After kicking the collective asses of Felipe Massa, Rubens Barrichello, Nelson Piquet and a bunch of other famous drivers, Schumacher was asked about his rumored return to F1 as Nico Rossberg's teammate at Mercedes. Refusing to refute the story, Schumi said, "Who knows? Anything can happen....I don't have any problems with my neck. It's 100 per cent."

Worried that the 40-year-old might not have what it takes to deliver the goods in F1? Check out this video for proof of his driving chops.
[via 0-60]

This is the start of a new semi-regular Jalopnik series we're calling "Auto-Erotic Design." We give you our favorite shot of a car part, you try to one-up us in the comments below by posting your favorite shot. To see if you can beat the hot automotive sex we've dropped atop the post we'll run our reader responses as a gallery the next day. (Note to starred commenters: Help us out by promoting the threads with pictures!)

First up, we're choosing foot pedals. You think you've got some hotter pedals than what McLaren's got? Prove it and show us the sexy below.

[via ColdTrackDays, Richard Thompson]

It’s probably been Formula One’s worst kept secret these past few weeks, but it’s official now: after Rubens Barrichello’s leave for Williams and Brawn GP’s sale to Mercedes-Benz, Jenson Button has left the team to join McLaren for the 2010 Formula One season.

The legend of Brawn GP, with its single season in Formula One which has resulted in both the drivers’ and the constructors’ title, is thus complete.

As for Button’s new job, consider that Lewis Hamilton has consumed two teammates over the course of but three seasons: Heikki Kovalainen over 2008–2009 and double world champion Fernando Alonso in 2007. Both left McLaren in a very unhappy state of mind.

Hamilton is McLaren’s home-grown talent, nurtured since age 13, and while he is undoubtedly scary fast in a well-sorted car, he is also a vain man known for public temper tantrums whenever things go even slightly wrong. Like in the first half of the 2009 season, when McLaren had the misfortune to produce a dog of a racing car.

So while the BBC is calling the Button–Hamilton lineup a “dream team at McLaren,” with both of them British and both of them world champions, expect rifts. McLaren already has a “one driver” and his name is Lewis Hamilton.

Photo Credit: FRED DUFOUR/Getty Images, Mark Thompson/Getty Images

The laconic Finn’s premature exit was the talk of the sport for most of the year, especially after Ferrari’s 2009 car turned out to be quite a dud. Nowhere was Räikkönen’s indifference more stark than at the Malaysian Grand Prix, where during a break forced by torrential rain, he wandered about the pits with a bar of ice cream instead of remaining by his racing car:

Räikkönen was forced to leave Ferrari at the end of the season to make way for Fernando Alonso. There were talks with Toyota, hampered by Räikkönen’s high price and ultimately by Toyota’s exit from Formula One, then there were talks with his former team McLaren, which fell through. One has to wonder whether Räikkönen’s exorbitant salary demands—rumored to be close to $50 million, very much not in synch with his performance over the last two seasons—were a deliberate move on his part to ease his exit from the sport.

Going where many Finn have gone before, Räikkönen is set to continue his career in rallying. He has, in fact, already debuted in the World Rally Championship: Räikkönen drove a Super 2000 class Fiat Grande Punto Abarth for Tommi Mäkinen Racing at this year’s Rally Finland in August.

He leaves the sport after nine seasons, with occasional displays of devastating speed and a lucky world championship in 2007, when he exploited the rivalry between McLaren’s Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton and the hubris of the latter to beat both at the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix, claiming the title which had eluded him at McLaren.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images, Massimo Bettiol/Getty Images

Mercedes-Benz have been racing cars for over a century now, but since 1955, they have been doing it in disguise: as AMG, as Sauber, as McLaren.

This is set to chance in 2010: Brawn GP will become Mercedes-Benz’s factory team as Mercedes Grand Prix.

The new team, headed by Ross Brawn, will have quite a history to match. The most famous Mercedes-Benz racing cars are the Silver Arrows, named for their unpainted aluminum bodies: two groups of cars which competed in the 30s and the 50s and won most of the races they were entered in.

