This got me musing on the anatomy of a Grand Prix driver. The demise of the gearlever and the advent of power steering through what looks like a PlayStation device have placed far more importance – and thereby value – on fingers and thumbs. When I asked a young BMW engineer to show me around the steering wheel at a test day in Barcelona, he looked at me blankly. “Ah, the interface,” he said seriously, “ yes, a very technical and expensive piece.”

Paddle-shift and an array of colour-coded buttons require extreme dexterity in the heat of battle, not to mention operating the F-duct, the brake balance and the front wing. They are busy men, Formula 1 drivers, relying not only on lightning reflexes, sharp eyes and a strong neck, arms and legs, but also nimble fingers and thumbs. When Alonso clouted the barrier in Monte Carlo he will have kept those newly insured thumbs away from the impact.

A modern Grand Prix car is a brutal and fearsome missile. Not in the same way as an Auto Union or V16 BRM, I grant you, but the sheer force of the grunt, the grip and the brakes demand a certain standard of fitness. In the old days, of course, it would have been a driver’s palms that he might have insured, or his largely unprotected upper body. At Monaco they would finish with blistered hands, gloves worn through by the constant gear-changing. Now they must contend with huge g-forces in the corners and under braking. It’s no wonder they spend so much time in the gym, or cycling up mountains.

How much stamina is required depends, in turn, on driving style and the efficiency of the machine. There tend, even now, to be two main types of F1 driver. Broadly speaking, into one category might go Fangio, Moss, Clark, Stewart, Prost, D Hill and Button. In the other we might put Brabham, G Hill, Rindt, K Rosberg, Jones, Senna and Hamilton. I repeat, these are broad categories tagged with ‘laid-back, smooth and shrewd’ and ‘ ballsy, mercurial and out there’. Something like that. The two styles place different demands both on the driver and car. Neither Prost nor Button get on with oversteer, while Senna and Hamilton liked/like a car they could/can throw around a bit. I have been privileged to sit alongside Denny Hulme in a Can-Am car, Derek Bell in a Porsche 917 and Petter Solberg in a Subaru. Believe me, they are busy.

There will be many who disagree. But that is the beauty of debate, the post-race banter at the bar. What is not in doubt is that, inside the car, there is a lot more ‘shock and awe’ than you can properly appreciate from the grandstand, and it has always been this way. In times past you could see the driver at work. Now they are encased up to their necks in carbon fibre, appearing almost at rest in the cockpit. This is deceptive. You cannot feel the brakes, see the power or hear the snatching of breath. But watch the onboard camera at Monaco, Suzuka or Interlagos, and you’ll begin to get some idea of what’s involved in keeping the car on the asphalt.

This weekend we move to Montréal, a low-downforce circuit, but one which demands extreme concentration allied with stamina and dexterity. The walls are close and there is much heavy braking. Should Ferrari fail to find some extra speed in Canada, Signor Alonso may wish he’d asked Santander to insure his future as well as his thumbs.

Clark’s final race
One of the few English journalists at Hockenheim in ’68 recalls fateful day

Colin Chapman
The Lotus boss was a complicated but brilliant man, as a new book recalls

Goodwood preview
What’s new at the Festival of Speed

Renault’s renaissance
How F1 team overcame ’09 setbacks

The ‘new’ Silverstone
Racing royalty and the Duke of York turned out for the track’s relaunch

Sir Jackie Stewart’s scrapbook
The triple World Champion’s career has been uniquely captured in a new book

Lunch with… Tom Kristensen
We meet most successful Le Mans racer

Mark Blundell’s race return
He’s not raced for seven years, but now an Audi R8 GT3 and Spa are calling

Jaguar’s Le Mans return
American Paul Gentilozzi is readying an XKR GT2 for the 24 Hours

David Murray
The Ecurie Ecosse boss tasted success at Le Mans, so why did he disappear?

Road test: Jaguar XJ
New saloon combines charm and ability

Women in motor sport
Michèle Mouton and the FIA want to encourage more female racing drivers

Monaco Historique
Period F1, F3 and sports car action

Mille Miglia retro
BMW victorious, 70 years after first win

Classic Racing Cars
Don’t be put off by its bulk – the Jaguar XJ220 was one seriously quick car

It’s interesting that, when forecasting the likely World Champion, most seem to be choosing between Schumacher, Hamilton, Alonso and Vettel – to be focusing, in other words, on one driver in each of the four top teams.

