No team polarises fans quite like Ferrari: some believe that they can do no wrong, despite a vast and growing body of evidence to the contrary; other, sounder minds put them in roughly the same category as Lucius Malfoy, Jabba the Hutt and Sandi Toksvig.

Until fairly recently, the team had a reputation for passionate disorganisation, which occasionally somehow produced a decent car, and there was no end of very good drivers queuing up to put their mark on a contract for the scuderia, only to be disappointed by the tractor they were given to race.

The Brawn/Todt/Schumacher/Byrne axis changed all that. Suddenly the cars were quick, driveable and bullet-proof, while behind the scenes this highly political team fostered its "special relationship" with the FIA, leading to all manner of dubious rule interpretations in favour of the red cars.

That the team inspires such extreme reactions is partly a product of its own success (many people love to hate the ultra-successful - just ask Man Utd, Bill Gates or Patrick Kielty) but also because of the strutting arrogance and faux innocence with which it has been achieved. The lesson, which seems to be repeatedly lost on Ferrari, is to win, lose and get caught breaking the rules with equal good grace.

Some of our readers doubtless question the extent of dotdotdotcomma's continued antipathy towards the scuderia but when repeatedly faced with the team's insufferable arrogance in victory, sanctimonious posturing at perceived wrongs and instinctive refusal to accept blame, it's the only sane response.

There. We got all the way through that without once calling them a bunch of cheating c*nts.

Founded by the Kiwi Bruce McLaren in 1963, Bruce McLaren Motor Racing merged in 1981 with the Project 4 team, which was being run by the barn owl Ron Dennis. The team is now part of McLaren Racing, a member of the McLaren Group, under the umbrella of McLaren Holdings, a subsidiary of McLaren PLC, which is wholly owned by McLaren (World Domination) Ltd.

Bruce McLaren is currently the only driver to have won a Formula One world championship race in a car bearing his own name as a constructor*, although the dotdotdotcomma-sponsored driver Panasonic Toyota, currently racing a borrowed Caterham with limited success, is optimistic of one day becoming the second.

The team has rapidly become one of the most successful in F1 history and is widely regarded as technologically top-notch, if sometimes a little fragile operationally. They are constantly trying to persuade everyone that they may be stiff and corporate but they still know how to have a good time. It's not terribly convincing.

They're far from unemotional, however, and Ron Dennis can often be glimpsed furtively wiping away a tear or two of joy. In fact, when one of his favoured drivers has won against seemingly insuperable odds during a troubled time for the team, it can sometimes be hard to hear the national anthems over the sound of Ron's blubbing.

*Other than, we've just realised, Jack Brabham. Who also won the world championship. Arse. Rest assured, our research team will be hung, drawn and quartered. Or should that be "hanged"?

A phenomenally successful F1 team which won nine constructors' titles in 20 years (it took Ferrari 50 years to do the same) but which usually dispenses with the services of the drivers who win the title for them: Alan Jones, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost and Damon Hill all took championships and then left the team at the end of the year, for one reason or another.

The team hit a purple patch in the 1990s, when a combination of Adrian Newey's ground-breaking designs, some jolly clever electronics and a handful of half-decent drivers resulted in repeated title wins. The 1992 and 1993 Williams are probably the most technologically advanced Formula One cars to date and you could almost say that they drove themselves, without wishing to devalue the titles that Mansell and Prost won with them, of course.

This period also produced the iconic blue and white Rothmans livery, which looked great but which was probably responsible for shifting truckloads of their cigarettes. The team did attempt to make amends later, however, by running cars plastered with stickers for Niquitin and thereby promoting something to help you give up what they'd been urging you to become addicted to a few years previously.

For the 2004 season, the Williams challenger sported a highly unusual "walrus nose", which did nothing for the car's performance but which did at least mean that Ralf Schumacher was no longer the ugliest thing in the paddock. The innovative nose proved uncompetitive and was replaced by something more conventional in the second half of the year. Ralf also proved uncompetitive and was replaced by someone more talented at the end of the year.

One of the few modern privateer F1 teams that lasted for more than a decade, Sauber began life as a sportscar manufacturer, enjoying some success (despite basing themselves in Switzerland, where motorsport is actually illegal) and forging a slightly distasteful alliance with the young Michael Schumacher.

The team moved into Formula One at the beginning of 1993, turning up at the first race with cars sporting a black livery which appeared excitingly modern and sleek but which was, in fact, just the first indication that the world's dullest F1 team had arrived.

Even potentially exciting developments, such as (a) grabbing a top-flight engine by forging a slightly distasteful alliance with Ferrari, (2) promoting a vastly inexperienced Kimi Raikkonen from Formula Renault straight to an F1 race seat and (iii) courting controversy by apparently running an exact copy of Ferrari's 2003 car and passing it off as their own, could not change the general perception of them as a bit dull.

Even when they spent a fortune on a state-of-the-art supercomputer, they went and called it Albert.

The curtain came down on their 13 years in the sport at the end of 2005, when BMW completed a takeover of the team and Peter Sauber presumably celebrated by having a really nice cigar.

The history of Renault in F1 reads like a company with an addiction it's trying to kick.