Here they are.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: W25
Year: 1934–1936
Engine: 3.3-liter straight-8
Power: 354 HP
Claim to fame: The first Silver Arrow

The rise of Mercedes-Benz’s grand prix team paralleled the Nazis’ ascent to power in Germany. After Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, he was approached by a Daimler-Benz executive and they agreed to a deal where the German state would sponsor the Mercedes-Benz racing team, which was then in deep financial trouble. There is dispute about the precise amount of sponsorship, with various sources pegging it between 10% and 40% of expenses.

The W25 was created for the 750-kilo formula: cars could weigh no more than 1650 pounds. It is not precisely clear how they lost their German racing white to became silver, but the most widely quoted story is that team manager Alfred Neubauer and driver Manfred von Brauchitsch devised the scheme to strip the car of its paint to squeeze it below weight regulations.

In any case, after early teething problems were overcome, it was a very successful car, winning many races in 1934 and taking the 1935 European Grand Prix Championship for Rudolf Caracciola. In its last year, it was eclipsed by Auto Union’s Type C, driven by Bernd Rosemeyer.

Like every Mercedes-Benz Silver Arrow which would follow, the W25 had a supercharged engine which emitted a characteristic whistle under acceleration. If you’re interested, Jenson Button drove it at this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed, where I captured the whistling on video.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: W125
Year: 1937
Engine: 5.6-liter straight-8
Power: 646 HP (← not a typo)
Claim to fame: Most powerful Grand Prix for decades

The W125 was supposed to be a stopgap for the 1937 season, before new rules for 1938 would come into effect, but what a stopgap it’s turned out to be! Developed by young engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut, who could drive it on the Nürburgring at race speeds, it rectified the W25’s handling problems and received an engine which would not be matched for power until Can-Am cars became truly mad, a good three decades later.

Rudolf Caracciola used the W125 to retake his European Grand Prix Championship title from Bernd Rosemeyer. As displacement rules changed for 1938, the car was retired after its single successful season.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: W125 Streamliner
Year: 1937
Engine: 5.6-liter straight-8
Power: 646 HP
Claim to fame: Won fastest ever Grand Prix race

This was a version of the W125 entered for the ludicrous AVUS race, held on two straight stretches of Autobahn with banked corners to connect them. The cars reached speeds of 240 MPH on the straights. Hermann Lang, who won the race in the car pictured, described the sensation as more akin to airplane acrobatics than auto racing.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: W125 Rekordwagen
Year: 1938
Engine: 5.5-liter V12
Power: 736 HP
Claim to fame: Holds land speed record on public road

Mercedes-Benz also used the W125 to run speed records attempts on Germany’s newly built Autobahns. On a January morning in 1938, Rudolf Caracciola drove this W125 at 268 MPH on a measured mile between Frankfurt and Darmstadt. To this day, it remains the highest speed ever achieved on a public road. Caracciola would describe the experience of running under overpasses at such speeds as trying very hard to stick a piece of thread through an eye of a needle.

This image is also testament to the troubled relationship Mercedes-Benz has with its past, where great racing success happened to coincide with Nazi power. Look close and you’ll see a swastika airbrushed into moderate oblivion on the driver’s headrest.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: W154
Year: 1938–1939
Engine: 3-liter V12
Power: 425 HP
Claim to fame: Beat Auto Union

For 1938, Mercedes-Benz designed a brand-new car, in keeping with the new regulations, which limited displacement to three liters. The resulting W154 was a low-slung technological marvel, running on a mixture of methyl alcohol, nitrobenzene, acetone and sulfuric ether, a gallon of which would propel it for a mere 2.8 miles. Auto Union’s rival Type D was no match for it, and Rudolf Caracciola used the car to take his third and last European grand prix crown.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: W165
Year: 1939
Engine: 1.5-liter V8
Power: 254 HP
Claim to fame: Took revenge on sneaky Italians

In the 1920s and 1930s, Tripoli—the Libyan capital, then part of an Italian colony—was host to a glamorous grand prix with high prices. By colonial tradition, it was an Italian home race. Following Hermann Lang’s back-to-back wins in 1937 and 1938 for Mercedes-Benz, the Italians suddenly changed the rules to allow only 1.5-liter cars for the 1939 years—cars which Alfa Romeo and Maserati, as opposed to Mercedes-Benz, happened to possess.

