There has only been a single man who has won world championships on both motorcycles and in racing cars: John Surtees.

He was the man to beat on bikes in the 1950s. He won an incredible 38 of the 49 Grands Prix he entered and became world champion seven times in two classes, riding Nortons and MV Agustas. He then switched to cars and won the Formula One world championship for Ferrari when Jimmy Clark’s Lotus 25 died on him on the last lap of a wacky 1964 Mexican Grand Prix.

Apart from Valentino Rossi’s flirting with Ferrari a few years back, modern drivers don’t experiment with the number of wheels they ride. Mark Webber is no exception. The photos you’re about to see were taken at a Superbike World Championship at Donington Park, the site of next year’s British Grand Prix.

Mr. Webber has kindly agreed to provide commentary for which we cannot be thankful enough.

Okay, so they are racing weird machines here but certain elements suggest we are still at a motor race. Good. Yamaha grid girls!

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Yes, Jonathan [Rea, driver for Ten Kate Honda – Ed], but do you have a lever that launches a homing missile on Ross Brawn’s brain in outer space?

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Honda. Hmm! Not much of a future in F1—or is there? Wait, I think I’ve found that lever for the anti-Brawn missile after all. Excellent.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

It’s reassuring that tire cozies are not exclusive to Formula One. Such sissiness pinned on a single category would be terrible.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Oh, great. These people wear Brawn GP team colors. I just bet Ross is picking my brain this very minute. Mate, unplug now, willya?

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Is that down under macho enough or shall I grab the girl in green with the umbrella?

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

I may be making a silly face but you will not be keeping keep my Red Bull hat for long, motorcycle boy [Tom Sykes of Team Yamaha – Ed], oh no you won’t.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

These guys are fast but I am faster.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Photography is complicated enough as it is, but when you add a lens that purposely manipulates the plane of focus or meddles with parallel lines, full comprehension will require a trip to the Physics section of your local bookstore to familiarize yourself with the work of Theodor Scheimpflug. The lenses used to take these photos are highly expensive and the output they produce cannot be used for straight news reportage, yet a handful a sports photographers employ them to capture the visuals of Grand Prix weekends in ways impossible with other equipment. And no, not every tilt-shift photo is a a fake miniature.

Click through for a distorted trip of the past three years of Formula One.

2008 Japanese Grand Prix

Here’s the Red Bull team having fun at Fuji Speedway. This is perhaps the most optically complex photo in our gallery and not only because you are probably spectacularly uninterested in the subjects in the plane of focus.

It’s because the girl’s left cheek also appears to be in focus, yet a blurred field separates it from the Red Bull team members. Physics majors, please explain in the comments.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Kimi Räikkönen, 2009 Monaco Grand Prix

This is classic tilted plane fake miniaturization: the chap in the red car is Kimi Räikkönen, on his way to Ferrari’s only podium finish this year.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Jenson Button, 2009 Turkish Grand Prix

A tilted focus is great for portraiture: photographer Mark Thompson can direct our gaze to Jenson Button’s left eye at the exclusion of everything else. Button here is consulting with his teammates at the 2009 Turkish Grand Prix, before his crushing victory on race day.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Jenson Button, 2009 British Grand Prix

If you tilt your plane of focus to a narrow vertical field, you can isolate a race car with sudden clarity. Jenson Button is seen here during free practice at last weekend’s British Grand Prix, where he lost by a wide margin to Red Bull’s flying Sebastian Vettel.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Felipe Massa, 2007 Monaco Grand Prix

Let’s see some Ferraris: Felipe Massa is seen here sharing a plane of focus with a bunch of yachts in Monaco harbor. He is on his way to finish third behind the twin McLarens of Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Michael Schumacher, 2008 German Grand Prix

Ferrari personnel in their red getups make for great photos: here’s Michael Schumacher at last year’s German Grand Prix, looking very excited as he’s sandwiched in between two aesthetic crimson blobs as the sole punk in blue jeans.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Kimi Räikkönen, 2009 Turkish Grand Prix