There’s no denying that, in the normal course of events, within a team one driver tends to assert his superiority over the group, to become the de facto number one, even if this is not officially acknowledged. And it’s a fact, too, that Michael, Lewis, Fernando and Sebastian have all shown themselves to be very keen on this thing of having the team revolve primarily around them. But I wonder if it’s going to be as clear-cut as some imagine.

Consider the ‘other’ driver in each team: Rosberg (Mercedes), Button (McLaren), Massa (Ferrari) and Webber (Red Bull). Of these only Nico has yet to win a Grand Prix, but then he has never – until now – had the car to enable him to do so. Shout me down if you will, but I have a suspicion that he will show a great deal better against Schuey than most appear to believe. Although Ross Brawn presided over a Ferrari team that for years clearly favoured Michael, he has publicly said that such will not be the situation at Mercedes.

Over at McLaren, Martin Whitmarsh has said the same about Hamilton and Button – and, again, I expect the performance gap between them to be far less than some suggest.

On to Ferrari. While I believe Alonso to be the best driver in the world, don’t forget that Massa – fully recovered – largely dominated Kimi Räikkönen, and came within a Toyota dry tyre of winning the 2008 World Championship. Felipe is cowed by no one these days, and quite right, too.

Finally, there is Red Bull: Bernie Ecclestone has predicted that Vettel will win the championship this year, and that’s not the silliest thing he has ever said, for Sebastian is prodigiously talented, with ambition to match.

I do, however, think it would be a great mistake to underestimate Webber. Because he’s in his thirties, and has been around a while, Mark is sometimes overlooked, but remember that last year he won twice – and that included a sound defeat of Vettel in Germany. Webber is Trulli-quick over one lap, and in a race no one fights harder. Twelve months ago he began the season with virtually no testing behind him, legacy of the badly broken leg sustained the previous autumn, but he never moaned about the discomfort, put up with his team-mate’s occasional tantrums, and simply put his head down and got on with it. I’m sure he will do the same in 2010.

Four top teams, then – but there are more than four drivers in the mix, and that’s what makes the forthcoming season so mouth-watering. And I’d add a final thought: if Renault comes up with competitive package, expect Robert Kubica – as talented as there is – to be in the thick of it.

If pushed, my money would be on Alonso for the title – but I’m not sure I’d bet very much…

It was a classic long-distance victory in that the winning car was the only Daytona Prototype to run the race essentially trouble-free, although the drivers did have to struggle with a sticking throttle and clutch failure. Faultless driving and pitwork were key to their success.

“I didn’t expect that we would be there at the end,” said Rockenfeller. “We were struggling with the handling most of the weekend but the team did a really good job to fix the car. We were pretty much changing everything on the set-up before the race. We didn’t know what to expect, but the car as perfect.”

Added Dalziel: “All four of us went into this race with a major unknown. We were pretty lost in practice but I knew if we could be reliable we’d be there at the end, and after the first couple of hours it was obvious we were fast. We never went off track or had any mechanical problems and I think this is a huge achievement for a new team.”

The winning Riley-Porsche was built and prepared at the Brumos team’s race shop in North Carolina under Mike Colluci’s direction, but the car was entered under the Action Express Racing moniker. The tough economic times compelled Brumos to lay off a number of employees at its dealerships last year, resulting in a decision to run just one rather than two Grand-Am cars in 2010. In turn the race team took the opportunity to build a different car powered by a Cayenne-based V8 built in California by the Lozano Brothers.

Built around a Riley chassis similar to last year’s winner and powered by a conventional Porsche engine, the new combination was turned out in off-white with a German flag down the middle. Colucci and Brumos also brought in veteran NASCAR crew chief and technical man Gary Nelson to help run the car.

Finishing third, four laps down, was the NPN Racing Riley-BMW driven by Scott Tucker/Ryan Hunter-Reay/Lucas Luhr/Richard Westbrook. Fourth, another 16 laps down, was Tracy Krohn’s Lola-Ford driven by Krohn/Nic Jonson/Ricardo Zonta/Colin Braun.