With only 8 months to go, Mercedes-Benz had their work cut out for them. A skunk works was formed, which took the 3-liter W154 and downsized it for Tripoli, finishing the car just in time. Hermann Lang didn’t waste the opportunity and rounded out his hat trick of Tripoli titles to the Italians’ great irritation.

Four months later, Europe was at war and motor racing came to a halt.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: W196 Type Monza
Year: 1954
Engine: 2.5-liter straight-8
Power: 257 HP
Claim to fame: Returned Mercedes-Benz to Grand Prix racing in high style

Barely a decade after World War Two, the Mercedes-Benz team was back in action. Team manager Alfred Neubauer and engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut returned to lead a new team, luring Maserati’s world champion Juan Manuel Fangio to drive their new car, the W196. The team debuted at the 1954 French Grand Prix, where they proceeded to take a 1–2 win.

The streamlined body was good for high-speed tracks like Rheims and Monza but unsuitable for most other circuits. After two races, Mercedes-Benz dropped the streamliner and introduced an open wheel version of the W196 which was used for the rest of their time in Formula One.

Photo Credit: Louis Klemantaski

Name: W196
Year: 1954–1955
Engine: 2.5-liter straight-8
Power: 257–290 HP
Claim to fame: Won back-to-back Formula One World Championships

The W196 was one of the most successful cars ever constructed for Formula One. It debuted and exited with a victory and won a total of 9 races between the 1954 French Grand Prix and the 1955 Italian Grand Prix. During that period, it was only beaten three times.

Of those nine wins, eight went to Juan Manuel Fangio and one to Stirling Moss.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: 300SLR
Year: 1955
Engine: 3-liter straight-8
Power: 310 HP
Claim to fame: Won World Sportscar Championship

You probably know this car already! The 300SLR was a two-seater version of the W196, with the engine enlarged to three liters. In 1955, Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson drove it to an incredible victory at the Mille Miglia, averaging 100 MPH over one thousand miles of Italian public road, a record which still stands.

The 300SLR also won the RAC Tourist Trophy and the Targa Florio, which was enough to beat Ferrari for the 1955 World Sportscar Championship title.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: 300SLR, Le Mans version
Year: 1955
Engine: 3-liter straight-8
Power: 310 HP
Claim to fame: Killed 85 people, caused Mercedes-Benz to withdraw from motorsports

On June 11, 1955, it went all wrong for Mercedes-Benz. Running a customized high speed version of the 300SLR in Le Mans against the Jaguar D-Types, Pierre Levegh’s 300SLR catapulted into the air and slammed headfirst into a wall of spectators, killing scores. The car was made of a highly flammable magnesium alloy called Elektron, which did not help things. The burned-out husk you see on the picture is what remained of Levegh’s car.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Name: 300SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé
Year: 1955
Engine: 3-liter straight-8
Power: 310 HP
Claim to fame: Fastest road car of the 1950s

Had Mercedes-Benz not retired at the end of the 1955 season, this is the car they would have raced at Le Mans. A coupé version of the 300SLR race car, it was instead used by Rudolf Uhlenhaut as his daily driver. The car could run at 170 MPH on the public road, which Uhlenhaut, a driver of almost Formula One quality, exploited to the last drop.

As the 300SLR itself was based on the W196 Formula One car, a way to imagine its devastating speed would be to install a canopy on Jenson Button’s championship-winning BGP–001 and use it as a daily driver.

New Formula One cars are usually introduced in January, so expect the next Silver Arrow to crop up sometime in January 2010. We’ll be here to tell you all about it.