Ferraris may suck this season, but even parked and hooked up to computers, they look gorgeous. 2007 world champion Kimi Räikkönen is about to go for a practice run at a race he would finish outside the points. Notice how the tilted plane renders everything but Räikkönen’s head and the yellow Scuderia Ferrari badge out of focus.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Kimi Räikkönen, 2007 British Grand Prix

Last Ferrari photo, but look at the fancy British clouds, sharp only where they line up with the starting grid of Silverstone, which photographer Clive Mason chose as his plane of focus. Kimi Räikkönen is seen here in happier times: he is about to qualify second in the 2007 British Grand Prix, a race he would win on his way to claim the 2007 championship.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Timo Glock, 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix

This photo captures like no other Mercedes-Benz’s renowned racing manager Alfred Neubauer’s observation that the racing driver is the loneliest creature in the universe. Neubauer invented pit signaling to remedy this, taking his Mercedes-Benz team to a hail of victories over three decades, while photographer Fred Dufour used a tilt lens to show Toyota’s Timo Glock practicing for the 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

David Coulthard, 2008 German Grand Prix

It’s Mr. Jawbone right there in his Red Bull, in the waning months of his long career. Wearing a flameproof balaclava, he is a lone white human figure in a scaffolding of wire and carbon fiber suspension parts.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Sebastian Vettel, 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix

Contrary to what you can read on the pit wall, this is David Coulthard’s successor Sebastian Vettel in the Red Bull RB5 car, leaving the pits at the 2009 Bahrain Grand Prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Hamilton, Heidfeld, Fisichella and Alonso, 2009 Spanish Grand Prix

You can also use a tilt-shift lens to cut through the clutter of people at a press conference, picking out those that your viewers are probably most interested in: bitter 2007 rivals Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, shown here at a press conference three days before the 2009 Spanish Grand Prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Red Bull’s Guests, 2007 Italian Grand Prix

Like any other photographic technique, a tilted plane of focus can be used to capture gratuitous shots of young women. These blondes are guests of Red Bull at the 2007 Italian Grand Prix and judging solely on appearance, they are hopped up on the team’s signature soft drink.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Jenson Button, 2009 British Grand Prix

And we’re back to toy cars. While photographer Fred Dufour probably did not know at the time he took this picture, Jenson Button’s usually dominant Brawn would actually be relegated to toy car status during last weekend’s British Grand Prix, as Red Bull’s upgraded RB5’s stormed the field, taking their second 1–2 victory of the season.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

Sebastian Vettel, 2008 German Grand Prix

Black and white? Art! Focusing in a slanted plane on Sebastian Vettel’s face shows just how young Red Bull’s superfast German really is: he was born on July 3, 1987. When this photo was taken, he'd only been old enought to have a beer in America for less than two weeks.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Fernando Alonso, 2009 Monaco Grand Prix

For a final tilted image, here’s one for pure aesthetic awesomeness. Fernando Alonso is taking the Grand Hotel Hairpin of the Monaco street circuit in the Renault during free practice at this year’s grand prix.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP/Getty Images

New to the informational deluge of Formula One this season is a table of pre-race car weights published on the official Formula One website. The published weights include car, driver and fuel, helping the erudite and mathematically inclined viewer separate a car’s performance from the hydrocarbons and the sole human sloshing inside.

Here is the table for last Sunday’s British Grand Prix, expressed in kilograms (multiply by 2.2 to get pounds):

1. Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull, 666.5
2. Rubens Barrichello, Brawn GP, 657.5
3. Mark Webber, Red Bull, 659.5
4. Jarno Trulli, Toyota, 658
5. Kazuki Nakajima, Williams, 652.5
6. Jenson Button, Brawn GP, 657.5
7. Nico Rosberg, Williams, 661.5
8. Timo Glock, Toyota, 660
9. Kimi Räikkönen, Ferrari, 654
10. Fernando Alonso, Renault, 654
11. Felipe Massa, Ferrari, 675
12. Robert Kubica, BMW Sauber, 689.5
13. Heikki Kovalainen, McLaren, 695.5
14. Nelson Piquet, Renault, 682.5
15. Nick Heidfeld, BMW Sauber, 665.5
16. Giancarlo Fisichella, Force India, 668
17. Sébastien Bourdais, Toro Rosso, 687.5
18. Adrian Sutil, Force India, 692
19. Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, 666
20. Sébastien Buemi, Toro Rosso, 672.5

