Although the official word from Ferrari and McLaren is that Massa and Hamilton are under contract 2012 and that Webber is very close to signing an extension at Red Bull. None of these team statements are going to stop what could turn out to be one of the most interesting games of driver musical chairs for a number of years.

Just like twelve months ago, Mark Webber is playing down his lack of a contract with Red Bull. Coupled with the new deal penned by his team mate these rumours have gained momentum over the past weeks. With talk of possible contract talks with Renault, Webber now in his sixth year with Red Bull has been comprehensively beaten by Vettel this year. With ongoing doubts about the fitness of Robert Kubica, we could see both Webber and Renault moving quickly to sign a deal.

Who would like to see Vettel and Hamilton together at Red Bull? Yes? Me too! Again these rumours won’t subside after Lewis was seen spending time in the Bed Bull motor home last month. This would be a tremendous coup for the Milton Keynes based team and cementing their place in the elite band of Formula 1 teams.

If this was to happen then who would be up for filling Hamilton’s shoes at McLaren?  Today McLaren played host to the FOTA fans forum, the two drivers in attendance was Lewis and Kamui Kobayashi. During the Q and A Kamui said he’d love to drive for Mclaren, given the fact that he’s one of the hottest young talents in Formula 1, maybe he had a sneaky seat fitting while he was there?

The annual driver rumour mill wouldn’t be complete without someone replacing Felipe Massa at Ferrari. It must be like water off of a ducks back now for the 2008 runner up. The official word from Ferrari is that he has one more year on his contract and is going nowhere! So that’s that then, right? Kimi Raikkonen had a year left to run on his contract when the prancing horse team dumped him at the end of the 2009 season so it would be no surprise to me if the same fate awaited Massa come November.

Ferrari has a raft of junior drivers, first in line is Frenchman Jules Bianchi. He is dovetailing his Ferrari duties with a drive in the GP2 feeder series for the Lotus ART team. Worryingly for Ferrari, this year to date he has only produced two points finishes and lies 15th in the standings. They may have to look else where for a replacement, Sergio  Perez’s name has been touted around the paddock in recent week, He is impressing many in his first year in F1 showing once again Peter Sauber’s eye for a talented driver.

Gilles Villeneuve was a man with an exceptional driving talent, he was a fierce racer with a flamboyant driving style. He knew the importance of beating his team mate. “I think I’ve proved that in equal cars, if I want someone to stay behind me….well, I think he stay’s behind!” In the 1979 French Grand Prix at Dijon, Rene Arnoux’s Renault must have been slightly better than the Ferrari as the two of them swapped places time and time again in the closing laps, Villeneuve edged Arnoux to finish second, not that this was of much consolation to him. “Finishing second is the first person to lose”. Arnoux on the other hand seemed much happier with his third place finish, in fact he seemed a little awestruck after the race. “I knew I’d been beaten by the best driver in the world”. Not that Derek Warwick would take any notice of what Arnoux thought! “He’s a Bloody Idiot. Always was and always will be!”

Ayrton Senna definitely had the same attitude to Gilles on coming second, in one of most famous quote he said ”Winning is like a drug…I can’t settle for second or third in no circumstances whatsoever”. His uncompromising attitude on the track won him an army of fans world wide, his ruthless driving wasn’t appreciated by all the other drivers, especially Prost (see part one). Gerhard Berger replaces Prost at McLaren for the start of the 1989 season, there he witnessed first hand the drive and determination of his team mate “He would be driving a car which on paper, was a second a lap slower than the opposition. And you knew at that moment, that you could not beat the opposition .Ninety nine percent of the drivers would accept this and say: ‘well next week we will have a new engine and we will be there.’ “For Aryton of course , it wasn’t like that at all He would think I have to be quickest, and he would do it. He was’nt dreaming. He just did it.”

Mika Hakkinen also drove along side Senna at McLaren in 1993 when he replaced the hapless Michael Andretti. ”With Senna,I learned how things should be done…With Mansell I learned how things mustn’t be done” (Not much love for ‘out Nige’ in these quotes!)

This is perhaps my personal favourite quote from Ayrton “Racing, competing, it`s in my blood. It`s part of me, it`s part of my life; I have been doing it all my life and it stands out above everything else”. It’s says everything about him for me.

One last thought from Enzo Ferrari “Aerodynamics is for those who cannot manufacture good engines.” does that include Exhaust blow diffusers then Enzo?

