instead of racing, opting to pay an $11 million fine for the privilege. The fact that their results since then have been, um, disappointing lends weight to the argument that, initially at least, they got it horribly wrong.

The team's test drivers during that development year were Mika Salo and Allan McNish, who were retained for the first year of racing but dropped at the end of the season, in a move that was probably another thing they got wrong and certainly won them no friends in this corner of the world, I can tell you.

The list of drivers they've since employed makes for dull reading: Cristiano da Matta, Olivier Panis, Ricardo Zonta, Ralf Schumacher, Timo Glock and Jarno Trulli, for whom we must admit to having a bit of a soft spot. Schumacher, in particular, is another thing the team got wrong, not least for deciding to pay him an astronomical retainer, despite all evidence that he really wasn't very good at all.

One thing the team did get right was to bring in Mike Gascoyne early in 2004 to lick their technical department into shape. On the other hand, their decision to drop him a couple of years later, just when his efforts were starting to bear fruit, baffled many of the more clear-thinking observers in the paddock.

There's also the tiny matter of an industrial espionage case brought against the team by Ferrari in 2004, after several people had commented on the striking similarity between Toyota's TF104 and the previous year's Ferrari. The case against Toyota seemed overwhelming but the FIA chose not to act, choosing instead to save their ire for the less clear-cut McLaren case in 2007.

Famously one of the best-funded teams on the grid, Toyota have yet to demonstrate that it is money well spent, not least to the top brass in Japan, who periodically issue deadlines to whoever the team principal happens to be that week. The team is still in F1 but never looks as if it will be in the long term.

Would anyone actually miss them though?

Nelson Angelo Piquet has six names, although we've picked his three best known ones. He is commonly known as Nelson Piquet Junior and also as Nelsinho Piquet, which he has asked people not to use any more.

Nelsinho is the son of Nelson Piquet, who claimed three world championships and made no friends along the way. His father's money meant that he could race for his own team all the way up to GP2, after which things get a bit expensive even for multi-millionaires.

His last championship was in 2004 when he won the British F3 title, although the perenially under-funded and criminally under-rated Ulsterman Adam Carroll heroically took the fight to the last event at Brands Hatch, about which we could go on but probably shouldn't.

Little Nelson competed in GP2 and A1GP, before curiously being picked up by the Renault F1 équipe, first as a test driver and subsequently as a racer, where his disappointing form was about what many of the more astute paddock observers had been expecting.

The perception of him as a sulky rich kid was given further weight when, after being sacked by Renault part way through 2009, he went running to the FIA with allegations of race-fixing, claiming that some bigger boys had forced him to crash deliberately at Singapore in 2008, in order to put team-mate Fernando Alonso on exactly the right strategy to claim the win.

The revelation was indeed shocking. We'd all got so used to seeing Piquet crash that believing he'd done so on purpose was difficult to reconcile. The fall-out saw Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds lose their jobs and, if there's any justice, brought an end to Nelsinho's career in the top flight.