F1's 70 greatest influencers: the 2000s

At the start of the new millennium, Aki Hintsa opened the eyes of the F1 paddock to new dimensions of performance. Hintsa was not a driver or a designer. He had no prior connection to motorsport.

He was a doctor, and the potential he explored was not mechanical but human: the mind and body of the athlete in the cockpit.

In 1998 and 1999 he had been alongside Mika Hakkinen as his fellow Finn secured his two world titles at the expense of Michael Schumacher. Hakkinen knew of Hintsa's work with the Finnish Olympic team, and that Hintsa had spent time as a doctor and missionary in Ethiopia, where he had studied the success of the country's long-distance runners.

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Fitness instructors had long been a part of the F1 scene, but Hintsa took a broader approach than the average physiotherapist, breaking down the elements of an athlete's wellbeing into six categories: physical activity, nutrition, recovery, biomechanics, mental energy and general health.

His work with a succession of drivers at McLaren - including Kimi Raikkonen and Lewis Hamilton - made Hintsa a familiar and respected figure in the paddock, and others queued for the services of his company.

Hintsa saw F1 as an ideal laboratory for his theories, and by the time he died of cancer in 2016, aged 58, his network of performance coaches was working with an array of clients, including corporate executives. Were Hamilton to win his seventh world title in 2020, it would be the 15th for a Hintsa-guided driver in 23 seasons.

By comparison with Hintsa, who arrived in F1 knowing nothing about its history, Murray Walker was steeped in gearbox oil from childhood. He may even have been the last active denizen of the paddock to have met the legendary Tazio Nuvolari, during a visit to Donington Park in 1938.

It was Walker's greatest quality that even in 2001, when he ended his full-time career as television's voice of F1 at the age of 78, he retained all the enthusiasm of the 14-year old who had begged the Italian champion for his autograph.

Succeeding Raymond Baxter as the BBC's chief F1 commentator in 1978, after a successful career in advertising, Walker achieved the sort of identification with his sport enjoyed by Dan Maskell in tennis, David Coleman in athletics and Eddie Waring in rugby league. As with all great commentators, Walker's idiosyncrasies exasperated his critics but were cherished by his fans.

In Theissen's mind, the performance of the Grove-built chassis never matched that of the V10 engines from Munich

Always delivering his commentary from a standing position, Walker had a voice that, in its more excitable moments, seemed capable of drowning out an entire field of racing engines, a perfect contrast to the laid-back drawl of James Hunt, with whom Murray formed a memorable double-act. No one came closer than Clive James to capturing his appeal: "Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire."

Walker left Formula 1 just as the work of Ross Brawn on rebuilding Scuderia Ferrari was reaching its zenith. Lured by Luca di Montezemolo and Jean Todt to join Michael Schumacher at Maranello during 1996, the new technical director recreated the squad that had won two titles with Benetton: himself, Schumacher, the designer Rory Byrne, the electronics wizard Tad Czapski and the chief mechanic Nigel Stepney.

Together with Paolo Martinelli, the resident engine specialist, they spent three years pulling the team into shape before embarking on a run of six consecutive constructors' championships and five drivers' titles.

Brawn had trained in mechanical engineering at the UK Atomic Energy Authority but in 1976 took his first step on a career in motor racing by joining March, first as a machinist and then as a mechanic. After moving to Williams in 1978, he progressed through R&D to a role as an aerodynamicist. A year on the Haas-Lola design team in 1985 was followed by three seasons with Arrows and two at Jaguar, where he designed the 1991 championship-winning XJR-14 sportscar.

Moving to Benetton, Brawn supervised Schumacher's first two titles in 1994 and 1995 while earning a reputation for pushing the technical regulations to the limit, something that would resurface during his years of unprecedented success at Ferrari.

Leaving the Scuderia in 2006, Brawn took a break before joining Honda for 2008. When the Japanese company suddenly withdrew at the end of the season, Brawn and Nick Fry took over, downsizing the team, acquiring Mercedes engines, changing the name to Brawn GP and exploiting a controversial double-diffuser design to win the 2009 world championship with Jenson Button.

Mercedes promptly bought and renamed the team, using it as the platform for its full-scale return to F1. Schumacher arrived for a couple of seasons but at the end of 2013 Brawn stepped away, leaving Toto Wolff to preside over a new era of success for the modern Silver Arrows. Four years later Brawn returned as the Formula One Group's managing director, tasked with creating new technical regulations that would make the racing more competitive: the ultimate poacher-turned-gamekeeper.

The new millennium also ushered a return of major manufacturers to F1 in significant numbers. Among them was BMW, whose new motorsport director, Mario Theissen, inherited a deal with Frank Williams made by the German company's outgoing sporting boss, Paul Rosche. The first fruit of the arrangement was a win at Le Mans in 1999 with a six-litre V12 BMW prototype, but the subsequent F1 partnership proved less satisfactory.

