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.

With his boy-band good looks and playboy demeanour you'd be forgiven for thinking that Max Chilton, brother of dippy-looking BTCC racer Tom, was born to Formula 1 in the mould of the now legendary James Hunt. But, apart from the obvious cockney-rhyming-slang inference, you'd be wrong.

A quick look at his Wikipedia page confirms everything you need to know about him, where phrases like "his father, Grahame, is the proprietor of the Carlin Motorsport team" and "Chilton's father Grahame is the multi-millionaire chairman of insurance firm [redacted] and vice chairman of [redacted]" do rather stick out like an opposable thumb.

And then there's his racing record, which, after some minor successes in karting and the doomed T Cars, is so much significantly less-than-stellar as to beg the question (answerable only by reference to Wikipedia and, to be frank, who his father is) of just WTF he did to justify both his debut in F1 in 2013 and the interest shown in him by the British motorsport media despite his failure to do anything much other than fail to crash.

After a pointless 2007 in British F3, in which his championship class Dallara was regularly outpaced by similarly experienced newbies in inferior national class machinery, he graduated to the Hitech team in 2008, managing to scrape together two podiums (...podia... whatever) with the team that had taken Marko Asmer to the drivers' championship the previous year by winning half the races.

An almost unprecedented third season in British F3 for 2009 saw a move to Carlin, now owned by one Grahame Chilton, and his experience paid off with a 4th place in the title, and his debut (and only) outright* win in the series, in his 62nd - and last - race. It was a pretty uncompetitive season, though. Daniel Ricciardo (Chilton's team-mate in what can only be described as his first full season of F3) trounced the field with 7 wins, coming home 87 points ahead of nearest rival, the rather average Walter Grubmuller, whom Chilton had beaten as teammate the previous year. Chilton finished 7 points behind thrid-placed Renger van der Zande, who had competed in 4 fewer races (and was punted out of another 2).

Having barely troubled the GP2 Asia scorers in 2009/10, the new year saw promotion to the GP2 series with Ocean, with whom he amassed a massive three points, followed by a return to Carlin in GP2 in 2011, in which he increased his points tally by 33%, to four whole points. After such a dismal record, most drivers would have given up, or at least gone into touring cars, but not Max. He secured a third season in GP2, now with a rejuvenated Marussia-Carlin team and, to his credit, achieved a consistent performance over the year, including 2 wins and a couple of additional podiums (etc), outperforming his team-mate Ryo Haryanto, who, to be fair, was a rookie, and did rather outperform Chilton’s rookie GP2 year by 35 points and 11 places, and, indeed, his sophomore year too.

2013 saw a thoroughly-deserved move into Formula 1 with Marussia, in which Max famously set the record as the only rookie driver ever to have finished every race of his first season of F1, thanks to the genius tactic of driving carefully around at the back of the field, and safely getting out of the way every time the leaders and, indeed, most of the rest of the field, came around to lap him.

This house believes that there are so many people who deserve to be racing in F1 more than Max Chilton.



* OK, OK, technically he won in Portugal, too, but he was beaten on track by Jules Bianchi and Sam Bird in the non-points-scoring 'invitation' class.

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.