Christian Horner has had the sort of career that makes many of us here at dotdotdotcomma not a little jealous, although we could live without the jumping into swimming pools in nothing but a Superman cape, thanks very much.

As a driver, his prowess in single-seaters got him as far as F3000, having founded the Arden team in the process. He spent a couple of years as driver/owner, before deciding that he was a better manager than a racer and hanging up his helmet, a painful practice that is illegal in all but the world's most liberal countries.

After retiring from the cockpit, Horner took just four years to deliver his team's first driver's championship, although Tomás Enge's title celebrations lasted only until the results of his drugs test came through. The title was instead awarded to second-placed Sebastien Bourdais, who since that slice of luck has been the relentlessly cheerful soul we know today.

After this set-back, Horner regrouped and led the team to a number of drivers' and constructors' titles, before being poached by Red Bull to lead their F1 challenge at a startlingly tender age. Some may have baulked at the appointment to team principal of a man of so few years but no one was complaining about his youth when Horner made his leap into the previously mentioned swimming pool with not much on. It could have been the Renault team principal who'd lost that bet and we've all seen the pictures of Flavio Briatore wobbling about on beaches.

There is no doubt that Horner knows what he's doing and for all we know he's also wise and fascinating when interviewed on TV but it's impossible to concentrate on what he's saying once you've realised that every fifth word he comes out with is "y'know".

Horner has one son, John, who's commonly known as Little Jack and who has a tendency to sit in corners.

Mark Webber is an Australian racing driver and a bloody good one too, mate, although ever since an aerodynamic fault led to his Mercedes somersaulting twice on the Mulsanne straight during practice for the 1999 Le Mans 24 Hours, he has put forward a convincing case for being Johnny Herbert's successor as the unluckiest man in F1 or, indeed, sportscars.

He has lost more F1 podium finishes through no fault of his own than he has any right to and more than once he has been in a position to win a race that has then been snatched away from him. Notable amongst these occasions was the drenched 2007 Japanese Grand Prix, when his own nearly-team-mate Sebastian Vettel ran into the back of him behind the safety car just as it looked as if the second-placed Webber had the beating of eventual winner Lewis Hamilton. Strewth!

In fact, the Japanese race in 2007 turned out to be really quite eventful for Mark, who had food poisoning for the race and threw up inside his helmet during the first safety car period. Yuk.

Given his luck, it is perhaps not surprising that Mark is also twice a winner of the "Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word 'F*ck' In A Live ITV Broadcast" award¹.


¹"What was Sato doing, for f*ck's sake?", Turkey 2005 and "Kids with not enough experience to do a good job that they f*ck it all up", Japan 2007

Sebastian Vettel holds pretty much all the "youngest ever" F1 records going and several that hadn't even been thought of before he turned up in his pushchair as Sauber's Friday driver in 2006.

At the time of his F1 race debut in 2007, he hadn't actually won a title since taking the 2004 German Formula BMW Championship - not exactly a blue riband championship - and he had twice failed to win the F3 Euroseries, being pipped to the title at his second attempt by team-mate Paul di Resta, a man almost as dull out of the cockpit as he is scintillating in it.

Vettel started as he meant to go on, however, setting a record just six seconds into his F1 career by speeding in the pit lane as soon as he left the garage and chalking up comfortably the shortest time ever between making your debut as an F1 racing driver and incurring a penalty. He's been setting records on a seemingly daily basis ever since and marks each one by shouting, "That's what I'm talking about!", although he usually hasn't ever mentioned it before.

Early in his F1 career he was often referred to as "the new Schumacher" because he (a) comes from Germany, and (2) began racing at the Kerpen karting track, although he has conspicuously failed to live up to the nickname by not repeatedly driving his rivals off the track, parking his car in the middle of the track during qualifying in Monaco or being disqualified from a whole season for trying to kill Jacques Villeneuve, however justified that may have seemed at the time.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Vettel continually changes his helmet design, which should make it more difficult to identify him during a race, although oddly enough it has probably made it easier: if there's a driver whose helmet you don't recognise, the chances are Sebastian Vettel is wearing it and if you can't be bothered to learn helmet designs, you can recognise Vettel because he'll be the bloke leading the race.

A life-long sufferer of slanty-finger syndrome (digitalis diagonalis), Sebastian is unable to point his index fingers straight up. His own condition is the "30-degree" strain, for which there is currently no cure; we can only hope that he simply stops qualifying in pole position and winning races, so that he will no longer be forced to display his disability in public and we can all stop laughing at him when he does.