Toyota as an F1 team chose not to follow received opinion from the word go. They set up their base in Cologne, of all places, they took on the monumental task of building both chassis and engine and they spent a year testing instead of racing, opting to pay an $11 million fine for the privilege. The fact that their results since then have been, um, disappointing lends weight to the argument that, initially at least, they got it horribly wrong.

The team's test drivers during that development year were Mika Salo and Allan McNish, who were retained for the first year of racing but dropped at the end of the season, in a move that was probably another thing they got wrong and certainly won them no friends in this corner of the world, I can tell you.

The list of drivers they've since employed makes for dull reading: Cristiano da Matta, Olivier Panis, Ricardo Zonta, Ralf Schumacher, Timo Glock and Jarno Trulli, for whom we must admit to having a bit of a soft spot. Schumacher, in particular, is another thing the team got wrong, not least for deciding to pay him an astronomical retainer, despite all evidence that he really wasn't very good at all.

One thing the team did get right was to bring in Mike Gascoyne early in 2004 to lick their technical department into shape. On the other hand, their decision to drop him a couple of years later, just when his efforts were starting to bear fruit, baffled many of the more clear-thinking observers in the paddock.

There's also the tiny matter of an industrial espionage case brought against the team by Ferrari in 2004, after several people had commented on the striking similarity between Toyota's TF104 and the previous year's Ferrari. The case against Toyota seemed overwhelming but the FIA chose not to act, choosing instead to save their ire for the less clear-cut McLaren case in 2007.

Famously one of the best-funded teams on the grid, Toyota have yet to demonstrate that it is money well spent, not least to the top brass in Japan, who periodically issue deadlines to whoever the team principal happens to be that week. The team is still in F1 but never looks as if it will be in the long term.

Would anyone actually miss them though?

The history of Renault in F1 reads like a company with an addiction it's trying to kick.

They entered the sport as a constructor in 1977, winning a respectable number of races but no championships, then spent one season (1986) as an engine supplier, before pulling out completely at the end of the year.

After going cold turkey for a couple of years, they rejoined the sport as an engine supplier in 1989, winnning five drivers' and six constructors' titles, before quitting again in 1997. By 2000 the itch had to be scratched again, so they bought the Benetton team, although they didn't rebrand it as Renault until the 2002 season.

They have introduced a number of innovations to the sport, including turbo-charged engines (since banned), V10 engines (since banned) and mass-damper systems (since banned). The one thing they seem to have pioneered that hasn't been outlawed is something that actually makes the cars slower: live-feed in-car cameras.

The team persists in building their chassis in Oxfordshire and their engines several hundred miles away, somewhere in france. There is undoubtedly a very good reason for this, although your chronicler admits that any sort of logical explanation eludes him at the moment.

Mark Webber is an Australian racing driver and a bloody good one too, mate, although ever since an aerodynamic fault led to his Mercedes somersaulting twice on the Mulsanne straight during practice for the 1999 Le Mans 24 Hours, he has put forward a convincing case for being Johnny Herbert's successor as the unluckiest man in F1 or, indeed, sportscars.

He has lost more F1 podium finishes through no fault of his own than he has any right to and more than once he has been in a position to win a race that has then been snatched away from him. Notable amongst these occasions was the drenched 2007 Japanese Grand Prix, when his own nearly-team-mate Sebastian Vettel ran into the back of him behind the safety car just as it looked as if the second-placed Webber had the beating of eventual winner Lewis Hamilton. Strewth!

In fact, the Japanese race in 2007 turned out to be really quite eventful for Mark, who had food poisoning for the race and threw up inside his helmet during the first safety car period. Yuk.

Given his luck, it is perhaps not surprising that Mark is also twice a winner of the "Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word 'F*ck' In A Live ITV Broadcast" award¹.


¹"What was Sato doing, for f*ck's sake?", Turkey 2005 and "Kids with not enough experience to do a good job that they f*ck it all up", Japan 2007