Sadly, I am just about old enough to be Lewis Hamilton’s dad. The chatter has already started about whether he’s old enough to be in F1 next year. As the adage goes, “if you’re good enough, you’re old enough”. Talk about in at the deep end, though – straight into McLaren alongside the reigning world champion. I wonder if he will get to play with all the toys.

I must say it’s really convenient that the F1 season starts again just after the superbowl. Gotta have some sport to obsess over on a Sunday!

So Max Mosely thinks he’s close to fixing the overtaking problem in F1. Excuse my cynicism, but I think not. It goes like this: AMD will make a supercomputer which, via the modern magic of computational fluid dynamics simulation, will “measure” the downforce of car designs and limit them to a certain figure. Sounds peachy, right?

The thing is, as any fule no who has followed F1 for any length of time, the edge in the sport is all in breaking the rules inventively so the scrutineers (and other teams) won’t notice – or at least can’t prove it. Not allowed to use wheel speed sensor data to inform the formerly outlawed traction control? No problem, just use the airbox pressure instead. The teams hire the best in the business to work around the rules, not within them. This purely computational rule, though, is one step further in this particular cold war.

This time, the teams don’t have to figure out how to defeat other teams, or even the people at the FIA doing the checking of the regulations. They have to beat a computer. If (when!) some bright spark figures out a way of designing an aero package which looks to the CFD computer to comply to the regulations but behaves better than that in a wind-tunnel, they’re made. At least until they’re found out.

You might think I hate all these subterfuges from reading this: you’d be wrong. It’s why I love F1. It’s the pinnacle of one of the most fiendish, devious and political sports there is :->

I wrote that title just after watching the US GP fiasco. I didn’t get around to fleshing the story out until now, 2 weeks later, just before the French. Well, is the picture any clearer after all the stories that have emerged since? Not really. I suppose I can see the FIA point of view: the Michelin teams all suffered a major technical failure, and the teams that were on Bridgestones should not have suffered as a result. Having said that, 120000 or so paying punters also suffered. Of course the big loser in all this is Michelin because they’ll have to stump up for compensation for fans, there’s talk of running a silly little exhibition race, but most of all, they just said “Michelin tyres aren’t safe” on national and international prime time. My little Punto got switched from the Pirellis to Bridgestone Potenzas a long time ago…

Poor old Kimi. There are all sorts of recriminations after his crash at Nurburgring when his front suspension broke after 15 laps of battering when running on a tyre, as James Alleninthepits described it, the shape of a 50 pence piece. He flat-spotted it trying to lap that twonk Villeneuve. I suppose strictly speaking to make it like a 50p piece he’d have had to flat-spot it 7 times, but I’m sure it wasn’t far off.

The new regulations this season where one set of tyres have to last each car for qualifying plus the whole race, along with the engine babying brought about by rules requiring them to last two race weekends just mean we’re treated to a two-hour endurance race. Don’t get me wrong, I like endurance racing; Le Mans is still one of the best tests of drivers and teams, but F1 to me should be about going as fast as you can for the two hours. They were billed as bringing down the cost of participation so that it wouldn’t end up as a slugging match between global car makers with no privateers and to promote closer racing by reducing the single-racing-line nature of most circuits. They’ve failed, and I think the F.I.A. knows it. That’s why they have started this survey cobblers. Quite how they couch it in the rules, I don’t know, but to me the key must be in the aerodynamics. When the drivers say that their lap times start to suffer when they’re within half a second or more of the bloke in front, that’s the problem right there.

I’ve often thanked my lucky stars that my work doesn’t have people’s lives depending on it. OK, if I screw up, a newspaper or a magazine might miss its deadline, but in the scale of things, it’s not too bad. If I was working on the Airbus software or something, it would be different. Today, I think, the Minardi F1 programmers will be getting a right royal bollocking because their cars managed all of 100 metres or so before conking out. It doesn’t get any more embarrassing.

Talking of F1, I’m still watching the closing stages of the race in Barcelona and no bugger has managed a pass on the track at all. It’s all about putting different levels of fuel on board and caning it when you’ve got a clear track ahead of you. What we have is time trial with knobs on, no more. Add to that the element of a 2 hour endurance race because of the new engine regs, and really it’s only appealing to the real motorsport anoraks. There’s not much of a spectacle to be fair. How the Cart Fedex series managed to have 10 different winners in 11 races or whatever it was, is obviously a mystery to old Max and the rest of the FIA.

Along with so many celeb kid STUPID names, is James Allen’s little boy really called Enzo?