As the combined weight of Sebastian Vettel, his load of fuel and his Red Bull RB5 race car is within rounding error of the Number of the Beast, one cannot help but wonder whether his hat trick of pole position, fastest lap and race win were achieved with netherworldly help.

He certainly looked like a man who had borrowed Lucifer’s great leather wings for the last sixty laps of F1 racing Silverstone will witness for the foreseeable future.

You will also notice that down at the bottom of the grid, BMW’s Nick Heidfeld and McLaren’s defending champion Lewis Hamilton share Vettel’s hexakosioihexekontahexaphilic heft. It only goes to show that a pact with the devil is never as simple as is looks.

Source: The Official Formula 1 Website. Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Follow our live text of the last grand prix at Silverstone on our F1 Live page.

If you’d like to add your own observations to our live stream, just log on to Twitter and post something with the hashtag #f1live.

Enjoy!

Update: Thank you all for following along, check back this afternoon for a gallery of the race.

Photo Credit: Paul Gilham/Getty Images

Stirling Moss: 1955, 1957

It took the Brits six tries to crack their home grand prix and it took their greatest driver and the car the Germans came back to Formula One with. Held at Aintree, it was the only race of the season where Moss managed to beat his teammate Juan Manuel Fangio, who went on to claim his third world title. As his win came after a pass at the last corner, Moss wondered whether Fangio had let him win, but the Argentine would always say: “No. You were just better than me that day.” British-Argentine relations would, in a few decades, take a turn for the worse.

Moss’s second win came two years later in a Vanwall VW5 shared with Tony Brooks, who is also credited with the victory.

Photo Credit: Daimler Global Media. Moss is driving his Mercedes-Benz W196 to victory at Aintree.

Tony Brooks: 1957

Dr. Brooks—he was a dentist by training—was the first Brit to drive a British car to grand prix victory after World War Two, winning a non-championship race in Syracuse. His win, shared with Stirling Moss, was his first of six victories in Formula One.

Photo Credit: Terry Whalebone. This is the Vanwall VW5 before the start of the 1957 British Grand Prix at Aintree.

Peter Collins: 1958

Collins was an up-and-coming driver at Ferrari, much liked by il Commendatore himself, whom Juan Manuel Fangio passed on the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 1957 to take his last win.

In 1958, driving the Ferrari 246 F1, he took his third and last victory in front of his home crowd at Silverstone. Two weeks later, he returned to the scene of his great battle with Fangio. On lap 11 of the 1958 German Grand Prix, he went over the embankment and hit a tree with his head, dying later that afternoon.

John F. Burns of The New York Times, who saw Collins drive to his last win, has written a heartbreaking report on the fair-haired young man, one of many casualties of the brutal 1958 season.

Collins is shown at the 1957 German Grand Prix in his Ferrari.

Jimmy Clark: 1962–1965, 1967

He was the fastest sheep farmer who has ever lived, the very humble soulmate of Lotus founder Colin Chapman, the man who could not put his head around the fact that everyone else was slower on the track. Chapman had a philosophy of building his Loti light enough to last only the duration of the race but not a second more. When the cars held together, Clark would usually win. When not, he would lose out on races—and championships. He dominated his home grand prix like no other Brit, winning a total of five times at Aintree, Silverstone and Brands Hatch.

Three months before he could defend his 1967 win with the dominant Lotus 49B, he lost control of his car at a Formula Two race at the Hockenheimring, crashed into a tree and died from his injuries.

