1. Since 1978, the man overseeing everything medical-related in F1 was Professor Sid Watkins, a graduate of the Liverpool University Medical School and Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary. A neurosurgeon, he is known as ‘The Prof’ and has largely been responsible for raising the safety standards in F1 to where they stand today.

2. The safety car was used for the first time at the Canadian GP in 1973. In a Porsche 914, the driver picked the wrong car as the leader, and this led to controversy with a number of protests and counter-protests being lodged.

3. The chequered flag always signals the end of a race – even if it’s waved at the wrong time, it still means the race has ended.

4. Enzo Ferrari started off by running Alfa Romeos in 1929, till 1938, but started his own team when Alfa Romeo took back control of the team. Thus, a legend was born.

5. The Lotus name dates back to 1958, and their claim to fame – among a number of innovations – is the fact that they were the first constructor to come up with a monocoque chassis in 1962, while others were still using tubular frames.

6. Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman brought a simple philosophy to F1 – ‘If you are not winning, you are not trying.’ He introduced the inclined driving position to F1.

7. The Lotus 25 was the result of Colin Chapman’s search for a way to reduce the frontal area. The skin of the car was the chassis, thus immediately making tubular frames redundant. It was a stiffer car and a variant of this car, the 33, shocked Americans by going to Indianapolis and thrashing the field.

8. Bruce McLaren formed the McLaren GP team in 1966, though there had been sports cars running under that name prior to 1966.

9. Ron Dennis, the successful McLaren team boss and mentor to Lewis Hamilton, was a mechanic at Cooper and Brabham. He used to work on Jack Brabham’s car. McLaren International was formed by merging his company, Project Four, with McLaren, thus giving rise to McLaren cars being called MP4/xx today.

10. The McLaren MP4/1 was the first all-carbon fibre design in F1, and in 1981 it became the first such car to win a GP by winning at the British GP.

11. The Williams team got into F1 in 1969 using a Brabham BT26 chassis with a Cosworth engine.

12. Frank Williams was a used car trader while he raced cars. His Williams team got their first win in 1979. In 1970, he saw his friend and driver Piers Courage killed racing at Zandvoort, Holland. In 1986, he was returning from a testing session at Paul Ricard in France when he had a crash that left him paralysed waist down, but that hasn’t stopped him from running his team even today.

13. Renault introduced turbocharging to Formula One in 1979.

14. The Renault RS01 was a game changer. It never won a race but it changed engine development practice by introducing turbocharging to F1. However throttle lag and unreliability caused a lot of problems, even though it had much more power (580bhp) than naturally aspirated engines (500bhp) of the time.

15. Clothes major Benetton got into F1 by buying the Toleman team, which was using a Brian Hart-designed engine in the car. The team’s first win came in 1986 when Gerhard Berger won in Mexico.

16. Bernie Ecclestone, architect of the Concorde Agreement, and probably the most important person in F1 today, was an F3 driver racing 500cc cars. Thereafter, between 1971 and 1988, he was the owner of the Brabham team.

17. When Bernie Ecclestone was still the owner of Brabham, his designer Gordon Murray came up with a revolutionary idea. Bernie had got a deal to use a bulky Alfa Romeo V12 engine in his car. Murray’s trick was to locate the radiator in a horizontal position with a big fan above it to draw cooling air across the radiator. However special ducts sucked air from under the car, thus forming a vacuum under it that gave the car much more grip. The BT46 became known as the ‘Fan Car’. Niki Lauda thrashed the field at Anderstorp, Sweden, to win easily – resulting in uproar and protests on safety grounds, because the BT46 was legally within the rules of construction. The FIA immediately banned the car, so it only ever raced that one time.

18. Ken Tyrrell also cut his teeth in 500cc F3 racing. A timber merchant, he entered Jackie Stewart and Jacky Ickx in F3 and F2 respectively, got into F1 in 1968, and won the title in 1969. Tyrrell was also known for being extremely secretive about his teams’ innovations – no one had any inclination of his extremely radical 1976 car till the cover was lifted.

