The people of Northumberland have a well-merited reputation for chortling in the teeth of adversity. This ability to find the positive in even the gravest situation was brought home to me a decade or so ago when our Vauxhall Astra was stolen in Newcastle. A few days later an officer from Northumbria Police phoned. "It's about your vehicle, Mr Pearson," she said cheerily, "I've some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that the car is currently ablaze in Benwell."
"What's the good news?" I asked.
"The fire brigade are attending the scene," she replied.
FIA president Max Mosley's maternal grandfather was a Northumberland baron, so perhaps it is from his mother that he has inherited his sunny disposition, along with a predilection for slightly dodgy entertainment provided by highly-paid professionals wearing striped jerseys. Certainly Max was in jaunty mood when interviewed on Radio Five about formula one's response to The Current Global Economic Downturn. To Mosley the cost of an F1 wheel nut is neither here nor there.
Pleasant though it was to hear somebody pooh-poohing talk of belt tightening in the manner of Ron Atkinson ("Things are tough. I'm down to my last 37 suits and I'm drinking non-vintage champagne"), I can't help feeling his mindset may be part of the problem. Because if F1 teams are paying £800 for a wheel nut, then whoever they are getting them from must have seen them coming. Though admittedly they are somewhat easy to spot, what with the mechanics, the motor homes and that bloke out of Jamiroquai accompanying them everywhere.
In fact, I'd guess they are probably buying them from the same bloke in the Old Kent Road who once tried to charge us more for a single Fiat 127 windscreen wiper than we'd paid for the entire vehicle. "Shhhoof," he wheezed when challenged. "Well, that's the problem with your classic car, innit?" This seemed at the time a rather flattering description though, as a friend of mine observed later, when it comes to cars there is a fine line between "classic" and "clapped out".
Mosley jokes that cutting the price of nuts doesn't matter a bean, yet that sort of careless attitude to cash is financial kamikaze when applied to cars. Everybody outside the rarefied circles of the FIA knows that you have to keep your wits about you when dealing with vehicle maintenance. Because if you give a garage an inch, it will likely take a mile (plus labour, parts and VAT).
And if Williams and co are buying wheel nuts for the best part of a thousand quid, then who knows what other rip-offs are going on? I bet they are shelling out £50 a time for Magic Tree pine air-fresheners and blowing a four-figure sum every year on those tins of boiled sweets you stick in the glove compartment and forget all about until they have stuck together and turned slimy. I imagine that if an F1 driver ever borrowed his works vehicle to go to a football match the minute he parked it he'd be assailed by local urchins squeaking "Look after your car for £21,750, mister?" ("And you'd just have to pay it, otherwise you'd likely come back and find they'd run a key down the side. And getting that repainted is going to set you back the thick end of a half-a-mill, isn't it?")
When talk of reining in this sort of mad profligacy is laughed off as irrelevant by Mosley there's little wonder that, while Premier League footballers can still afford to have swimming pools in the shape of their penises built on man-made islands the shape of their penises in the Persian Gulf, the world's glitziest motor sport finds itself in parlous financial straits.
Jenson Button once astonished sport by declaring, "I am not a playboy". What is the point, many of us asked, of being a formula one driver and not being a playboy? It is like playing lead guitar in a heavy metal band and foreswearing drink, narcotics and groupies in favour of a quick read of The People's Friend, a mug of Ovaltine and an early night.
Now I can see that Jenson was actually making an early bid for future employment in the forthcoming austerity F1. An altogether tougher environment, in which leading teams come under investigation by HM Customs and Excise for running their cars on vegetable oil bought second-hand from Monte Carlo chip shop A Little Plaice on the Riviera. And Farming News warns its readers of "gangs of men in jumpsuits plastered with advertising" who have been siphoning red diesel out of tractors, bringing hedge-cutting operations in Northamptonshire to a virtual standstill.
Whatever happens with Honda and the rest, there's one thing I would really like to know from Max Mosley: how do you persuade the claims investigator from the car insurance company that the vehicle you have written off has a £10m gearbox and wheel fixings that cost more than a brand new family estate? After all, if my experience with that Astra is anything to go on, it's hard enough to get them to part with £3,000 even when you've got the police report, the full service history and the book price for that year's model slapped down right in front of them.