Photo Credit: Allsport Hulton/Archive. Bette Hill throws her husband Graham a party to celebrate his homecoming from America where he won the Indianapolis 500 in a Ford-Lola. Graham and his son Damon Hill—who would become a British Grand Prix winner, unlike his dad—push reigning World Formula 1 Champion Jim Clark around on a toy tractor.

Jackie Stewart: 1969, 1971

The man who taught James May how to drive fast won his home grand prix twice—both times in cars which were either French or built with French money. Not that it troubled the cool Scot, who would go on to extend both of his home wins into world championships.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images. Stewart is at the 2003 Canadian Grand Prix with fellow Brit Ozzy Osbourne. No pigeons were harmed in the taking of this photo.

James Hunt: 1977

A Silverstone race, it was a battle between party boy Hunt and his Austrian archnemesis Niki Lauda, who returned phoenix-like from the ashes of his fiery crash on the Nürburgring at the 1976 German Grand Prix.

While Hunt held off Lauda by over 18 seconds in front of his home crowd, he had no chance to defend his 1976 world title, which Lauda would win by a wide margin over Jody Scheckter.

This race also marked the Formula One debut of the turbocharged engine, at this point a comically inept device campaigned by Renault, which would over a few short years come to rule the sport.

Photo Credit: Allsport UK/ALLSPORT. All smiles is Mrs. Hunt, three years before James’s home win. Note Hunt’s totally rock and roll breast patch.

John Watson: 1981

Watson was an F1 driver who later became a sports car racer and a broadcast commentator. His win at Silverstone was the second one of his career. He would win three more GP's before moving on to sports cars.

It was the car he drove which marks this race for history: Watson’s McLaren MP4/1 was the first F1 racer made of carbon fiber. Watson drove the plastic tub to its first victory. The material would take over aluminum for the construction of racing cars in a few months.

Photo Credit: Tony Duffy/Getty Image

Nigel Mansell: 1986, 1987, 1991, 1992

While Colin Chapman watched Jim Clark die, it was the other way around with the mustachioed Mansell: it was only at his third year in F1 when Chapman dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 54. His relationship with Lotus’s new management soured after that and he moved on to Williams, then Ferrari—where he witnessed Enzo Ferrari die after selecting him as his last driver, in a motorsports career which spanned six decades.

Mansell would return to Williams to drive their high-tech active-everything cars. He won his fourth and last British Grand Prix with the Williams FW14B, one of the best F1 cars ever made, with which he claimed his only world championship.

Photo Credit: DOMINIQUE FAGET/AFP/Getty Images. The other guys pictured here having a killer time at the 1986 Portugese Grand Prix are Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet.

Damon Hill: 1994

His father Graham may be the more famous of the Hills, with his dapper mustache, his six wins at Monaco, his three Formula One world championships and his victories at the Indianapolis 500 and at Le Mans, but he never won the British Grand Prix.

Unlike his son Graham, who won at Silverstone and was then rammed by Michael Schumacher at the last race of the season, denying him the world championship.

Photo Credit: Pascal Rondeau/Allsport. Hill is in his Williams Renault before the Pacific Grand Prix at the TI circuit in Aida, Japan.

Johnny Herbert: 1995

Who’s Johnny Herbert? Why, he raced for a decade in Formula One and won three races, one of them at Silverstone, where duelling championship leaders Schumacher and Hill knocked each other out, allowing the Brit in his Benetton to slip by and claim victory.

Herbert was also on the team which drove the Mazda 787B at Le Mans in 1991, a shrikeing Day-Glo quad-rotor Wankel racer, which still holds the only Le Mans title for Felix Wankel’s wacky invention.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images. The person you are looking at instead of Johnny Herbert is British model Keeley Hazell.

David Coulthard: 1999, 2000

The man who is to jawbones what Jay Leno is to chins may not be remembered as much of a grand prix winner over his grand total of 15 years in Formula One, but he’s managed to take both Monaco and Silverstone twice. In both of his wins, he was sitting pretty in the sister car to Mika Häkkinen’s championship-winning McLaren.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images. Coulthard is showing his incredible mandible at the 2004 San Marino Grand Prix.

