The racing arm of the road car manufacturer founded by Colin Chapman, Team Lotus competed in Formula One from 1958 to 1994, scaling a great number of heights and plumbing as many depths along the way.

Stirling Moss scored the first Lotus F1 win at Monaco in 1960, besting the then dominant Ferrari team as he did so and thereby earning the cars a permanent place in the dotdotdotcomma hall of fame.

This victory was, slightly embarrassingly, for Rob Walker Racing, a customer of the Lotus team; the first Team Lotus win didn't come until the following year at the 1961 US Grand Prix but it was to be the first of many: Team Lotus was the first squad to reach 50 Grand Prix wins, beating Ferrari (which was the second team to do it) again, despite having entered F1 eight years after the Italian team. You can probably see now why Lotus has a special place in our hearts.

Lotus pioneered many concepts in F1, among them monocoque chassis, using the engine as a stressed member (no laughing at the back), mid-mounted engines, four-wheel drive, ground effect, carbon-fibre bodywork and, erm..., tobacco sponsorship, over which we shall discreetly draw a very big veil, pausing only to note that the Gold Leaf-sponsored cars and the iconic JPS livery did look pretty bloody good. *cough*.

When he wasn't being showered with glory in F1, Chapman was in America, showing the locals how to go racing at the blue riband Indianapolis 500. His car almost won at its first attempt in 1963, was leading when it retired in 1964 and finally won the event in 1965. Job, as we believe they say, done.

The team was never quite the same after Chapman's death in 1982 but it did continue to win the occasional race until the 1990s, when its slow decline accelerated as the sport's costs spiralled and the unedifying eleventh-hour alliance with Pacific Racing is best forgotten.

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.

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.

Having had a fair degree of success in junior single-seaters, Campos Racing made a successful application to move up to F1 as Campos Meta for 2010. The team was only founded in 1998, so team principal Adrian Campos has done a pretty decent job.

Campos himself was a Minardi driver for a couple of seasons, which goes a long way towards making him all right by us, and he can clearly handle himself¹ in the business arena as well, having beaten off stiff competition² in securing the final F1 slot³.

Campos Meta's application included details of deals they had agreed with Cosworth, Dallara and Xtrac, so that's the engine, chassis and gearbox sorted out, which leaves Campos themselves to contribute just the nut that holds the steering wheel. Or Bruno Senna, as he's better known.

However, following a majority buy-out in February 2010, the squad was renamed "Hispania Racing Team" before its inaugural season had even begun, which was (a) good news for the team's future in F1, and (2) an irresistable opportunity to make lots of childish remarks about hot flushes and mood swings.

As a midly diverting footnote, it may be of interest to learn that the "Meta" part of the team's original name referred to Adrian's passion for metaphysics, in particular the concepts of necessity, possibility and the plurality of worlds and how, in conjunction with Leibniz's theories on alternative realities, they might be used to prove that he could have finished in the points if he hadn't been disqualified from the 1987 Brazilian Grand Prix.


¹Fnarr.
²Oik.
³Yip.