Photo Credit: Mercedes-Benz

Lego Stig is part of a grand series of racing minifigs, most of them based on Formula One drivers:

Photo Credit: Phil Birkitt

[DailyMail]

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The conflagration which enveloped Ferrari’s Ice Cream Man was fuelled by racing fuel from his fellow Finn Heikki Kovalainen’s McLaren.

Kovalainen left the pits prematurely, dragging a piece of refuelling hose behind his car, which sprayed fuel as he made his way down the pitlane. The spray flashed up for an instant when it touched Räikkönen’s hot Ferrari. With his characteristic cool, he drove on immediately after the flames had died down.

After the race, McLaren was fined $50,000 for dangerous conduct, while Kovalainen received a 25-second penatly, which dropped him from 9th to 12th position in the final classification (both outside the points).

Jenson Button, talking to the BBC after the race, was a bit more blunt in his description: “Kobayashi is absolutely crazy, very aggressive.”

The 23-year-old Japanese driver has been Toyota’s F1 test driver for the past two seasons but apart from two rounds of free practice at this year’s Japanese Grand Prix, he has never raced.

All that changed when Toyota’s regular driver Timo Glock did not recover from a leg injury in time for the Interlagos showdown. Starting from 11th place on the grid, Kobayashi drove with such brazenness and abandon that one of the commentators on the Hungarian broadcast I was watching remarked that he had never seen anybody drive a Toyota F1 car with such gusto.

Said lack of gusto is a major headache for Toyota, who have been running a well-financed team in F1 for eight seasons without a single win in 138 races. Their drivers have always been a bit…well, a bit like the Toyotas you purchase for daily driving. No major problems to complain about at all—but certainly nothing remarkable about them either.

And you just cannot win in Formula One without remarkable drivers who border on absolute craziness. While some of what Kobayashi was doing, especially his back-to-back overtaking battle with eventual world champion Jenson Button, was on the far edge of the rulebook, one thing is for certain: he is the kind of driver Toyota needs.

Even if the very expensive Kimi Räikkönen ends up slipping from their grip for 2010, Toyota could do worse than install Kobayashi in either Trulli’s or Glock’s permanent seat. Now that they have at last learned how to build a consistently fast car, all they need is a driver with that extra determination to stick his car on the racing line.

Whether that racing line happens to be occupied or not.

Photo Credit: TORU YAMANAKA/AFP/Getty Images, Clive Mason/Getty Images, Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Please note that like all videos depicting recent Formula One races, the one embedded above showing Kobayashi battling Button at the Brazilian Grand Prix can disappear at whim. F1 employs a number of trigger-happy copyright lawyers.

Although far from finished, the F1 racer's been fitted with newly mandated skinnier front tires and a bigger gas tank and it's just finished wind tunnel testing.

The team at Lotus got a late start on their entry and as such are working overtime to complete the car by February 2010 for early testing in March. It's been validated in the wind tunnel, but the parts actually need to be built, complete with all machining, carbon fiber work and assembly. The Lotus will be powered by a Cosworth engine and an Xtrac transmission. [Automobile]

At first glance, it looks like a small Datsun, an SP310 Fairlady for instance, but the details don’t add up. There is also this peculiar badge:

And a blurred model name on the quarter panel:

The badge would make you think Prince Motor Company, the guys who made the original Skyline which lives on as the Nissan GT–R, but—as far as I know—Prince never made a small roadster.

What makes the whole situation even more baffling is that I ran this photo by my friend Zsolt Csikós, who is a living and breathing encyclopedia of old Japanese cars, and even he came up blank. And when the guy who, roused from his sleep, can tell you year-by-year changes on fourty-year-old non-exotic cars comes up blank, you know you’re in trouble.

Unfortunately, the embedded metadata offers no clue:

SUZUKA, JAPAN - OCTOBER 04: Kazuki Nakajima of Japan and Williams rides in a vintage car during the drivers parade before the Japanese Formula One Grand Prix at Suzuka Circuit on October 4, 2009 in Suzuka, Japan. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

So it’s up to you now, expert morphologists of a bygone Japan: what the hell was Kazuki riding in before he brought his Williams home to a not particularly shiny 15th place?