Lewis Hamilton: 2008

Last year’s race was a rain-soaked wacky waltz, notable for Felipe Massa’s numerous 360’s, a high speed track bunny and a beautiful, composed drive by McLaren’s Hamilton, who was yet to face what it’s like to race in an uncompetitive car.

The race was also a sign of things to come with Ross Brawn back in the game: in a snap decision, he outflanked the field on tire tactics to propel Rubens Barrichello to third place in that utter crap Honda My Earth Dream car—notable for always bringing up the rear—which they had already given up development on.

A year later, the tables have turned: Honda is out of Formula One, their 2009 car is powered by a Mercedes-Benz engine and is absolutely pulverizing the opposition. It is the clear favorite to win this year’s race, the last at Silverstone, with Barrichello’s teammate Jenson Button set to become the thirteenth Brit to win at home.

And there may never be a fourteenth, of course.

Photo Credit: Paul Gilham/Getty Images. Hamilton is at a press conference before this year’s British Grand Prix, with Jenson Button looking on.

You just know something’s amiss when you are greeted with FIA president Max Mosley’s very British grimace on Jalopnik as you boot up in the morning. Turns out “Formula 1 is finished,” as two-time world champion Fernando Alonso has described the current situation to the BBC.

The current situation is only slightly simpler than the internal politics of Afghanistan, with power-hungry old white men scheming behind closed doors. The only difference seems to be their lack of flowing beards and Stinger missiles—but then Max Mosley would make a great Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

What is the current situation, exactly? Most of the major teams have refused to accept Mosley’s scheme to turn Formula One into a two-tiered, budget regulated series, with teams who agree to run on an arbitrary budget set by Mosley getting access to slacker regulations: higher revving engines, more aggressive aerodynamics, the works. The teams have correctly argued that this runs against the very essence of Formula One: namely, that cars built to the same set of regulations–or formulae–race each other. Bunny rabbits may occasionally race against the cars, as seen at last year’s British Grand Prix, but they do not figure in the official results.

Mosley’s fear seems to be that current expenditures will drive major manufacturers out of the sport as car companies will not be willing to pay half a billion dollars a year for a vanity product in these financially bleak times. So far, the only manufacturer which has actually quit was Honda—but not before handing former team principal Ross Brawn the current season’s most dominant car, the BGP-001, campaigned with an 86% win rate thus far by Jenson Button.

Just to put Mosley’s budget cap in perspective: his suggested $65 million a year is exactly half as much as the amount paid a week ago by a Spanish football team for a single player. Great footballers have their price, even obnoxious bastards like Real Madrid’s latest pick Cristiano Ronaldo, but they certainly don’t require expensive, one-off machines made of carbon fiber and titanium to do their thing.

It’s all very sad, really, but is perhaps an inevitable conclusion to the bullying and thuggery Max Mosley and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone have subjected Formula One to over the past decades. While many involved in F1 have become very rich in the meantime, the biggest money was made not by the people who actually go out there and race cars, but the very few who have brokered deals.

It may be unavoidable or it may be a historical artifact dating back to the late 70s when the very same duo made Formula One into the global media juggernaut it currently is. But it has certainly not helped the sport’s long-term survival. Formula One at the moment is subject to rapid, arbitrary rule changes and it is increasingly raced on tracks worlds away from the sport’s historic and financial heartlands—Europe and North America.

The series began in 1950 at Silverstone, a converted airfield in postwar England which will host its last race this Sunday. The teams have until today evening to reach a last minute compromise. Otherwise, the cars on the grid on Sunday afternoon may take part in not just the last grand prix at Silverstone—but in the last grand prix of a Formula One with a future.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, DIMITRI KOCHKO/AFP/Getty Images, MAX NASH/AFP/Getty Images, SHAUN CURRY/AFP/Getty Images

Sir Francis has not had it easy. He has been in Formula One for an incredible four decades now, starting out with a second-hand Brabham chassis in 1969, and it wasn’t until ten years later that his team scored their first win, with Clay Regazzoni taking the 1979 British Grand Prix.

