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.

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.

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.

Born in the picturesque English hamlet of Stevenage in 1985, Lewis Carl Davidson Hamilton was named after the American sprinter Carl Lewis and the legendary British easy listening DJ David Hamilton. He has since moved to Switzerland and attempted to distance himself from association with David Hamilton.

Hamilton famously approached McLaren boss Ron Dennis at the Autosport Awards in 1995 and told him that he wanted to race for him one day. Dennis told the ten-year-old Hamilton to call him in a few years and thus was a mutually rewarding relationship forged. Some of the more disreputable members of the dotdotdotcomma staff have since adopted a similar strategy in approaching girls in clubs, although they have yet to demonstrate a level of success anything like Hamilton managed.

On his way to F1, Hamilton picked up titles in karting, Formula Renault UK, the F3 Euroseries and GP2, after which he picked up Nicole Scherzinger, who was apparently already a well-known singer with girl band Pussycat Dolls, but who first came to the attention of the dotdotdotcomma editorial team for wearing a really smashing dress during the title-deciding race at Brazil in 2008 and then jumping about in it quite a lot.

Hamilton's time in F1 has been far from dull and he has shown almost as much ill-conceived misjudgement as he has jaw-dropping ability. The audacious overtaking moves and lightning pace have been accompanied by pit-lane crashes and overly optimistic first-lap lunges, as well as more than his fair share of FIA wrist-slaps.

The decision to strip him of his win at Spa in 2008, seemingly for being too good at overtaking Kimi Raikkonen, still baffles those of us who don't wear Ferrari T-shirts.

When he wasn't driving people off the road, ramming other cars, parking in the middle of the track or trying to punch David Coulthard, Michael Schumacher displayed a dazzling talent for finding new ways to disadvatage his team-mate.

We're being slightly churlish, of course, but Schumacher's reputation as a driver will forever be coloured by the unsporting manner in which he raced. His first break in F1 came with Jordan at Spa in 1991 and his second with Ferrari at Silverstone in 1999, when he fractured a leg crashing at Stowe.

His final F1 drive through the field at Interlagos was a reminder of what his legacy could have been if he hadn't been quite so ready to tarnish it quite so frequently.

The wanker.

The second incarnation of Virgin Racing, a rebranding instigated when a Russian car maker decided to increase the level of its sponsorship to such an extent that it effectively bought the team. In doing so, it chose to ignore the recent salutary example of Spyker, another supercar manufacturer nobody had ever heard of before its purchase of the former Jordan team and which nobody has really heard of since it sold it again pretty damned quickly.

Changes like this are usually of no great significance to the viewing public but in this case it means that fans will no longer be able to anticipate commentating faux pas, such as "Let's see how this Virgin handles in slippery conditions." For that reason, the name change is a bit disappointing.

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.

For the 2012 season the team built its own car for the first time, having previously raced adapted Dallara chassis, and this move really did bring about a significant change in the team's fortunes: after avoiding the final place in the constructors' title in 2010 and 2011, the team trailed home dead last in their third year. They were put up for sale towards the end of the season but failed to find a buyer and quietly went out of business. HRT RIP.

As a mildly 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.

Alonso's full name is Fernando Alonso Diaz and few people realise that he is the half-brother of Cameron Diaz, the well-known jizz-haired actress.

His success in Formula One has led to a huge growth of interest in the sport in his home country of Spain, where not so long ago you could easily pick up cheap tickets to the Grand Prix and pretty much have your pick of seats, so thanks for that, Fernando.

Like many of the sport's stars, Alonso began his F1 career with Minardi and he made a splash at his first race, where he out-qualified his team-mate by over two and a half seconds. That margin is rendered slightly less impressive when you learn that his team-mate was Tarso Marques who, as racing drivers go, has a lovely personality.

Fernando was soon snapped up by Renault, where he spent a year testing before being promoted to a race seat. He became the then youngest world champion in 2005 and the youngest double champion in 2006. There followed an abbreviated tenure at McLaren which failed to yield a third title, largely because he proved unable to beat a rookie, after which he was welcomed back to the Renault team, where he is expected to wait grumpily until a Ferrari seat becomes available.

Alonso is an exceptionally talented and complete racing driver but he also has a reckless - often self-destructive - streak and an eccentrically unique take on what it means to be a team-player, traits which have doubtless closed a number of F1 doors to him.

In 2005 he was appointed one of UNICEF's Goodwill Ambassadors, which may explain why he never has any left for anyone else.