Motor sport and particularly the financing of Formula 1 has been in turmoil for many years as it wrestled with the clear dangers of smoking and that fact that tobacco sponsorship was the very thing that kept the sport alive. Very slowly the sport has come away from tobacco but is there another problem about to rear it’s ugly head?

Having just watched the final qualifying for the Monaco Grand Prix around the streets of Monte Carlo I’m left stunned by both the ingenuity and the naivety of man.

As you watch the spectacle of these incredible if somewhat insane individuals career between the barriers at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour, I’m left aghast that whatever rule changes the authorities come up with, the billions of dollars pumped into the sport by the biggest corporations in the world today will seek out and find the world’s top technical brains who will regain the speed the rule changes try to deny the teams.

I’m sure like me you see many qualities in Michael Schumacher, Jenson Button, but you don’t see naivety as one of them; well I’m not referring to the drivers, but that of you and I the great unwashed and unsuspecting public.

You see some thirty eight years ago I was watching some of the names that are still around in the sport today such as Lotus, Ferrari, and Hill hurtle around the streets of the Principality admittedly not quite as quickly as the cars of today do but definitely in machinery that left their occupants in much greater peril. I watched mesmerised not realising quite what an impact the spectacle playing out before my eyes on our family colour television, would have on my life, for the maverick team principle of Lotus Colin Chapman had engineered a deal between his team and John Player and Lotus had just become the first sporting entity to attract commercial sponsorship and Lotus now ran in the colours of the popular cigarette of the time Gold Leaf.

I was naive and believed that it was perfectly safe to regularly place a concoction of paper and leaves into my mouth light it up and drag hot air through it into my lungs and what brand of paper and leaves did I use to start my smoking career?