Update: Jim–Bob and Graverobber to the rescue! It’s a Toyota Publica, pronounced paprika.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Poor Nelsinho! Not only did he have to drive under the shadow of a famous father and suffer the intrigues of an unhinged Flavio Briatore, someone has now assembled an unflattering compilation of his short career in Formula One:

While making a crash-laden video of any racing driver is a walk in the park these days, it is a particularly easy job in the case of Piquet Jr., who never distinguished himself with particular car control or outright speed during his year and a half in Formula One.

Apart from a lucky second place at last year’s German grand prix, he failed to finish on any podium, going so far as not scoring a single point in the current season. After 28 races with the team, Renault dropped him after the Hungarian grand prix—in turn, Piquet set in motion the chain of events which led to the uncovering of a sordid episode of race-fixing and the end of Renault’s team principal Flavio Briatore and team engineer Pat Symonds.

So what’s next for the young Brazilian? Perhaps NASCAR: he is set to test a Toyota Tundra for Red Horse Racing next Monday at Rockingham Speedway in North Carolina. A close reading of his Twitter feed will perchance also reveal how to say YEEHAW! in Brazilian Portuguese.

Photo Credit: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images, Elsa/Getty Images for NASCAR, Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

The tall, aggressive Pole has had a bummer of a 2009 season, culminating with BMW’s announcement that they were leaving Formula One at the end of the year.

Driving the unimpressive BMW Sauber F1.09, Kubica’s closest chance for victory was at the season’s first race in Melbourne, where he was gaining hard on Jenson Button, only to get tangled up with Sebastian Vettel and crash out of the race with three laps to go:

Compare this with his seven podium finishes last year, including his sole win thus far at the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix.

Renault is remaking itself after the race fixing scandal which has cost team principal Flavio Briatore his career in F1. They have yet to announce Kubica’s driving mate for 2010: Romain Grosjean, who replaced Nelsinho Piquet in the middle of the season, has not yet been confirmed to stay on.

According to sources, Kubica is already training for his new job by consuming vast quantities of omelette du fromage.

Source: BBC, Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Button went to Japan with a 15-point lead on his teammate Barrichello as Sebastian Vettel—very fast but prone to the errors of the young—looked increasingly less of a credible challenger. Twenty-five points behind with thirty to grab in three races, Red Bull’s driver faced an uphill battle.

He began his working weekend by setting pole on Saturday with a time of 1:32.160, 60 milliseconds clear of Toyota’s Jarno Trulli, with McLaren’s incumbent champion Lewis Hamilton a further 175 milliseconds behind.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The legs you are looking at belong to Timo Glock, Jarno Trulli’s teammate at Toyota, who finished second at the previous race in Singapore. He injured his left calf in a crash during practice and couldn’t drive in the race.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Vettel had the advantage of pole position, but could not afford to finish at anything worse than 4th to retain even a sliver of chance for this year’s title. Which would be no mean feat, as Vettel celebrated his 22nd birthday on July 3rd—if he became world champion, he would be by far the youngest champion the sport has ever seen.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Because he knows Jay Leno has a great many fast cars which he likes to drive at speed, Vettel performed a ritual transformation into The Chin as he put on his fire-retardant mask.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

And the race is on! As you can see in the lower right corner, Lewis Hamilton, driving the KERS-powered McLaren, pulled in dangerously close to Vettel from his position of 3rd on the grid. Vettel can thank Jarno Trulli, seen in his red and white Toyota on the left, for holding Hamilton slightly back. While Hamilton was at one point nosing ahead of Vettel, he was on the outside line, allowing Vettel to turn first into the first corner. This was to be a position he would never relinquish, not even for a single pitstop.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Proving how fast he is when he doesn’t have to deal with traffic, Vettel quickly built up an impressive lead as he was chased by Lewis Hamilton and Jarno Trulli.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Hamilton ran in second place for almost half of the race, having overtaking Trulli at the start, but he was never in a position to challenge for the lead.