In these PR savvy days, the current breed of ‘for sure’ Formula 1 drivers rarely say anything to upset the team, team-mate or sponsors. There has been the odd exception to this rule in recent years, Rubens Barrichello’s Blah blah blah outburst after the 2009 German Grand Prix made more headlines than the race it’s self. Lewis Hamilton, a man who has been taught the media savvy ways since his karting days. At Monaco this year he proved that even he wasn’t immune to a headline grabbing out burst with “It’s an absolute frickin joke” and “Is it cos I is black”.

There was a time when comments like this were common place in the news paper columns, a time when the drivers told us exactly what the thought! Nelson Piquet (snr) wasn’t a man to mince his words, during an interview Nelson had this to about rival Nigel Mansell. “Mansells wife is very unattractive, Mansell is very strange, it seems that he likes to suffer. And I talk about double suffering! Not only is he married with that horrible woman, he built a statue of her in their house’s garden”. I don’t think he was that keen on the Monaco Grand Prix either, although he was more polite. ”Driving in Monte Carlo is like riding a bike in your house”.

If you want to find out where the drivers of the day got this from, you don’t have to look past former Brabham boss, Bernie Ecclestone. It’s hard to think that he now is the top man in Formula 1 when he comes up with comments like “Anyone who doesn’t speak English, isn’t worth speaking to”. Maybe Formula 1 domination isn’t enough for the pint-sized pensioner? In 2009 he was quoted in an interview praising dictatorships, Hitler in particular saying “He got things done!”

There is no love lost between Jo Siffert and Pedro Rodreguez. After an on track collision Jo said “The little Mexican bastard tried to kill me”. Prehaps the next race was at Brazil, where Chico Landi asked the drivers “are you here to race or crash?”

Alian Prost was well known for his rivalry with Ayrton Senna, one thing that really bothered the Frenchman was Ayrton’s one track mind. ”It would be a personal victory for me to convince Ayrton that there are more things in life rather than just racing” He wasn’t however so kind about his then team-mate’s aggressive driving style. “Ayrton Senna has a small problem, he thinks he can’t kill himself because he believes in God and I think that is very dangerous for other drivers.”

Who knows when we’ll be treated to the next pearler from one of today’s drivers? Driver turned commentator, David Coulthard obviously doesn’t “Racing drivers have balls, unfortunately non of them are crystal”.

Innovation has always been at the heart of Formula 1. In the early days Mercedes introduced the first fuel injection system, Vanwall were the first to use disc brakes and Lotus pioneered the monocoque chassis.

Over the last thirty years or so, there has been times when the teams hard word (and millions of pounds) have seemed to be wasted when their new technology has fallen foul of the powers that be!

In 1977 Team Lotus unveiled the first ground effect car, an innovation that was discovered almost by accident! The team was testing new wings in the wind tunnel when the engineers first noticed being sucked towards the floor by the faster moving air under the car. They attached cardboard ‘skirts’ to the scale model to increase the effect and ground effects was born. The following year the Lotus 79 took 10 wins (out of 16) giving the team a one two in the championship to Andretti and Peterson. In 1979 most team had their own skirts in place and ground effect cars dominated Formula 1 until it was outlawed in 1983 in a bid to curb ever-increasing cornering speeds.

One notable variation of ground effects came midway through 1978 when Brabham turned up for round eight in Sweden with the BT46B ‘fan car’. The Brabham’s Alfa Romeo engine was too bulky to run the standard type air channels under the car so to get around this they connected the fan to the real of the car. Connected to the throttle, the fan accelerated the airflow under the car sucking it down like the skirts on the Lotus. The team claimed that it was to aid cooling but it fast became apparent that this wasn’t the case as Piquet romped off into the distance, winning by over half a minute. This was the only outing for the fan car as rival teams protested after the race. The win was allowed to stand but the BT46B was outlawed.

After the banning of ground effects, Lotus started looking into active suspension for their next big performance gain. In 1982 the Lotus 91 became the first car to be equipped with active ride technology although the early systems were still ‘reactive’, involving driver input to change the hydraulic settings. Ayrton Senna gave an active suspension car its first win in 1987 before being shelved at the end of 1988.

It wouldn’t be seen again until the final round of the 1991 season in Adelaide on the William FW14B. The race was too wet for the team to gather any decent data but as winter testing got under way it became clear how good the car was. During 1992 and 1993 the FW14B and FW15 chalked up 20 wins out of 32 racers, delivering two drivers and constructors titles in the process. Active suspension was banned at the end of 1993 and is probably the most expensive item in the F1 dust bin.

