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.

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.

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.