Then came his first pitstop. McLaren threw down the gauntlet with a scorcher of a tire change and refueling at 6.7 seconds—with Jarno Trulli, running third, due for his own stop in the next lap.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Toyota rose to the occasion: they swapped out Trulli’s slicks and refueled him in 6.6 seconds. Combined with the time he gained on Hamilton during his last, fast lap out, this was enough of a margin to allow Trulli to return in front of Hamilton. The Toyota pit crew was absolutely overjoyed. Trulli would manage to hold on to his position to take the 11th podium of his 12-year career.

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Here’s Jenson Button, driving out of the points after a lackluster qualifying session and a poor start. Pure luck would return him to 8th place, worth a single point: a fight ahead of him between Adrian Sutil of Force India and Heikki Kovalainen of McLaren culminated in a spin, allowing Button to slip by. He finished at 8th, one place behind teammate Rubens Barrichello, who thus gained a point on him. Brawn GP would end the race needing half a point to claim the constructor’s championship.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Poor Mark Webber, already out of the challenge for the world title, had to start from the pitlane after a botched qualification and was already on his second or third pitstop by lap five. Red Bull Racing used the opportunity to recall him to the pits a number of times during the race to test various aerodynamic bits: you’ll remember that in this season, testing is not allowed outside of race weekends.

Red Bull did a splendid job. Running dead last in 17th place with two laps down on the rest of the field, Webber set the race’s fastest lap on lap 50 with a time of 1:32.569.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Just as things were becoming a tad boring, Bernie Ecclestone—sitting in his supervillain mansion on the island of Thule in the Southern Ocean—pressed the ACCIDENT button on his control panel. Toro Rosso’s 19-year-old Jaime Alguersuari promptly disintegrated an advertising board and stuck his car nose first into the tire barrier. The Spanish kid emerged just fine, but as the track was now littered with carbon fiber, it was time to fire up the 6.3-liter V8 in the AMG Benz safety car.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The race stewards performed with clockwork Japanese precision, but it still took them five laps to clear the track, chilling everyone’s tires. Fun was provided by safety car driver Bernd Mayländer, who let the big Benz rip, sending big gargles of V8 down the trackside microphones.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Nothing remained for the last few laps: Robert Kubica threatened Button for a while but then backed off, allowing him to grab his single point—and Vettel his full ten for the 4th win of his career. He was manic with joy. The photo above was preceded by one hell of a chest bump, captured by the cameraman to the right. If you watch the race on tape, keep an eye out for it!

Photo Credit: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

One of these days, racing drivers will have to abandon Dan Gurney’s great invention if they don’t want to end up cross-posted to our sister site of smut, Fleshbot.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Come to think of it again: too late. Call the San Fernando Valley—or better yet, Budapest!

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

The saddest man on the entire island of Honshu! In a repeat of last weekend’s performance, Toyota inched ever closed to its first win in Formula One. But similarly to Timo Glock’s second, Jarno Trulli could not claim victory. He was full of praise for his team and his injured teammate, a stark contrast with the ever aloof Lewis Hamilton, who blamed nothing but his car for his third place.

Sebastian Vettel is now 16 points down on Jenson Button with two races to go and a maximum of twenty points to gain. Two years ago, Kimi Räikkönen was down 17 points as Formula One went to its penultimate race in Shanghai—but two flawless victories and Lewis Hamilton’s rookie shakes made him world champion by one point over Hamilton and teammate Fernando Alonso.

Let’s see if Vettel can do the same. He’s got his work cut out for him: the next race will be on Barrichello’s home turf in Brazil on October 18th.

Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

Massa lost last year’s title fight in perhaps the most frustrating way imaginable, when on the very last lap of the season’s last race, Lewis Hamilton passed a struggling Timo Glock to finish fifth, gaining the single point he beat Massa with.

Three races earlier, Massa had been in the lead when his fellow Brazilian Nelsinho Piquet’s now-infamous staged accident bunched up the field behind the safety car, resulting in a dramatically reshuffled race from which Fernando Alonso emerged victorious while Massa came in at 13th, out of the points. Realizing that these were his only points lost due to conscious scheming, he’s lashed out at the lenient treatment Renault has received:

All of what happened was robbery. Regarding the race nothing has happened, the result stays the same. That’s not right. It changed the championship. I lost by one point…they just sent Briatore home. I don’t understand it and I don’t think it was right.