Is the country your born in and brought up in have any relevance to whether you can succeed in F1? Yes of course it does! But not quite as you may think.

At the bottom of this list there is some countries that you may expect to see like South Africa (Jody Schecter 1979) and New Zealand (Denny Hulme, 1967) both taking a title apiece. Even Argentina has produced one champion (albeit 5 times champ Juan  Manuel Fangio)!

So you can see a pattern developing? Countries with no real motoring heritage/industry not really producing title after title like the likes of Italy, France and USA right? Well you’d be wrong, Italy in fact has won only three titles with two drivers (Alberto Ascari and Giuseppe Farina). The latest of which coming in 1953 a fact even harder to contemplate given the early days of the championship were dominated by Italian cars. Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo were all leading manufacturers in the early years of F1. A total of 101 Italian drivers have driven in F1.

France too, the birth place of Grand Prix racing and home of historic manufactures like Renault, Citroen and Peugeot has on contributed with ‘Le Professeur’ Alain Prost who has chipped in with four titles between 1985 and 1993.

Harry Schell was the first American to try their hand at F1. Since his debut at the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix 154 other Americans have followed in his footsteps (a total second only to the UK). Schell and 152 others failed to bring home the title, only Phil Hill and Mario Andretti were crowned world champions. Given the efforts of the last two to try (Michael Andretti and Scott Speed) it could be a fair few more years wait for the next one!

Until 1994 Germany wasn’t even on the list. Since then we have seen Michael Schumacher rack up 7 titles. He has only just been joined be ‘pointy finger’ Sebastian Vettel in 2010.

Looking towards the top end of the list, and also bucking the trend (the other way) is Finland and Brazil both have produced three champions apiece. Brazil has given us Emerson Fittipaldi (2) Nelson Piquet (3) and Ayrton Senna (3). Finland, not only is a country without a motor industry, it barely has any roads with out ice on! so it my surprise you that they have produced the same amount of world championship winning drivers as Brazil !(Keke Rosberg, Mika Hakkinen (2) and Kimi Raikkonen). Impressed? No? but what if I was to add that only EIGHT Finnish driver have ever taken part in F1. That’s quite a win ratio!

At the top of the tree, producing more than three times more title-winning drivers than Brazil and Finland is the Great Britain. Mike Hawthorne started the ball rolling in 1958, he has been followed by Graham Hill (2), Jim Clarke (2),  John Surtees,  Jackie Stewart (3), James Hunt, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill, Lewis Hamilton and the latest Jenson Button in 2009.

So really to sum up, it does matter where you come from but not for the reasons you may think! What do the Finnish and Brazilians  have that would be seem to be lacking in Italian drivers? and why doesn’t Ferrari give more opportunity to their home-grown drivers (Ivan Capelli was the last full-time, Italian driver for the prancing horse).

When Hiroshi Fushida took to the track for the 1975 Dutch Grand Prix weekend he was the first Japanese driver to compete in F1, I doubt may in the land of the raising sun thought they’d still be waiting for their first F1 victory 35 years later! The public love their Motorsports, their support for Ayrton Senna was almost as fanatical as his fans back in Brazil. There is a good infrastructure in place for young talent to be nurtured before heading off to the finishing schools in Europe. So why is Japan still waiting to stand on the top step of the podium?

Here’s a look at five of the most loved Japanese races since the mid Seventies up to the present day with an insight from former F1 racer Taki Inoue answering questions on the drivers. Taki raced in 18 Grand Prix during 1994 and 1995 for Simtec and Footwork.

Kozuyoshi Hoshino: Tagged “The fastest guy in Japan” Kozuyoshi started his racing career on bikes winning several National Motocross championships for Kawasaki by 1968. He was then persuaded by Nissan to try his hand on four wheels, it was a very good decision! In 1975 and 1977 he won the Japanese F2000 title, in 1978, he was crowned Japanese F2 champion before adding three F3000 Titles in ’87, ’90 and ’93. An impressive CV for any budding F1 driver surly? His F1 career spanned only two races, both at his home race for Heros Racing. He retired in 1976 after using up all his allocation of tyres and brought home his year old Kojima in eleventh the following year. I asked Taki why he thought Kozuyoshi didn’t get more opportunity in F1 given all his titles in other categories? TI “Very simple, he didn’t have any budget to carrying on F1 program. And also, he doesn’t like to go out Japan, which means typical Japanese”.

