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.

Rubens Barrichello's father and grandfather are also confusingly called Rubens, although Rubens himself had the good sense to name his own sons Eduardo and Fernando. We'll concentrate on the best known Rubens Barrichello here.

Barrichello's career before F1 is impressive: he claimed five Brazilian karting titles, which he followed by winning both the Formula Vauxhall Lotus and the British Formula 3 titles at his first attempt. He graduated to Formula One in 1993 with Jordan and in 1996 he got to drive one of those amazing-looking gold Benson & Hedges cars, although unlike his team-mate Martin Brundle, Rubens preferred to drive his the right way up.

A switch to Stewart in 1997 proved to be what they call "character-building". Barrichello saw the chequered flag at just three races, although one of those was at Monaco, where his second-place finish reduced team boss Jackie Stewart to tears on live TV. In fact, Jackie spent most of that year crying but this was the first time it was for joy. Rubens, no stranger himself to the odd bout of blubbing, fitted right in.

With just a brief mention of the controversial 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, at which Ferrari team orders saw Rubens let Michael Schumacher through for victory just yards from the line, we move on to the remarkable 2003 British Grand Prix, where Barrichello had probably the best race of his F1 career, overtaking anyone and everyone on his way to a memorable victory. His brave pass of Kimi Raikkonen at Bridge is the first and only time anyone has ever overtaken there. Most likely.

Rubens is now the most experienced driver in F1 history, which is a nice way of saying that he's knocking on a bit.

Nelson Angelo Piquet has six names, although we've picked his three best known ones. He is commonly known as Nelson Piquet Junior and also as Nelsinho Piquet, which he has asked people not to use any more.

Nelsinho is the son of Nelson Piquet, who claimed three world championships and made no friends along the way. His father's money meant that he could race for his own team all the way up to GP2, after which things get a bit expensive even for multi-millionaires.

His last championship was in 2004 when he won the British F3 title, although the perenially under-funded and criminally under-rated Ulsterman Adam Carroll heroically took the fight to the last event at Brands Hatch, about which we could go on but probably shouldn't.

Little Nelson competed in GP2 and A1GP, before curiously being picked up by the Renault F1 équipe, first as a test driver and subsequently as a racer, where his disappointing form was about what many of the more astute paddock observers had been expecting.

The perception of him as a sulky rich kid was given further weight when, after being sacked by Renault part way through 2009, he went running to the FIA with allegations of race-fixing, claiming that some bigger boys had forced him to crash deliberately at Singapore in 2008, in order to put team-mate Fernando Alonso on exactly the right strategy to claim the win.

The revelation was indeed shocking. We'd all got so used to seeing Piquet crash that believing he'd done so on purpose was difficult to reconcile. The fall-out saw Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds lose their jobs and, if there's any justice, brought an end to Nelsinho's career in the top flight.

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.

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.

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.