His grassroots operation has seen its share of deaths, beginning with Piers Courage at Zandvoort and ending with Ayrton Senna at Imola. Williams himself has been confined to a wheelchair for 23 years since he flipped his rental car in France and crashed his spine into the roof.

None of this, however, has managed to cloud his essential devotion to motor racing:

I love what I do. All the people at Williams love what they do. Patrick [Head, Williams engineering director], my partner, feels exactly the same — he just wants to go racing, winning. We’re very upset with ourselves because we haven’t done any real winning for a very long time. It’s now about 10 years or something. And it’s very embarrassing, but we have to live with that. It’s our own fault, nobody else’s. And we have to get the sun to shine again soon.

That sun may shine on a forlorn landscape: talks between the Formula One Teams Association and Max Mosley’s FIA have broken down a few hours ago, leaving only Force India in Formula One from the current grid, apart from Williams.

Whatever happens, Williams will be at the British Grand Prix this weekend, the stage of their first victory thirty years ago. Barring supreme weirdness, they are not likely to mark the occasion with another win. Brawn GP driver Jenson Button enters his home Grand Prix as the runaway favorite, after winning six of the season’s seven races thus far.

Still, consider the sheer enthusiasm of the man for noisy, fast machinery:

One of the biggest thrills of my life was I went to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona and I watched from 50 meters to the right side of the runway, the flight of four F-15c’s at takeoff, two by two, the second just five seconds after the first, and the noise! The ground shook! I was a guest of a colonel in the air force. I said, ‘Will you be using reheat?’ — which you call afterburn — and he said, ‘No, but if you want it, I can tell them.’ And I’ve never forgotten it. The noise! The power! And they got to the end and they went whoosh, it was almost vertical. Fantastic. Speed and noise.

Source: The New York Times, Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images, Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

The Hamilton portrait, which was paid for by McLaren’s fuel partner ExxonMobil, is far from being the only such piece in Macaluso’s extensive portfolio. While most of his motor oil paintings are abstractions, there are two portraits of another man of African ancestry who has gone where no man of his lineage has gone before: President Barack Obama.

Macaluso is clearly a fan of dead dinosaurs, as evidenced by this quote from the ExxonMobil press release:

Painting with the Mobil 1 used motor oil offered a wide range of tones and was obviously a very refined product from its texture. It was extremely smooth and very particle-rich, with all the engine dirt in perpetual suspension, making for a great painting medium.

If he ever decides to branch off into rock music, “Engine Dirt in Perpetual Suspension” would be one hell of a band name.

The depictee himself was rather pleased, saying he was “very impressed with the oil painting.”

The painting will have its first public outing at a VIP event at the British Grand Prix, where Hamilton will arrive as the defending champion. Although given the pace of his McLaren this season, he will need nothing short of divine intervention to retain that distinction at the very last Grand Prix race held at Silverstone.

Where another Brit will arrive as the clear favorite—Brawn GP driver Jenson Button.

Image Credit: David Macaluso, ExxonMobil

The horizon already looked gloomy when the field set off to run the planned 56 laps of the Malaysian Grand Prix. Fat tropical rainclouds darkened the horizon, as Jenson Button on the pole was passed by a nimble Nico Rosberg of Williams for the lead. But the real star of the start was sneaky Fernando Alonso in a heavily fueled Renault, who used his Kers button—the gizmo that stores braking energy as a readily available power pop—to great effect and zoomed throught the field up to third. Alonso then proceeded to hold up most of the field behind him in scenes reminiscent of trains on a railroad track.

The bunch around Alonso provided for gorgeous, fluid racing in the first dozen laps. Cars hugged each other with inches to spare, then a single mistake by Alonso allowed Räikkönen in his Ferrari to rocket by. He was replaced on Alonso’s heels by Red Bull’s Mark Webber—nicely recovered from his balls-freezing time in the cryo chamber—who got into a great game of cat and mouse with the double World Champion, before Alonso solidified his position in fifth. It was motor racing at its most beautiful.

