The FIA (or Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile to give it its full, inexplicably french, name) is an ominous association formed to represent motorists and motoring organisations. Its headquarters are at 8 Place de la Concorde, Paris (ring top bell), coincidentally just up the rue from one of the city's best bordellos.

The federation acts as the governing body for a number of motorsport series and championships, mostly in a venal or, if we're feeling charitable, incompetent manner. It should not be confused with the Fédération Internationale de l'Alcosport, which governs Drink-A-Long-A-Grand-Prix almost as badly.

Comprising 222 member organisations, the FIA can also boast a Senate, a Court of Appeal and a General Assembly and it wouldn't take a stretch of the imagination to see its activities as part of a sinister plan to get itself recognised as a sovereign state in its own right. It's not a million miles from how Hitler started, that's all we're saying.

Its decisions have at times left the FIA open to accusations of favouritism and manipulation and its credibility wasn't helped any by revelations that its married president, Max Mosley, was partial to sado-masochistic orgies involving more tarts than you can fit on one hand. Mosley, seeing no incompatibility between his behaviour and his position, failed to tender the resignation that many were keenly anticipating.

They claim to do a lot of work on road safety but we've never knowingly seen any of their campaigns.

Jarno Trulli is a man of contradictions¹: his speed over one lap is electrifying, yet his race pace is often less impressive; he's an Italian, yet he has a Finnish first name²; he's strong, yet gentle³.

Trulli often transcends the limits of his car during qualifying to place himself higher up the grid than he had any right to. The shortcomings of his vehicle are then revealed during the race, when the "Trulli train" forms behind him and drivers blessed with faster cars have until Jarno's first pit-stop to consider how they might improve their own qualifying performance.

It's either that or the fact that Jarno just loses interest during races. The jury's still out.

Trulli's admirers point to his first F1 victory, at Monaco in 2004, as evidence of the Italian's smoothness, precision and feel, which - while admittedly making him sound like one of those multi-bladed razors - does seem to be the prevailing view of the man as a driver.

Jarno has his own range of karts and is co-owner of a vineyard, which has allowed him to cultivate the endearing habit of sending his friends a case of Trulli wine now and then. Should anyone have any information regarding how to have one's name added to this mailing list, please send it to the usual address.


¹No he isn't.
²Imagine that. It's like a pathetic, fawning, dribbling, little Ferrari fan from England calling his son Enzo.
³It's possible that your chronicler got a little carried away at this point, as a result of being (a) a bit of a Trulli fan, and (2) a bit drunk.

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.

Pretty much since his F1 debut with Sauber in 2002, Felipe Massa has been doing his best to shake off his reputation as a driver who is fast but wild, while for roughly the same period, dotdotdotcomma has been doing its best to reinforce that reputation.

It's not that we harbour any particular dislike of the chap but Massa is no more capable of changing his underlying nature than he is of, oh, I don't know, not spinning five times in the wet at Silverstone in 2008. During the duller parts of a Formula One season, it's nice to have someone a bit mad in the field for the occasional moments of insanity they provide and ever since Takuma Sato left the sport, Massa is the best we have.

That said, Massa has been guilty at times of Ferrarigance, which is a word we've just made up for the special brand of arrogance only a fully brainwashed Ferrari team member can display. His ridiculous protestations that Fernando Alonso had impeded him during qualifying at Monza in 2006 readily spring to mind, as does his failure to acknowledge that his spin at Fuji in 2008 had been caused when he turned in on Sebatien Bourdais. On both occasions, of course, the stewards favoured the bloke in red.

In any case, F1 would probably be less of a spectacle without loonies like Massa and "fast but wild" is not a bad epithet to have. It could be a lot worse. Just look at what we've called Michael Schumacher or Jacques Villeneuve.

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

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.

Everyone's second favourite team, it says 'ere, Minardi somehow survived in Formula One for 21 years, averaging just over 1.8 points per season, on a budget that should barely have financed a season in Formula BMW.

The team's very first driver, Pierluigi Martini (who enjoyed three spells with the team), went on to score their first point, claim their only front row start and drive the only lap the team ever led. He also scored nearly half the points they ever earned.

Victory sadly eluded the team but Mark Webber's fifth place on his F1 debut in 2002 at Webber's and team owner Paul Stoddart's home race came pretty close to feeling like one. And no-one except Michael Schumacher remembers who won that race.

Lack of funding eventually led to the end of the Minardi name in F1, when the team was sold to Red Bull on the proviso that the team's base remain in Faenza, which is somewhere that the dotdotdotcomma editors really must visit one of these days.

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?

Former F1 driver Aguri Suzuki was given just a few weeks to start up the "Honda Junior" team - formed to placate Takuma Sato's fans after his sacking from the Honda F1 team - and get it to the grid of the first race of 2006. That the team not only turned up but also managed to get one of its cars to the end of the race was little short of miraculous; that the driver who finished the race was the crash-happy Sato really did beggar belief.

Although Super Aguri was not directly related to the Arrows F1 team, there was certainly an element of keeping it in the family: Super Aguri operated from the former Arrows factory and spent their first season campaigning four-year-old Arrows chassis, sold to them by the ever-enterprising Paul Stoddart.

Their finest hour came at the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix, during which Sato overtook - on track, without smashing into him - defending world champion Fernando Alonso, on his way to sixth place. In the same race both Sato and team-mate Anthony Davidson finished ahead of the two works Honda drivers, which must have really hurt.

The last time two such little blokes had been quite so chuffed was when Doc and Sneezy got a quick look up Snow White's skirt.

The team competed in the first four races of 2008 before the money finally ran out and they packed up shop, to the disappointment of the many fans the little team had accumulated.

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.