Among those out of luck were Ganassi’s second Riley-BMW driven by Montoya/Dario Franchitti/Scott Dixon/Jamie McMurray (above), which led more than 140 laps before blowing an engine. The Riley-Porsche of last year’s winner, Brumos Racing, blew its flat-six motor after 20 hours while defending Grand-Am champions Alex Gurney/Jon Fogarty and Daytona team-mates Jimmie Johnson (below)/Jimmy Vasser ran into a variety of problems, finally succumbing to a broken oil pump. Also out of luck were Wayne Taylor’s SunTrust Dallara-Ford and Mike Shank’s pair of Riley-Fords. This trio swept the top three places in qualifying but ran into various troubles in the race and finished fifth, sixth and seventh.

As he left for Ferrari, so Robert Kubica – on the market following BMW’s withdrawal – took his place, but through the late months of last year rumours abounded that Renault, too, might follow the lead of Honda, Toyota and BMW, and disappear from F1. Theoretically, therefore, Kubica might have been on the street once more – and, frankly, I was surprised that during that period any team signed any driver before being certain of Robert’s situation.

For my money, he is one of the top four drivers in F1, and some go further than that. His close pal Alonso has said he considers him the best, while even Lewis Hamilton has – privately – admitted that Kubica is the driver he most fears.

When Renault announced that, while the team would be continuing under the same name, a considerable chunk of it had been sold, Kubica declared that he now considered himself free to walk, should he choose to do so. After being reassured that it would remain a serious F1 operation, he said he would remain – but his original contract was for one season only, and there has been speculation that he could well join Alonso at Ferrari in 2011.

It could be that Kubica will have a frustrating time of it – again – this year, but still it astonishes me that when pundits consider the prospects for the coming season, frequently they omit to mention him. In all probability, this is because they do not expect very much from Renault, but if the car is even half-decent expect to see Robert in there, pitching. He might not look the part as much as some, but potentially this is a great Grand Prix driver.

It’s a fairly daunting experience standing next to a touring car driver as he tightens his helmet, starts the deafeningly loud engine of his 2-litre, 200bhp, BMW 320si E90 Touring Car – just before the light turns green – but it’s a feeling of excitement that will never be forgotten.

Known to be the fastest circuit in the UK, Thruxton can pose a few problems for drivers and their teams, but throughout the day the Airwaves team carried on with a minty fresh air of optimism and excitement.

“It’s a particularly tricky circuit for BMW”, Airwaves’ younger driver Jonny Adam (above) informs us. “We generally don’t expect to do too well on it, unlike Brands Hatch where the car can really perform to the best of its ability.”

With this in mind, Airwaves’ local hero Rob Collard (below) still made up an outstanding 12 positions in his second race finishing a respectable fifth, and then fifth again in the third race, taking home two points for the team leaving him fourth in the driver standings with 42 points.

“If you’d asked me after qualifying yesterday (Saturday) if I would take two fifth place finishes here then I’d have taken that,” said Collard at the end of the day. “I started really well all day and the car was very good in races two and three. There were four or five really top drivers out there all battling for position in race three and I really enjoyed it, it was very good racing for us and the fans.”

And it certainly was a terrific day for the fans as the second round of the BTCC delivered the motor racing excitement known only too well for touring cars. Several collisions kept the fans on their feet and the appearance of the safety car added to the dynamics of each race.

Upon getting up close and personal with the team it was amazing to witness the professional approach with which Airwaves BMW team went about its preparation before each race. The pit was a hub of activity as the mechanics worked frantically on each car while touring car fans moseyed around with intrigue and fascination.

“Keep up, keep up” called out the Airwaves pit official as he hurriedly led us on to the starting grid while the cars took up their positions. The last minute checks were performed on each of the cars and the sound of raging engines filled our ears.

“When I say ‘go’ you’ll have to make a run for it to get off the grid.” With this instruction we were both pretty keen not let this man out of our sight, otherwise we’d be getting a lot closer to the circuit than we’d bargained for.