19. In 1976, the Tyrrell P34 had six wheels instead of four. The idea was to have four small front wheels and reduce the frontal area for less wind resistance. The car had superb grip and superlative turn-in ability. Tyrrell managed to get third position in the constructors Championship behind Ferrari and McLaren. Both March and Williams copied the idea, but they were never able to develop their cars to a racing level in time, and the design was later banned.

20. The eighties gave rise to a new word in F1 – composites. Composites are an amalgam of materials like fiberglass and resin or aluminium and Balsa wood or carbon-fibre and Kevlar, bonded by heat treating phenolic resins and adhesives.

21. Thanks to a Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli who developed the theory, F1 cars have been using ground effects to help them get around corners much faster than normal cars.

22. Circuits that differentiated men from the boys were the Nuerburgring, Spa-Francorchamps, Monza and Monaco. If Spa has unpredictable weather, as well as La Source, the Bus Stop chicane, and, of course, Eau Rouge, Nuerburgring has its length of 14-plus miles, and corners like the Karussel and Flugplatz, Monza has Lesmo 1, Lesmo 2, and the Parabolica, while Monaco has its street circuit, as well as Ste Devote, the Station Hairpin, and the only hi-speed tunnel in F1.

23. The early US GPs were never very popular with Americans thanks to local NASCAR and Indycar racing being far more popular. It is said that during the US GP at Phoenix (1989, 1990 & 1991), there was a bigger crowd at a local ostrich race than at the
F1 track.

24. The first close finish in F1 was in Reims, France in 1954 when the gap between first and second place was just 0.1 seconds. The following year in the British GP at Aintree, the gap was 0.2seconds which was also the gap in 1961 at Reims, again. The most spectacular finish though was Jackie Stewart’s win at the 1969 Italian GP at Monza where the gap was 0.008sec, and had four cars battling for the win at the finish line.

25. When Mercedes came into F1, albeit briefly, in the fifties, they came very well prepared. The W196 was designed by Rudolf Uhlenlaut and it had a streamlined body, making it the first car to have been designed with aerodynamics in mind. It was unique in the way the engine was mounted, and also had innovations like desmodromic valve gear, as well as fuel injection.

26. Controversy is part and parcel of F1 today, but the first time it happened was at Monza in 1960. The little rear-engined Coopers had outclassed the field through the year, mostly due to their handling abilities. However, at Monza, the organizers decided to ‘help’ the home team by switching from the road course to the full circuit, which featured high-speed, but bumpy, banked corners where handling advantages would be negated. A boycott reduced the field to four Ferraris, two F2 Porsches, and a handful of privateers and home honour was upheld with Phil Hill winning ahead of Richie Ginther and Willy Mairesse in their red cars.

27. The Cooper T51 was the first mid-engined car to win an F1 World Championship. It taught constructors that having the engine at the rear allowed the driver to sit lower, there was no need for a propeller shaft, and the engine could be directly mated with the final drive thus reducing bulk.

28. The BRM H16 was a car that not only flattered to deceive, but also became the laughing stock of the paddock. On paper, the car was very impressive with designer Tony Rudd developing a 16-cylinder engine that theoretically would develop in excess of 600bhp. In actuality, it was a nightmare with never-ending problems presenting themselves one after another. Internal vibration (balancing) was a major issue, and the engine never developed the power expected of it.

29. Ever since Lotus introduced sponsorship in to F1, several alliances have been formed – dictating the livery of the cars. Some of the more memorable sponsors include Durex and the condom cars, Benetton, Parmalat (Italian dairy products), Yardley male toiletries, Seven-Up, Gitanes, JPS, Marlboro and Gold Leaf (cigarettes), Elf, Shell. Cigarettes have been driven out of sponsorship in F1 today, but not entirely.

30. If the ability to purchase a Rolls-Royce is any indication of earning capacity evolving in F1, according to Richard Williams, an automotive writer and author, Stirling Moss could have purchased 6 in 1961, James Hunt could have purchased 7 in 1976, and way back in 1996, Michael Schumacher could have purchased 170 – all thanks to ever-increasing sponsorship in F1!