Historical revisionism, perhaps, as a Formula One season is by default laden with what-ifs. Still, it’s easy to understand his frustration. A year ago, Massa was driving a highly competitive car, fighting for the championship until the last corner of the last grand prix.

Since then, Formula One has become a mad shuffle, Ferrari’s 2009 car has proven to be a huge disappointment, new teams and young guns have emerged and matured and Massa himself took a giant spring to the head from Rubens Barrichello’s car, which nearly killed him and removed him from competition for the rest of this season.

While he is still a young driver at 28 and with a team that will surely bounce back, he is certainly no closer to winning his world championship than on that November day in São Paulo, where it slipped from his hands so cruelly, right in front of his home crowd.

Source: BBC, Photo Credit: Paul Gilham/Getty Images, Clive Mason/Getty Images

A year after this photo was taken, Lauda went on to win his first of three world titles. This was before he became an owner of airlines under both his names: first Lauda Air, then Niki.

Di Montezemolo managed the Scuderia for only a year before he ascended in the Fiat hierarchy, then returned to Ferrari after Enzo Ferrari’s death, only to ascend yet again and take over the entirety of Fiat after Umberto Agnelli’s death in 2004. He is also the founding president of the Formula One Teams Association.

Regazzoni’s best year in F1 was the very year this photo was taken, when he finished the world championship only three points behind winner Emerson Fittipaldi. Six years later, he was paralyzed from the waist down in a grievous accident, when he hit a wall at the 1980 United States Grand Prix West at 150 MPH.

Nothing, however, would stop the mustachioed Swiss from grabbing a minigun to play the character of Blain Cooper in Predator:

Photo Credit: Igor/Picasa

Defending champion Senna arrived in Japan needing a win to keep his title chances alive against teammate Alain Prost, with whom he had developed a fierce rivalry over the previous two years, driving McLaren’s dominant MP4/4 and MP4/5.

Photo Credit: Pascal Rondeau /Allsport

This is Senna’s qualifying lap, which would earn him pole with a time of 1:38.041. There is perhaps no better footage of Formula One racing to demonstrate the sheer speed involved. Television cameras distort and slow down the cars, while modern in-car video—recorded with a wide-angle lens from a vantage point high above the driver—renders the scene with a surreality more in common with videogames than racing.

Here, however, the speed is monstrous, staggering, our perception aided by a regular lens shoved right up against the driver and by a manic Senna, driving his V10-powered McLaren-Honda with fury. You get the sense that there is no single millisecond on his lap where you could control the jittery racer, driven absolutely at the limit.

For a comparison, here’s Alain Prost’s (left) qualifying lap side-by-side with Senna’s (right). Prost was no slouch, but he is simply demolished by Senna here. The finish line would see them 1.730 seconds apart—a difference of 1.8 percent, a huge margin at this level. Over the course of a grand prix, a difference like that will add up to almost a full lap.

In the race, Senna’s advantage would not hold up: Prost beat him off the line and developed a lead. Five laps before the end of the race—which, with Prost in the lead, would have meant Senna losing the world title—Senna made his move, but Prost cut him off. Neither of them would back down and their tangled McLarens came to a stop.

Photo Credit: TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images

While Prost got out of his car, Senna was push-started to rejoin the race, which he promptly won—only to get disqualified, handing the world championship for 1989 to Alain Prost, who left the team to join Ferrari for 1990.

A year later, they’re back in Suzuka for the 1990 Japanese Grand Prix. At the drivers’ press conference, Senna is still upset. He leaves the room after a barely veiled comment by Nelson Piquet.

Note: The video begins in Japanese but becomes English for the choice bits.

Senna would, of course, ram into Prost’s Ferrari right after the start of the 1990 race, taking them both out of the action yet again. This time, it was Senna who walked away with the championship.