Suffice to say we made it in one piece and were alive to watch the race with the rest of the Airwaves team in the paddock.

But it was Fabrizio Giovanardi, Colin Turkington and Mat Jackson who took first place in the three races of the day. Meanwhile VX Racing’s Matt Neal still tops the leader board with 64 points, six points ahead of Turkington. VX Racing had a fantastic result in round four as they brought home a 1-2-3 – their first in five years.

On May 17 the BTCC battle for points continues at Donington Park.

By Jennifer Carruth and Victoria Newell

Dear Nigel,

Didier Pironi was (and still is) given relatively bad press, not just because of his days at Ferrari with Gilles Villeneuve. Was this really deserved, and had he not crashed in Germany could he have actually become a greater champion than Alain Prost?

Steve Draper

Parting with £100 is one thing, but when you end up with only three laps of the track and a sandwich for lunch that even urban foxes would have problems keeping down, you do feel a little cheated.

Nowadays, thankfully, you’d be hard pressed to find somewhere where the cars aren’t up to standard. That’s because a level of competition has ensured that even the most budget of locations has a certain pride when it comes to which car they put paying guests in. Apart from, that is, a certain place I went to a few months ago which shall remain nameless. The ’80s touring car racers looked as though three angry chimps had been left to do their worst inside – what was left was an eclectic mix of wires which didn’t work and upholstery that smelt of oil and, alarmingly, cinders and burnt Nomex suit.

But, in the words of a certain Rob Widdows, I digress. The other day I was at Brands Hatch for the launch of its 2009 racing season where the media and drivers gathered to sample various cars and bikes at the track.

MotorSport Vision – the company owned by Jonathan Palmer which runs the Formula Palmer Audi series as well as various driving days at Brands Hatch, Oulton Park and Bedford Autodrome – announced that it has teamed up with BMW to offer new M3 track days.

The new M3 is a staggering piece of kit with over 400bhp and, as Palmer pointed out, “When I started driving anything with 200bhp, like the original M3, was powerful. But the performance of these cars really is superb and it can only be used a to limited extent on public roads – that’s the advantage of running on the circuit.”

Never a truer word was spoken, and what’s more you can either go for 15 laps in the M3 and then jump into a single-seater, or just stick to the BMW and hammer round for 30 laps.

Having done one of Motorsport Vision’s driving days at Bedford Autodrome I can assure you that they are the most professionally run events I have been to, so I expected nothing less from the new M3 experience. In the event the car was beautifully smooth and, although the instructor decided that he wasn’t going to switch the traction control off, the M3 certainly had enough power to make you go a little ‘wide-eyed’ through Paddock.

Having said this, it was events at the end of the day that have stuck in my mind. Because it was the season launch Brands was playing host to all shapes and sizes of vehicle, from Formula Palmer Audis to historic Lolas and McLarens, and from the new Formula 2 car (more on this in the magazine soon) to racing trucks.

The racing trucks are truly unbelievable. They weigh more than an elephant and pack a quite ridiculous 1000bhp. The brakes are water-cooled – otherwise they’d last approximately three metres – and they leave the pits with liquids pouring all over the place and smoke billowing from their tyres.

I was lucky enough to have a passenger ride in one and the feeling of coming out of Clearways in a six-wheel drift is one that I will never forget. They aren’t slow either … despite being limited to 100mph we hit the limiter at the start of the pitwall.

If you get offered a ride in one of these, please, please say yes. It’s the closest you’ll get to being part of a herd of stampeding elephants.

I do not own a BMW but I have been reading the latest edition of the magazine. A friend of mine, soon to take early retirement from a blue chip British company, may forsake Waitrose for Tesco but he’s hanging on to his BMW.

The reason I mention this is because there is a most enlightening article about the new KERS contraption that will be seen on some of the Grand Prix cars when they appear in Melbourne in March. We know that BMW is well advanced in this respect, having already developed a brake energy recovery system for its M3 models. Conversely we know that the new Ferrari F60, launched today at Mugello, is using a Magneti-Marelli system that is rumoured to be far from fully ready to race. There won’t be much rest at Maranello during the next couple of months as Ferrari, like many other teams, strives to get on top of the new technology.