Lap 18 saw a botched move by Ferrari, as they recalled Kimi Räikkönen into the pits to shoe him in full wets—with still no rain on the circuit, only those looming thunderclouds on the horizon. Räikkönen slowed down and dropped to the back of the field.

A few laps later, the rain did start, and the field dashed for the pits—except for a hypersonic Jenson Button, still on slicks with a very light load of fuel. Over two flying laps, he built up enough of a lead to pit for intermediates and come in to lead the race. Another brilliant move by Ross Brawn, similar to but the inverse of his tactics at last year’s British Grand Prix, where he put Barrichello on full wets before the rain really started to fall, which allowed the Brazilian in his abysmal Honda to zoom through the field and take third.

The zooming this time was done by Toyota’s Timo Glock, who was given a set of intermediates for a track half dry and half soaking. Glock was closing in on Button at something like 8 seconds a lap, going through the field like butter.

The rain eased up for a few laps at this point, and Button came into the pits for the fourth time to change for intermediates. He immediately charged up on Timo Glock—who had changed to full wets—and passed him for the lead.

And it was at this point that the rain clouds went medieval. Cars began aquaplaning and the safety car was followed very shortly by a red flag. The drivers pulled into the grid with rain falling in buckets as everyone ran for their lives. The cars were soon swarmed by team personnel in umbrellas, as a nervous Felipe Massa of Ferrari radioed for a new visor to replace his useless, fogged-in one, and was promptly told “Felipe baby, stay cool”.

This he did, along with the rest of the field. Grabbing snacks and drinks, they waited for the rain to stop to no avail. As a Grand Prix has to conclude within 2 hours of its start, all eyes were on the clock. The rain showed signs of abating, and the drivers got back to their cars and then time ran out and a scruffy Button was told that he had just won back-to-back Grands Prix, with Nick Heidfeld in 2nd and Tim Glock in 3rd place. Trulli was 4th, Button’s teammate Rubens Barrichello 5th, with Webber, Hamilton and Rosberg rounding out the points.

Because the race was stopped with less than 75% of the total distance covered, drivers will get half points, similar to what had happened at the 1984 Monaco Grand Prix—scene of a young Ayrton Senna flexing his rain muscles—where Alain Prost took 4.5 points and ended up losing the World Championship to Niki Lauda by half a point.

For the 70 minutes that the cars were out there racing, it was magnificent stuff. The Brawns are great but not boringly dominant, and a number of young teams are lapping at their heels. The season continues on April 19 in Shanghai.

If the 15 remaining races are half as good as these first two were, 2009 will definitely be a year to remember.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, Paul Gilham/Getty Images, NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images

In addition to the exhibition lap, the Toyota cars will adopt special Dark Knight paint schemes, while the Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock's overalls will be made to look like Batsuits (no word on nipples). The Bat-Pod will also be in attendance, but possible due to its extremely un-motorcycle-like handling characteristics, it won't be ridden.

PRESS RELEASE

Panasonic Toyota Racing joins forces with The Dark Knight at Silverstone

Thanks to a partnership between Panasonic Toyota Racing and Warner Bros. Pictures, Hollywood is coming to Silverstone for the British Grand Prix weekend to celebrate the release of the event movie of the summer: The Dark Knight.

The much-anticipated film, which releases in cinemas across the UK on 25 July, is the follow up to the 2005 action hit Batman Begins. The Dark Knight reunites director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale, who again portrays the dual role of Bruce Wayne/Batman.

To mark the release of The Dark Knight, Panasonic Toyota Racing will adopt a new look at Silverstone this weekend. The Dark Knight artwork will feature on the TF108s and the overalls of Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock, as well as the team's motor home.

But The Dark Knight theme does not stop there. On show at Silverstone will be the iconic Batmobile and Bat-Pod vehicles, while some very special media events will bring the excitement of The Dark Knight to life.

The Batmobile will even take to the Silverstone track on Thursday evening for a demonstration run alongside the TF108, followed by some unique photo opportunities with the Bat-Pod and Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock.