Jenson Button came into the world in Somerset in 1980. He has two slightly silly middle names - Alexander Lyons - and three slightly older sisters, born at regular internals in 1967, 1970 and 1973, although far be it from us to suggest that little Jenson was slightly less planned than his sisters.

Success in karting and Formula Ford led to Formula 3 and then almost immediately on to Formula One, where he made a few rookie mistakes but also qualified third in a Williams at Spa, which went a long way towards shutting everyone the hell up.

Still under contract to Williams, Jenson drove the 2001 season for Benetton, which became Renault in 2002 and BAR the year after. This was clearly all a bit confusing for Button, who announced in mid-2004 that he would be driving for Williams the following season, having signed contracts for both teams. Once that legal Gordian knot had been cut, Jenson went and did it all again in reverse in 2005, as he tried to wriggle out of his contract with Williams to stay with BAR.

Throughout all this vacillating, Jenson was linked with a succession of beauties, perhaps indicating that what women really want is a rich man in touch with his feminine side or, to put it another way, a Formula One driver who can never make his f**king mind up.

Button is often joined at races by his father John who, ever since Jenson won the first race of the 2009 season, has taken to wearing his "lucky pink shirt", conveniently forgetting - in the way that superstitious people do - all the times he wore the same shirt and Jenson finished three laps down.

Jenson has homes in Monaco, the UK and Bahrain, where he pursues his hobbies of mountain biking, almost growing a beard and browsing through lingerie catalogues to find his next girlfriend.

Alonso's full name is Fernando Alonso Diaz and few people realise that he is the half-brother of Cameron Diaz, the well-known jizz-haired actress.

His success in Formula One has led to a huge growth of interest in the sport in his home country of Spain, where not so long ago you could easily pick up cheap tickets to the Grand Prix and pretty much have your pick of seats, so thanks for that, Fernando.

Like many of the sport's stars, Alonso began his F1 career with Minardi and he made a splash at his first race, where he out-qualified his team-mate by over two and a half seconds. That margin is rendered slightly less impressive when you learn that his team-mate was Tarso Marques who, as racing drivers go, has a lovely personality.

Fernando was soon snapped up by Renault, where he spent a year testing before being promoted to a race seat. He became the then youngest world champion in 2005 and the youngest double champion in 2006. There followed an abbreviated tenure at McLaren which failed to yield a third title, largely because he proved unable to beat a rookie, after which he was welcomed back to the Renault team, where he is expected to wait grumpily until a Ferrari seat becomes available.

Alonso is an exceptionally talented and complete racing driver but he also has a reckless - often self-destructive - streak and an eccentrically unique take on what it means to be a team-player, traits which have doubtless closed a number of F1 doors to him.

In 2005 he was appointed one of UNICEF's Goodwill Ambassadors, which may explain why he never has any left for anyone else.

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.

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.

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.

Founded by the Kiwi Bruce McLaren in 1963, Bruce McLaren Motor Racing merged in 1981 with the Project 4 team, which was being run by the barn owl Ron Dennis. The team is now part of McLaren Racing, a member of the McLaren Group, under the umbrella of McLaren Holdings, a subsidiary of McLaren PLC, which is wholly owned by McLaren (World Domination) Ltd.

Bruce McLaren is currently the only driver to have won a Formula One world championship race in a car bearing his own name as a constructor*, although the dotdotdotcomma-sponsored driver Panasonic Toyota, currently racing a borrowed Caterham with limited success, is optimistic of one day becoming the second.

The team has rapidly become one of the most successful in F1 history and is widely regarded as technologically top-notch, if sometimes a little fragile operationally. They are constantly trying to persuade everyone that they may be stiff and corporate but they still know how to have a good time. It's not terribly convincing.

They're far from unemotional, however, and Ron Dennis can often be glimpsed furtively wiping away a tear or two of joy. In fact, when one of his favoured drivers has won against seemingly insuperable odds during a troubled time for the team, it can sometimes be hard to hear the national anthems over the sound of Ron's blubbing.

*Other than, we've just realised, Jack Brabham. Who also won the world championship. Arse. Rest assured, our research team will be hung, drawn and quartered. Or should that be "hanged"?

Mercedes GP was born when Brawn GP's amazingly successful combined inaugural and valedictory year in F1 prompted the car manufacturers' großen Käse to buy a controlling interest in the team at the end of 2009.

The takeover was not intended to cause any undue instability, however; the new team would continue to be based in Brackley, less than 30 miles from Mercedes's F1 engine factory in Brixworth, giving the whole operation a distinctly German flavour.

The team pulled off a bit of a coup - or scored a massive own goal, depending on where your loyalties lie - by signing Michael Schumacher on a three-year contract, which sees the seven-time champion reinstated as the sport's undisputed number-one villain and, dare we say, wanker.

Sponsorship for 2010 comes from Malaysian oil company Petronas, whose turqoise logo should clash nicely with the dreary grey livery traditionally favoured by Mercedes.

After Ireland, Russia and Holland had had a go, Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya stepped in to buy the old Jordan squad, encouraged by F1's desire to break into the Indian market, presumably because the sub-continent is home to an awful lot of potential new smokers.

Despite looking every inch the medallion man, Mallya is undoubtedly a shrewd operator, albeit one who was foolhardy enough to become the team's fourth owner in as many years, and he was welcomed into the paddock by everyone except Flavio Briatore, who thought he was taking the piss.