They entered the sport as a constructor in 1977, winning a respectable number of races but no championships, then spent one season (1986) as an engine supplier, before pulling out completely at the end of the year.

After going cold turkey for a couple of years, they rejoined the sport as an engine supplier in 1989, winnning five drivers' and six constructors' titles, before quitting again in 1997. By 2000 the itch had to be scratched again, so they bought the Benetton team, although they didn't rebrand it as Renault until the 2002 season.

They have introduced a number of innovations to the sport, including turbo-charged engines (since banned), V10 engines (since banned) and mass-damper systems (since banned). The one thing they seem to have pioneered that hasn't been outlawed is something that actually makes the cars slower: live-feed in-car cameras.

The team persists in building their chassis in Oxfordshire and their engines several hundred miles away, somewhere in france. There is undoubtedly a very good reason for this, although your chronicler admits that any sort of logical explanation eludes him at the moment.

Forged from the remnants of Minardi, Toro Rosso is Red Bull's junior F1 team. The arrangement lets Red Bull (a) try out unproven young drivers and (2) take cocky french multiple Champ Car champions down a peg or two.

The team benefits from an unspecified amount of help from its senior team but is still free to plough its own furrow. In 2007, for instance, it used Ferrari engines rather than the Renault power units favoured by Red Bull, which proved, if nothing else, that the Ferrari team must have had one hell of a chassis.

Toro Rosso has yet to inspire the same level of support enjoyed by Minardi, although it was on the right lines when a senior manager occasioned a physical assault upon the wholly objectionable Scott Speed. Keep it up, lads, and we'll put our not inconsiderable weight behind you.

After Ireland, Russia and Holland had had a go, Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya stepped in to buy the old Jordan squad, encouraged by F1's desire to break into the Indian market, presumably because the sub-continent is home to an awful lot of potential new smokers.

Despite looking every inch the medallion man, Mallya is undoubtedly a shrewd operator, albeit one who was foolhardy enough to become the team's fourth owner in as many years, and he was welcomed into the paddock by everyone except Flavio Briatore, who thought he was taking the piss.

For its first season in 2008, the team boasted customer Ferrari engines, Mike Gascoyne as Chief Technology Officer and, um, Giancarlo Fisichella but when Super Aguri stopped turning up to keep the Force India cars off the back row, the team looked like becoming a perennial back-marker, although at Monaco in 2008 Adrian Sutil came within a handful of laps of claiming fourth place, until Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen lost control braking for the Nouvelle Chicane and punted him out of the race, an incident that the FIA saw fit to overlook.

In December 2008, Honda announced that they were pulling the plug on their F1 team with immediate effect. Like a lot of people enduring the global economic downturn, they probably only needed a bit of extra cash to help them meet the repayments on that big plasma screen they'd just bought but for a while it made the future look gloomy for several hundred people working in Brackley, for whom working in Brackley was already reason enough to be gloomy.

Fortunately, multi-millionaire Jenson Button was saved from the dole queue by a Ross Brawn-led management buy-out, which was announced only three weeks before the start of the 2009 season and only five minutes before the new BGP001 was out on track putting in its first laps. In a debut that was impressive and dull in roughly equal measure, the car failed to explode, grind to a halt, go up in smoke or do anything even remotely amusing.

The new team, dubbed Brawn GP, sported a mainly white livery and an unchanged driver line-up, which upset F1 hopeful Bruno Senna, who had not only lost his last chance to get on the grid for 2009 but had also long believed that painting racing cars white shows a lamentable lack of imagination.

The first Polish F1 racing driver, Robert Kubica also possesses the most remarkable nose seen in the sport since the days of Alain Prost. Even the 2004 Williams "walrus nose" didn't make as many people jump when they saw it for the first time.

Pushing his startling proboscis to one side for a moment (no mean feat in itself), Kubica has quickly come to be recognised as one of the very finest talents around. His exemplary 2008 season was seen by many as more deserving of a title than those of the McLaren and Ferrari drivers, who actually stood a chance of winning it.

His maiden victory in Canada during the 2008 season was scored at the track where a year previously he had crashed spectacularly, clipping Jarno Trulli's Toyota and becoming airborne before striking a crash barrier at over 185mph. The accident subjected Kubica momentarily to 75G but a trip to hospital revealed nothing more than light concussion and a sprained ankle.

Either safety had come a long way in F1 or they build them tough in Krakow.

Everyone's second favourite team, it says 'ere, Minardi somehow survived in Formula One for 21 years, averaging just over 1.8 points per season, on a budget that should barely have financed a season in Formula BMW.

The team's very first driver, Pierluigi Martini (who enjoyed three spells with the team), went on to score their first point, claim their only front row start and drive the only lap the team ever led. He also scored nearly half the points they ever earned.

Victory sadly eluded the team but Mark Webber's fifth place on his F1 debut in 2002 at Webber's and team owner Paul Stoddart's home race came pretty close to feeling like one. And no-one except Michael Schumacher remembers who won that race.

Lack of funding eventually led to the end of the Minardi name in F1, when the team was sold to Red Bull on the proviso that the team's base remain in Faenza, which is somewhere that the dotdotdotcomma editors really must visit one of these days.