Initially just a renamed version of BAR, Honda set about forging closer links between Japan and Brackley, something that for some reason no-one had ever attempted before.

The team has enormous resources and is keen to build on its heritage of dabbling on F1 in the 1960s and the success it enjoyed as an engine supplier in the eighties and nineties. It's safe to say that there's still a way to go.

The striking 2007 "Earth car", a laudable attempt to stimulate debate, featured a livery that was just an image of the Earth in space but sadly the car handled as if it weighed about the same and Jenson Button's mechanics taped a cigarette lighter inside his cockpit for the last race of the season, in the hope that he'd burn the damned thing at the end of the race.