Phew! Another year has rattled past quick-sharp. They never quite pan out how you expect, do they? 12 months ago, in the spirit of making resolutions for the new year, I published a ‘to do’ list for 2010. So, how did I do on the to-dos?

1) Attend more grands prix. For various reasons (hosting at Renault, working in other series, not being organised enough to sort accreditation in time, etc) I only went to one GP in 2009. Yes, the travel is expensive, but going to races and keeping busy during the weekend is the only way to properly keep up with what’s going on.

Ah. Er. Fail! And, humiliatingly, for many of the same reasons as 2009.

2) Watch Michael Schumacher in action at a big-balls corner, preferably during qualifying. Love him or hate him, MS is a fabulous sight on a hot lap.

Oh, the perils of building one resolution on another. Still, MS was a bit of a dud in 2010. If he does better next year, I will…

3) Read a Thomas Hardy novel. Mrs C suggests Jude the Obscure.

Success! Courtesy of a month’s booking at the Red Bulletin back in January, necessitating a train journey hither and thither to ‘that London’, this one went straight in the back of the net. Perhaps ill-advisedly I followed this notoriously grim and depressing novel with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead, a similarly gloomy read.

4) Learn how to do a bow tie. May just be a very useful life skill…

Fail, fail, fail. They say that the Queen can spot a clip-on bow tie from a mile off. Still, since hardly anyone from motorsport ever picks up a new year honour from HRH, I’ve got plenty of time to practice.

5) Comment on more blogs. It’s the polite thing to do.

Hmm. Qualified success.

6) Finish reading A Man In Full. This is a failed resolution from 2009 (in my defence, although I’ve had the book 10 years, I bought it in large-format hardback from remaindered stock and it isn’t very portable).

This is now a failed resolution from 2010 as well, but for the best of reasons: I haven’t had any long layoffs in which to sit down and read the wretched thing.

7) Deliver my second book on time.

Ahem. Well, the good news is that it’s finished and it looks great. Judge for yourselves in April 2011!

It’s a cliché to describe Brazil as a country of great contrasts, but like most clichés the description has earned its status by being true. São Paulo has a particularly grim reputation, and I vividly remember my first visit there. Like no other great metropolis on earth, with the possible exception of Los Angeles, São Paulo immediately impresses and imposes with its size and the relentless unpleasantness of its architecture as you approach it by car. As we bumped along the freeway in the back of an old Fiat taxi it just grew and grew. The traffic was absurd. Cyclists were riding against the flow in the tiny gap between the lane and the barrier of the central reservation. It was utterly chaotic.

If you believe everything you hear about São Paulo, you’d probably not leave the boot of your taxi. The reality is that it’s certainly grim in parts, but that the fear of crime grips the tourists more firmly than it does the locals. I had to attend a press event in a hotel about a mile up the road. Of course, I took a taxi. It took about an hour. At one point I peeked out from underneath my bulletproof camouflage blanket and saw someone cycling past with an iPod tucked into his belt and the distinctive white earbuds stuffed in his ears. He either had very good insurance or he wasn’t as paranoid about robbery as I was.

After the 2007 race, many of us were late finishing because of the ‘cool fuel’ nonsense. A year or two earlier, a car carrying Toyota personnel had been ambushed and fired upon on the way home. As I left the circuit with two colleagues from AUTOSPORT it dawned on us that we didn’t have transport. We would have to step outside the safety of the circuit gates and hail a taxi. At 11 o’clock on a Sunday night it was a long time coming. We stood, in the rain, three blokes with moderately valuable laptops, waiting for an armed mob to descend upon us at any moment. It didn’t happen.

Anecdotally, 2010 seems to have been a pretty bad year for crime at the Brazilian Grand Prix. Is it actually worse, or are we just being tense? Once, on a charity bike ride through Kenya with Eddie Jordan (amongst others) I was alone on the road when I encountered a man loitering with a rather large machete; I sized up the situation and realised that the road wasn’t wide enough for me to evade him if he was intent on doing me a mischief. Instead, I stuck to my trajectory and gave him a cheery greeting as I passed within a machete’s swing of his position. He just looked at me as if I was slightly peculiar.

Sometimes the fear of crime is as intrusive and repellent as the act itself.

This thought came to me in conversation with fellow scribblers at the Silverstone launch a couple of weeks ago, and it came to me again while watching the Spanish GP on Sunday afternoon – round about lap 25, when my pen fell out of my mouth and into my lap, waking me up*. For pretty much the first time since Formula 1 slipped into an internet-enabled 24-hour news cycle we’re missing the kind of long-running story that keeps readers happy when they return to the news trough every day.

Sadly, though, because those readers are so accustomed to their daily updates, if they find the trough empty** they tend to go on the AUTOSPORT message board and vent spleen about how lazy and inept the journalists are. Thus the newshounds have really had to raid the store cupboard for odds and ends this year. When the most exciting thing to talk about is whether an F1 car’s mirrors ought to be in an outboard or inboard position, it’s time to pop outside for a reality check.

I blame Jean Todt. He’s determined to keep a low profile and not annoy anybody – at least for now. When Max Mosley was in the driving seat you could be sure that conflict would eventuate, because he combines an almost insatiable appetite for mischief with the frustrated politician’s hunger to wield absolute authority – you know, without all those other troublesome idiots getting in the way with their pettifogging demands.

Perhaps F1 could take some lessons from successful TV dramas, with their meticulously planned character development and story ‘arcs’. When viewing figures decline, the producers swing into action rather than denying that the product is losing its popular appeal.