Satoru Nakajima: Satoru was the first Japanese driver to have a career of any longevity, taking part in 80 race weekends (74 race starts) between 1987 and 1991. Satoru’s big break came in 1987 with Lotus thanks in no small part to the engine supply from Honda. At the tender age of 34 he was no spring chicken and Partnering the late, great Ayrton Senna  no one gave him much of a chance. Saturo’s highlights include scoring point’s in his second race (’87 San Marino GP) finishing sixth. A great 4th place finish and fastest lap in ’89 at Adelaide in the underpowered Lotus Judd was to be the highest placing for him. After two uneventful years with Tyrrell in ’90 and ’91, Satoru retired from F1 after the 1991 Australian Grand Prix. I asked Taki How good could he have been if he had got his chance earlier in his career? TI “The same thing to him. He didn’t have any budget to have done F1 program earlier. When Honda decided to come back F1 as an engine supplier, Honda believed Williams could accept Nakajima with Engine, but Williams said they need engine but they didn’t need driver. Honda immediately found out any team which Honda could supply engine with driver. This was a Lotus.”

Aguri Suzuki: A record breaker for good and bad reasons! He has the unenviable record of failing to pre-qualify for any of the 16 races in 1989 while driving for Zakspeed. His career peaked in 1990 with the Larrouse Lamborghini team.Two sixth place finishes in Britain and Spain were very good but they were eclipsed by a stunning third place finish at his home race at Suzuka. This was the first time a driver from Japan had stepped foot on the podium of a F1 race. For the first time, there was a belief the a Japanese driver could take a win.  The following years didn’t capitalise on this success, a string of DNF’s and DNQ’s were to follow in the next two years. Aguri injured his neck in a massive crash during practice for the 1995 Japanese Grand Prix and immediately announced his retirement from racing. Taki answered How much did that podium at Suzuka in 1990 mean to the Japanese public and aspiring F1 drivers like yourself? TI “No much. Because he didn’t drive Japanese manufacture engine when he finished 3^rd.”

Takuma Sato: With a hatrick of F3 titles in 1991 (British F3, Macau GP and Masters of F3) Takuma came into F1 with more Eastern promise (and backing from Honda) than any of his predecessors. 2002 saw Takuma given his chance at Jordan, his first points finish came at Sazuka at the end of the year with a fifth place finish. In 2003 he moved to BAR Honda as test driver, he got his chance to race in that years Japanese Grand Prix deputising for Jacques Villeneuve, bringing the car home in sixth position. A full-time race seat followed in 2004, a season the produced Taku’s best finish, third place at the US Grand Prix. That still to this day is only the second podium for a Japanese driver. Takuma will be best remembered for the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix. Driving for the hastily assembled Super Aguri team, driving year old Honda’s he managed to score the teams first points. A sixth place finish was news worthy enough but overtaking both Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari and defending world champion Fernado Alonso’s McLaren in the process had fans around the world on their feet. I asked Taki, Did the pressure of expectation weigh heavy on his shoulders and undermine his talent during his F1 career? TI “Well, he was a pure Honda boy. All budget was paid by Honda. I don’t think he felt any pressure on that point. But still Takuma fans became like a Takuma religion. It is very strange situation compared with the other driver.

Kamui Kobayashi: When Timo Glock injured his leg during qualifying for the 2009 Japanese Grand Prix, no one could have expected the performance this young driver from Amagasaki would produce standing in for him at the next race. The next race was Brazilian Grand Prix, Kamui drove a race far beyond his years keeping behind him non other than the champion in waiting Jenson Button. Button tried for several laps to get past Kamui whilst charging through from fourteenth on the grid and pulling off some stunning overtaking manoeuvres which have become his trademark. 2010 saw Kamuri score 32 points on his way to 12th in the championship. 2011 has seen points picked up in all races (both Saubers were disqualified in Australia after finishing in the points) with a career best fifth place at Monaco. Consistent finishes coupled with his flamboyant driving style has defiantly caught the attention of the bigger teams. He showed in Canada in the wet he’s a force given a more level playing field running in second until the circuit dried out. Surly the wait for a race winner from Japan is nearly over? TI “For sure, he has a talent to win the F1, but he really needs proper management system to get a potential seat in the future.”