Giuseppe Farina's Alfa Romeo 158, winner of the first F1 World Championship Grand Prix. Photo by James Mann

Do you like great pictures of Formula 1 cars? This weekend (2-3 October) James Mann, my collaborator on the Art of the Formula 1 Car book, is hosting an exhibition of his work as part of the Lambeth Open Festival.

Gilles Villeneuve's Ferrari 312T3

The exhibition is free to enter and you can find it at Plough Studios (Park Hill, Clapham, SW4 9NS), where many of the cars were shot for the book. You’ll be able to see the ‘cove’ and gain a real insight into how cars are photographed in a studio. As well as photographic prints there is a real F1 car, a recently restored Leyton House CG901 – one of Adrian Newey’s early works.

On Monday the prints will be auctioned off in aid of The British Home charity. If you like the pictures you can also order copies and there will be autographed copies of the book available too (assuming I don’t get mown down on the way there tonight).

Michael Schumacher's Ferrari F2000

Martin Whitmarsh addresses the media. Picture by Darren Heath

Back in the dog days of F1, Mrs Codling would take a nap on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon. Roused only by Bob Constanduros’s strident cry of “Champaaaaaaaaaagne,” she would open a weary eye and enquire as to the identity of the winning driver; usually it was Michael Schumacher, and, thus apprised, her only comment would be, “Borrrrrrrring!”

She’s taken more interest over the past couple of years, but about 10 laps into the 2010 F1 season opener my wife decided that her time might be more productively deployed in the manufacture of some carrot and orange soup. Should we now, like many of the sport’s luminaries, be pressing the panic button?

I ask only because there has been an unseemly, tawdry and tedious rush to screech from upon high that F1 is broken and must be fixed NOW, NOW, NOW. You could understand if this noise issued forth solely from journalists who’d been left without much to write about by such an uneventful grand prix; but no, we’re getting it from those team principals who are never knowingly last to reach an open microphone.

Saint Martin of Whitmarsh beat the Frystarter to it on this occasion (maybe we should assign points and turn it into a championship). Before the engines were even cold he was assuring the BBC that the tyre situation needed a ground-up rethink:

We were one of three teams that said we should have two mandatory pitstops because we were worried about one-stopping. I think we have to re-examine that. But I think if we can now push on Bridgestone to have ‘racier’ tyres, we need a super-soft tyre that is really going to hurt if you take it to 20 laps.

Sounds good enough, but a man in Martin’s position would know that it’s unworkable. The tyre allocation for the season has already been determined. Melbourne’s allocation is already on the boat. Bridgestone can’t simply torch a load of tyres it’s already produced and come up with an entirely new set of compounds overnight; that would be asking a lot, even if the company hadn’t already decided to pull out of F1 at the end of the year. Such talk is shamelessly populist.

Speaking of shameless populism, enter the Frystarter:

I think it would be bad if we didn’t react. I think we have all seen a race that was far from the most exciting that we have ever seen, and what we now need to do is between us have a look at it and establish what we do need to do.

I know what we need to do: declare a moratorium on outright guff.

Perhaps Bahrain was the wrong venue for the season opener. I don’t wish to demean it as a location; no other nation to have joined the F1 calendar in the past decade has shown such unswerving commitment to getting it right. The royal family takes a personal interest in the running of the circuit (compare and contrast with China and Turkey, who host grands prix to the ever increasing indifference of the authorities and the local populace). But it isn’t used enough, it’s dusty (an absolute deterrent to overtaking), and the fiddly additional section had no meaningful effect on the racing.

We’re one race into a season. One race that has overpromised and underdelivered. There have been boring races in the past and there will be again. We shouldn’t extrapolate one set of circumstances to arrive at a storyline for the whole season. Could we at least see what happens at Melbourne and Sepang before we decide that F1 is heading off to hell in a handcart?

Less reactionary heads may prevail. Stefano Domenicali of Ferrari has it right:

Let’s wait and see how the other races will develop. It may be a different situation in different conditions, so I would like to tell you my opinion after a couple of races so we can at least have a different scenario that we can say, this is the real situation or not.

The book features a range of Formula 1 cars from the Alfa 158 to Lewis Hamilton’s championship-winning McLaren Mercedes MP4-23. The Alfa we photographed is one of only two left in the world and it is the actual car in which Farina won the first world championship grand prix in 1950.

In between is a miscellany of machinery, each of which has an interesting tale to tell as well as fitting into what TV scriptwriters would call Formula 1’s ’story arc’.

If you fancy a taster then you can see a selection of the photographs and some adapted text in the most recent issue of F1 Racing magazine.

You can order a copy here. I’ll put in one of those fancy windows-in-the-sidebar as soon as I can work out how to do so without utterly wrecking the site.

Michael Schumacher is the most rapacious competitor ever to stalk the Formula 1 paddock. Anyone who thinks he is coming back just for one last run around the block, or to add to his already considerable wealth, is kidding themselves. He’s here to win the 2010 world championship or die trying.

This hasn’t stopped some people soft-soaping the idea of Schumacher’s comeback. My colleague Ed Gorman wrote in The Times yesterday:

The impression gained is that the German wants to pick up where he left off with Ferrari when he retired in 2006. Those suggesting that he may see his role more as a mentor to Nico Rosberg, the 24-year-old who would be his team-mate, than a team-leading championship contender, are wide of the mark. He is said to be looking to add not only to his record 91 grand-prix wins, but also to his unparalleled haul of seven drivers’ titles.

Ed is pulling his punches here. Only a serial dingbat would imagine that Schumacher is going to play the avuncular mentor role to Rosberg. Michael wouldn’t have signed up unless he was confident he could blow young Nico’s doors off – and he will, by fair means or foul.

For Mercedes this is a PR coup (of sorts), plus some belated ROI after easing Michael’s path to F1 through the junior formulae. For German TV stations it’s good news for viewing figures. For anyone who views Formula 1 as a sport, rather than a crushingly cynical exercise in winning at any cost, it is utterly depressing.

People often ask me what Michael Schumacher is ‘really like’. I say it’s tricky to tell. In many ways he is perfectly normal. He has an extraordinary talent behind the wheel but he is also a family man and he adopts stray dogs. He’s also a shameless cheat.

I say ‘shameless’ advisedly. Michael has a feline quality. Cats have no guilt; a tiger will maul its keeper and then half an hour later wonder where they’ve gone. It’s the same in the business world. Robert Maxwell, Kenneth Lay and Bernard Madoff didn’t view their behaviour as fraud, but simply as a different business model.

It is this mindset that has driven Michael to avail himself of any means necessary to win, whether that be spinning deliberately to spoil an opponent’s qualifying lap (Monaco 2006), punting opponents off the circuit altogether (Australia 1994 and Jerez ’97), or compelling his team-mate to move over (Austria 2002). Let’s not get into the business of illegal traction control systems, although there is a story that Juan Pablo Montoya was moved to such fury at the Brazilian GP one year when he heard the Ferrari’s engine stutter (signifying the presence of TC) that he drove into Schumacher’s car.

For all these reasons I hope Michael Schumacher’s return to Formula 1 is a brief and inglorious one. There is good reason to hope: word reaches me that Sebastian Vettel has already signed a contract with Mercedes in 2011. Let’s drink to that…

Come in. Have some champaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagne!

Owing to technophobia-related IT issues, it’s going to be a sub-optimal visual experience for now. It’ll eventually have pictures and pretty things – when the server lets me upload them…