For its first season in 2008, the team boasted customer Ferrari engines, Mike Gascoyne as Chief Technology Officer and, um, Giancarlo Fisichella but when Super Aguri stopped turning up to keep the Force India cars off the back row, the team looked like becoming a perennial back-marker, although at Monaco in 2008 Adrian Sutil came within a handful of laps of claiming fourth place, until Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen lost control braking for the Nouvelle Chicane and punted him out of the race, an incident that the FIA saw fit to overlook.

Forged from the remnants of Minardi, Toro Rosso is Red Bull's junior F1 team. The arrangement lets Red Bull (a) try out unproven young drivers and (2) take cocky french multiple Champ Car champions down a peg or two.

The team benefits from an unspecified amount of help from its senior team but is still free to plough its own furrow. In 2007, for instance, it used Ferrari engines rather than the Renault power units favoured by Red Bull, which proved, if nothing else, that the Ferrari team must have had one hell of a chassis.

Toro Rosso has yet to inspire the same level of support enjoyed by Minardi, although it was on the right lines when a senior manager occasioned a physical assault upon the wholly objectionable Scott Speed. Keep it up, lads, and we'll put our not inconsiderable weight behind you.

Having made his fortune in airlines and hotels, Malaysian entrepreneur Tony Fernandes gathered together a group of similarly enthusiastic and suitably wealthy businesspeople to form a consortium with enough cash to start up a Formula One team. Quite why you'd then actually go ahead and do that instead of, say, blowing the money on a really amazing weekend in Las Vegas is a question that will for the moment remain unaddressed. That's what they chose to do and thus was Team Lotus reborn.

The name was a problem from day one.

Fernandes claimed that he had bought the rights to the name from David Hunt, brother of the late F1 champion James, which sounded about as plausible as claiming that you're within your rights to call your team Honda because Viviane Senna said it was okay. Proton, the Malaysian car-maker which bought Lotus Cars when the latter was going through one of its less buoyant phases, issued a statement to the effect that actually, it wasn't so sure about that claim and the legal eagles began circling like, um, vultures.

Meanwhile on the track, the team was performing better than expected. Sporting an iconic green-and-yellow livery, which evoked the classic Team Lotus colours before they turned into high-speed cigarette packets, both cars managed to get to the finish in their first race and they went on to finish a creditable tenth in the championship, making them easily the best of the three new teams for 2010.

The plan for 2011 was to consolidate on that promising start but the courtroom battle over the Lotus name became a bigger distraction daily. Renowned serial name-changers Renault rebranded themselves Lotus Renault GP, with backing from Group Lotus, and launched their 2011 car in iconic black-and-gold livery, which evoked the classic Team Lotus colours after they turned into high-speed cigarette packets, and later in the season they announced that from 2012 they would simply be called Lotus.

No doubt there was a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating, posturing, bargaining and - dare we suggest - transferring of large sums, of which we the public remain unaware, but the outcome was never really in any question. Team Lotus would keep their green and their yellow but would be renamed Caterham, in order to promote a car company which Tony Fernandes had bought, forgotten about and recently rediscovered down the back of his sofa and which, coincidentally, still makes a version of the legendary small but big-hearted Lotus 7 sports car.

Throughout their problems, however, the team built up a small but fervent band of supporters, consisting largely of the same fans who made up the small but fervent band of Minardi supporters, who liked the Forti team before that, always had a soft spot for Andrea Moda and who, in short, get a kick out of following any team that counts 16th place as a pretty good result. In the case of Team Lotus, their cause was helped by employing the popular Jarno Trulli and Heikki Kovalainen as their two drivers and by having a team principal as genial as Tony Fernandes, a man with a face that falls so easily into a grin that he looks as if he smiles even while he's asleep.

Virgin Racing is either just the kind of underdog team that deserves your loyalty and support or the latest considered marketing ploy of that unashamed self-publicist Richard Branson, depending on your point of view.

The team is actually Manor Grand Prix in a new suit, since it was John Booth's team - which has enjoyed considerable success in junior single-seater categories since it was founded in 1990 - that was awarded a spot on the F1 grid for 2010. Before the FIA entry list was published in late 2009, however, Virgin had swooped in to become the title sponsor and install as team principal one of their own high-flyers, who was quickly replaced when it became apparent that he knew even less about racing than Flavio Briatore.

The team is therefore competing as Virgin Racing, which we keenly anticipate will lead to all sorts of unintended commentary box doubles entendres, along the lines of "that Virgin looks a bit of a handful in the wet", which is the sort of thing that amuses our little brains.

Manor is based in the UK in two sites: one in Sheffield and the other just next door in Bicester. In that regard, Manor has following the BMW-Sauber approach, although Manor's two sites are at least in the same country, and Booth is confident that his squad can emulate the success enjoyed by BMW, right up to the point at which they collapsed.

Bolstering the Manor workforce is experienced entrepreneur Nick Wirth, whose engineering company has no doubt done this, that and the other thing with varying degrees of success. For a couple of years he was the founder, owner and technical director of the Simtek F1 team, which achieved levels of performance suggesting that Wirth held most of the other positions there as well.

Wirth will shoulder the responsibility of producing the cars and his 2010 challenger is the first F1 car designed using solely CFD simulation technology - no wind tunnels here, thank you very much - so with that level of innovation behind them, it will be fascinating to see exactly how many seconds off the pace the car will be.

Drivers for the first season are Timo Glock, who shows every indication of being the new Nick Heidfeld (which isn't intended as completely insulting, even if it sounds like it is), and Lucas Di Grassi, who has a very nice line in world-weary abuse for other drivers when he's been punted off which we reckon he'll have plenty of opportunity to use.