Photo Credit: Allsport UK /Allsport

Ten years later, Senna’s scorching pole from 1989 remained an awesome feat. Watch this comparison with Michael Schumacher in 1999, who is driving Ferrari’s constructor’s champhionship-winning F399. Senna, five years dead at this point, is right up there with the German who would come to dominate Formula One in the coming years.

Felipe Massa, still recuperating from his head injury sustained at the Hungarian Grand Prix, will remain with Ferrari as Alonso’s teammate.

Giancarlo Fisichella, who joined Ferrari after a surprising second place finish for Force India at the Belgian Grand Prix, will remain for 2010 as the team’s reserve driver.

Räikkönen is rumored to return to his former team McLaren, where he will surely have a jolly time with Lewis Hamilton. You can just picture the Ice Cream Man being two driver to last year’s champion—well, to anybody.

Source: BBC, Photo Credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images

As a race, it was a weird combination of boring and fun, with some crashes adding sparkle to what was otherwise a procession. A resurgent Lewis Hamilton led from start to finish, followed by Toyota’s Timo Glock. Victory has eluded the Japanese team yet again, for the 136th time since their debut in Formula One in 2002.

Last year’s grand prix, the first such event in Singapore, was the scene of Renault’s staged crash for Nelsinho Piquet, which cost Renault team boss Flavio Briatore his career in motorsports. His ex-team, however, made it onto the podium courtesy of Fernando Alonso, who brought his R29 home in third place, the first podium finish for Renault this season.

Alonso and winner Hamilton—teammates and mortal enemies at McLaren for the 2007 season—provided for some high body language fun, as they could not conceal their mutual disgust neither in the pre-podium room nor on the podium itself. A bloody fight to the death with broken bottles of Mumm champagne was, for a long time, not out of the question.

The talented Mr. Vettel of Red Bull will have to wait until next year to seriously challenge for the title, as a number of rookie errors have contributed to his poor finish at 4th, effectively putting him out of the world championship race.

Meanwhile, Jenson Button of Brawn GP gained two points on teammate Rubens Barrichello with his 5th place finish. He now leads the championship with 84 points to Barrichello’s 69, with 30 more up for grabs in the remaining races. Even though he has not won a race since Vettel demolished him in his home race at Silverstone, Button will have a hard time losing the championship if he continues to finish well into the points.

Only three more races to go in perhaps the strangest Formula One season ever. Stay tuned for the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend at Suzuka.

The case for night races! Giancarlo Fisichella in his Ferrari is a wonderful sight in his Ferrari even if he threatened nobody for points.

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Even pitstops look cooler at night. Here’s eventual winner Lewis Hamilton being fuelled by his silver and red McLaren team.

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Quick, silly face, you’re in focus—not! Did you know that F1 babes are officially called grid girls? I love that.

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There is a painterly quality to this photograph taken just after the start of the race. Lewis Hamilton led from pole to finish.

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Contrary to her usual habit, Lewis Hamilton’s girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger did not spend every second on camera jumping up and down. Hamilton is just as perplexed as every connoisseur of the female form.

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Timo Glock in his Toyota, on his way to second place, living the Toyota Curse. Still, in spite of his bad luck, he is a man named after a German handgun.

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Famous people! In fact, a famous couple: Jean Todt is with his fiancée, former Miss Malaysia and Bond girl Michelle Yeoh.

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If you were a refueling hose, this is what you would see of a Formula One race. Spectacular—but I suspect rather repetitive after a while.

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Jenson Button is on his way to demonstrate how to win the Formula One world championship without winning a single race in the second half of the season.

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A happy Hamilton! Look how bubbly and used up his tires are after the race.

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Bursting with joy is Mr. Alonso after his first podium finish since last year’s Brazilian Grand Prix, isn’t he?

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Sebastian Vettel is obviously a future champion. All he needs to do now is not make silly mistakes. Then again, he’s 22—and I’ll just bet you can remember silly mistakes you’ve made at that age.

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Watch the gap between Hamilton and Alonso. Bosom buddies, aren’t they?

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