Not that I’m suggesting we should wake up and find Max Mosley in the shower, of course, but many soap operas do get a boost when a familiar rogue reappears on the scene. We’ve already had a touch of that; Michael Schumacher’s return puts me in mind of Dirty Den coming back to Eastenders, although I hope that Michael’s comeback isn’t scuppered by some unfortunate business with a webcam.

Or could this actually be that other trope of the failing drama, when a much-loved character returns but is played by a different actor? I say this only because going by Schumacher’s race pace this year, his role is actually being performed by his younger brother – or perhaps even by Jarno Trulli, he of the ‘Trulli Train’…

* Mind you, if you think Formula 1 is boring at Barcelona, you should try watching the DTM there.

** Obviously, if you are an avid consumer of GMM crap then the trough is never empty.

At the 1959 US GP, Harry Schell managed to persuade the organisers that he had beaten his previous best qualifying time by six seconds, and he was permitted to start his Cooper from the front row. It subsequently emerged that he had noticed a few unmanned marshals’ posts around the back of the circuit and taken a crafty short cut. Although he claimed the whole thing had been a prank, he was quite happy to accept the elevated starting position.

You couldn’t do this on a modern F1 circuit, though; Sebring was based around the landing strip of a wartime airfield, with a proliferation of convenient taxiways off the main route…

In other words: “You’ve got plenty of money – so divvy up some more, old chap.”

Although the Telegraph has quoted new GM Europe CEO Nick Reilly (a GM career man) as saying that the company could change hands for a nominal sum, the figure mentioned in the story – $1 – does not actually appear in any reported quotes, so it may be an invention of the writer. A representative of the prospective purchasers told Reuters that GM is seeking assurance that Ecclestone and Genii have the wherewithal to ensure Saab’s future.

The explicit Ecclestone-Genii alliance has been of great interest to F1 insiders, many of whom have been speculating that Genii’s investment in the Renault F1 team was lubricated with funds from Bernie’s capacious vaults – as was the case, they say, with the succession of new names above the door of Eddie Jordan’s former equipe.

Still, I’m a trifle baffled by the Saab business – in every sense of the phrase. Is it a bargain? I doubt if even David Dickinson would describe it as “a bobby dazzler”. What brand capital Saab once had as a maker of solid but distinctive and quirky mid-size cars is long gone to all but a tiny cabal of ageing loyalists.

Saab’s antediluvian model range needs urgent investment, and developing new cars isn’t a cheap process. The devaluation of the brand began in the mid-1980s, before GM’s takeover, with the 9000 model, the product of a misbegotten platform-sharing agreement with the Fiat group.

GM took a 50 per cent stake in 1989, and even though it quickly became clear that the automotive giant had no clear strategy for Saab, it completed the takeover in 2000. The ‘new’ 900 model of 1993, relaunched five years later as the 9-3, was a pastiche of old hat Saab design cues riding on an Opel/Vauxhall Vectra chassis. It was safe enough if you were to run headlong into a moose, but otherwise its dynamics were too poor to commend it to the discerning driver.

Mid-way through presiding over a two-decade spell of ennui and underinvestment, GM decided to make Saab a ‘premium’ brand. I went on the launch of the all-new 9-3 in 2003, during which it was explained that all the Saab dealers would have to subscribe to new standards of presentation in order to keep their franchises. At this point Saab’s model range consisted of a reheated Opel Vectra and a glorified Fiat Croma, although behind the scenes it was developing model for the US market based on the Subaru Impreza – a dog of a car that principally appealed to boy racers and rally geeks (there’s an overlap; I could draw you a Venn diagram).

I paired up with fellow iconoclast Iain Robertson for the drive, and we concurred that while the car wasn’t bad, it had too much from the GM parts bin for it to compete with BMW and Mercedes. Still, one of the other veteran motoring hacks saw some cause for optimism.

“Have you seen the sort of people buying BMWs nowadays,” he hissed rhetorically after dinner, tremulous fingers clutching a glass of port. “Forgive me, my lad – who are you, anyway?”

Ultimately, branding is about product. Making the showrooms posh didn’t transform Saab into the premium brand it wanted to be, and buyers steered clear of its ageing and underwhelming model line. The absence of bespoke multi-cylinder engines didn’t help; there was a GM V6, but other than that Saab stuck with small-capacity turbocharged fours at a time when premium customers wanted silky, pukka V6s and V8s. Tumbleweed blew across the polished tiles of the lately refitted dealerships.

So if Bernie and has buddies do get hold of Saab, they have a hell of a lot of investment and product-planning to do. Sticking a Saab badge on the nose of an F1 car (if that is one of their aims) won’t bring this brand back from the dead.

No, not learning how to do a bow tie (imagine the befuddlement of my fellow commuters, though; it’d be worth doing just for a laugh). Jude the Obscure – great book, but joyless. I’m reading The Naked And The Dead now. I’ll probably need a comedy after that…

1) Attend more grands prix. For various reasons (hosting at Renault, working in other series, not being organised enough to sort accreditation in time, etc) I only went to one GP in 2009. Yes, the travel is expensive, but going to races and keeping busy during the weekend is the only way to properly keep up with what’s going on.

2) Watch Michael Schumacher in action at a big-balls corner, preferably during qualifying. Love him or hate him, MS is a fabulous sight on a hot lap.

3) Read a Thomas Hardy novel. Mrs C suggests Jude the Obscure.

4) Learn how to do a bow tie. May just be a very useful life skill…

5) Comment on more blogs. It’s the polite thing to do.

6) Finish reading A Man In Full. This is a failed resolution from 2009 (in my defence, although I’ve had the book 10 years, I bought it in large-format hardback from remaindered stock and it isn’t very portable).

7) Deliver my second book on time.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of these throughout the year…