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.

Kimi Raikkonen clearly loves his racing but can just as clearly take or leave everything that goes with it. Often electrifying behind the wheel, he sounds so wretchedly bored by the whole affair when he's interviewed that you're left wondering exactly why he carries on. He is, to borrow Martin Brundle's memorable phrase, extremely low-voltage.

Raikkonen entered F1 with Sauber in 2001, despite only having competed in 23 car races in his life. He'd won 13 of them but the FIA still needed convincing that he wasn't going to be a danger to himself and others before they issued his superlicence. They needn't have worried: Kimi scored a point in his debut race, having reportedly been asleep only half an hour before the start.

When Mika Hakkinen retired from the sport, Kimi was snapped up by McLaren, where they need to have a Finnish driver to prevent the fall of the Tower of London or something, so Raikkonen found himself paired with David Coulthard, during a season that once again turned out not to be the Scot's year.

Several seasons of poor reliability led Kimi to sign for Ferrari from 2007 and it turned out to be a good choice, since he won the title in his first season with the team, overcoming a seemingly insurmountable 17-point deficit to rookie Lewis Hamilton in the final two races.

It has, however, been Kimi's extra-curricular activities that have generated the most column inches. He has had contretemps with photographers, out-stripped lap-dancers, won snowmobile races under the pseudonym "James Hunt", been thrown out of nightclubs with his inflatable dolphin, raced powerboats dressed as a gorilla and and married a model.

After an electrical fire led to his retirement from second place in Monte Carlo in 2006, the TV cameras followed Kimi as he stomped through the streets, helmet still on, and straight onto a yacht (presumably his own) floating in the harbour. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine him subsequently drinking it dry.

The yacht, that is, not the harbour.

One of the few modern privateer F1 teams that lasted for more than a decade, Sauber began life as a sportscar manufacturer, enjoying some success (despite basing themselves in Switzerland, where motorsport is actually illegal) and forging a slightly distasteful alliance with the young Michael Schumacher.

The team moved into Formula One at the beginning of 1993, turning up at the first race with cars sporting a black livery which appeared excitingly modern and sleek but which was, in fact, just the first indication that the world's dullest F1 team had arrived.

Even potentially exciting developments, such as (a) grabbing a top-flight engine by forging a slightly distasteful alliance with Ferrari, (2) promoting a vastly inexperienced Kimi Raikkonen from Formula Renault straight to an F1 race seat and (iii) courting controversy by apparently running an exact copy of Ferrari's 2003 car and passing it off as their own, could not change the general perception of them as a bit dull.

Even when they spent a fortune on a state-of-the-art supercomputer, they went and called it Albert.

The curtain came down on their 13 years in the sport at the end of 2005, when BMW completed a takeover of the team and Peter Sauber presumably celebrated by having a really nice cigar.