At BMW’s Research & Innovation Centre in Munich, meanwhile, there is cautious optimism despite this being relatively unfamiliar territory for the engineers, none of whom have a great deal of previous experience with KERS. Mario Theissen, who leads the BMW-Sauber team, has made it clear that the new system will only be run on the F1.09 when it has “fully matured”.

I may well be wrong but I sense there will be wranglings and gnashing of teeth in Melbourne. The FIA is said to be keeping a close eye on its latest wheeze to make F1 racing greener and more relevant to the high-performance cars of the future. Brake energy recovery may not be the re-invention of the wheel but it is certainly a headache for motor racing teams who require reliability with outright speed.

Encouragingly, the driver will have to use his brainpower, as he must decide when to use the extra energy stored up by the recovery system. Boy, how this would fall into the hands of men like Prost and Lauda. But who will make the best of it as we go into the new season? Nobody has the answer to that but an outside bet on Alonso in the Renault, or Kubica in the BMW, might be worth considering.

If you own a BMW you will have read about this intriguing new development. If you don’t, then it’s still well worth keeping abreast of how this technology works and how it may help, or hinder, the teams as they approach the first race. We may fleetingly return to the good old days with a fair few mechanical retirements. Remember all those cars parked at the side of the track? Certainly the cars are going to look a little fatter and wider to make room for all the gubbins that goes with recovering energy.

The days of Cosworths and Hewlands seem an awfully long time ago, don’t they? Nice memories on a wet, windy January day. But we have to keep up and, as the Dinky Toys advert used to say, there’s “always something new” to play with.

But it may not be Christmas and New Year revelling that finds you in this condition. Getting back to work is never easy, especially when the world around us appears to be in such turmoil. And the little world of motor racing has not escaped what may turn out to be some kind of watershed in our times.

Grand Prix teams – and freelance writers – do not have a fortnight’s holiday for Christmas even when the season starts a little later, as it does this year. There are new cars to be built, new sponsors to be charmed and existing ones to be reassured. Not easy this year. In both cases.

Talking to Ian Phillips (above) at Force India, you get it straight from the hip. “There will always be new sponsors,” he says, “but right now they are going to have to be mighty brave.” He should know, having survived four decades with, among others, Jordan, Midland, Spyker and now Force India. These are not comfortable times for a bank, or a car manufacturer, to justify a major partnership to its shareholders.

Costs are coming down, however, and not before time. Sir Jackie Stewart is right when he says that Formula 1 should have been preparing itself for leaner times way before the current economic woes became headlines. He is also right when he suggests that the FIA should, following the reign of Max Mosley, have a president from outside the motor racing business. It would, he argues, be a healthier and more efficient alternative to the tightly held and claustrophobic kingdom to which we have become accustomed.

What really matters to people like us are the cars. And, of course, the racing. So what can we expect from the 2009 season? Predictions, especially about the future, are always to be taken with a pinch of salt but there are some indicators.

Firstly, KERS might be a mighty flop, a white elephant rather than an engineering miracle. This rather depends on who you are talking to, as is ever the case. BMW has spent a great deal of time and money on developing its own system, sacrificing some development of the 2008 car to do so. But there are many in Munich who fear that KERS may be either postponed or, at worst, put back on the shelf. Unlikely, but there are vague murmurs that the mighty Scuderia is not as far advanced as it might be and may even consider asking the FIA for some kind of postponement. Again unlikely, but millions of euros have been spent, especially in Munich, and it is not preposterous to suggest that whoever has the best system in Melbourne may just run away with the first few races. For many teams, dealing with new aerodynamics, slick tyres and less testing is more than enough, without the extra anxieties of an energy recovery system.

Christian Horner, the boss at Red Bull, says that a few teams will have KERS on the cars in Melbourne but, in his view, the advantage of extra power may not prove to be worth the extra weight and complexity of the various systems. As with any other new component on a racing car, these new KERS systems – which are not mandatory – will only be run in race trim if the evidence is there on the stopwatch.

Meanwhile Happy New Year everyone! Try watching Pink Panther films instead of the news bulletins. You will feel a whole lot less ramfeezled.