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There were occasional wins for the strong driver line-up of Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher in the first half of the decade, and the Colombian challenged Michael Schumacher strongly for the 2003 title, but the Williams-BMW team's overall results fell short of its potential. In Theissen's mind, the performance of the Grove-built chassis never matched that of the V10 engines from Munich.

The failure of the 2004 "walrus-nose" FW26, the loss of Montoya to McLaren and a winless 2005 widened a rift in the relationship between Theissen and Patrick Head, leading to the abrupt termination of the arrangement. Crucially, Williams had refused to entertain BMW's offer to become a part-owner of the team rather than a title sponsor and engine supplier.

Opting to stay in F1, BMW bought the Sauber team and installed Theissen as its principal. Despite the quality of Nick Heidfeld and Robert Kubica, four years of collaboration between Munich and Hinwil produced only a single win, for Kubica at the 2008 Canadian GP, in which Heidfeld finished second.

At that point the future for BMW Sauber looked promising, but a poor showing in 2009, including abandoning the KERS regenerative braking system mid-season, led to a decision to withdraw from F1. Peter Sauber bought his team back, and Theissen's time in F1 was over.

The debut grand prix season of the 19-year-old Fernando Alonso, at the wheel of a Minardi in 2001, was the prelude to a career that brought a new generation of fans to F1. For a while his appeal resembled that of a boy-band hero and at the Spanish Grand Prix entire grandstands were blanketed with the blue and yellow flags of his native Asturias. They were also the colours of the Renault team he joined in 2002, although he would spend that first year as a test driver.

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It was Alonso's bad luck never to find himself in a team with cars designed by Adrian Newey, the man with a plausible claim to be considered the greatest F1 designer of all time

Renault's F1 boss, Flavio Briatore, was Alonso's personal manager, well placed to favour him over incumbent Button as a partner to Jarno Trulli for the 2003 season. Alonso justified the decision by taking his maiden grand prix win that year. In 2005 and 2006 he won 14 races, seven in each season, dethroning Schumacher and Ferrari to take consecutive world titles.

At that stage Alonso looked likely to dominate and define an entire era. But a move to McLaren, alongside the younger and equally competitive Hamilton, exposed chinks in his armour. The fallout from the Spygate affair opened a rift with Ron Dennis, the team principal, that even four race wins could not close, and a three-year contract was terminated after a single season.

Two years back at Renault were notable mainly for Alonso's victory in the 2008 Singapore GP, achieved after the team had staged a crash by its number two, Nelson Piquet Jr, to bring out the safety car and give Alonso - who had started 15th on the grid - the opportunity of a decisive early stop for fuel and tyres. Punishments were handed out to Piquet, Briatore and technical director Pat Symonds, but Alonso himself was deemed to have played no part in the scheme.

Alonso's move to Ferrari in 2010 should have restored his fortunes, but a strategy error during the last race of that season in Abu Dhabi cost him a third title and the next three seasons were a tale of inconsistency. The last of his 32 victories came at Barcelona in 2013. A year later his contract was terminated, with few tears on either side. Alonso was reunited with McLaren, but four years at Woking delivered nothing and again ended messily.

Alonso will always be seen as Spain's first great grand prix driver, but what should have been one of the great careers failed to reach fulfilment. His later adventures at Le Mans and the Indy 500 demonstrated his sheer love of racing, but it remains hard to imagine Alonso's return to F1 at Renault in 2021, with his 40th birthday looming, adding to his laurels.

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It was Alonso's bad luck never to find himself in a team with cars designed by Adrian Newey, the man with a plausible claim to be considered the greatest F1 designer of all time. Starting in F1 at the end of the 1980s with a Leyton House-sponsored March car that clearly punched above its team's weight, in 1990 Newey joined Head in the Williams design office, contributing enormously to the sophisticated cars that dominated the field in 1992 and 1993, bringing world championships for Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost.

Williams's refusal to grant Newey a shareholding led to the departure of a man whose unequalled understanding of the effect of airflow on a chassis was expressed via a pencil and a drawing board rather than CAD tools. The FW19 car which took Jacques Villeneuve to the championship in 1997 still benefitted from the carryover of Newey's input, but his departure in 1995 prefaced the team's long decline.

At McLaren, Newey's next employer, he designed the cars with which Hakkinen won his two titles, and in 2005 the new Red Bull team made him the sort of offer - believed to be around $10m a year - normally made to a top driver.

On arriving at the Milton Keynes factory, formerly the HQ of Jaguar's F1 operation, Newey found that bad habits and obsolete processes needed to be swept away. It would take the remainder of the decade to bring the team up to the level of his ambition, sealed with its first win, a one-two for Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber in the 2009 Chinese GP.

The men who made it possible for Newey to turn his visions into reality were Dietrich Mateschitz, owner of the Red Bull drinks company, and Christian Horner, the Red Bull F1 team principal. Mateschitz, born in Austria in 1944, had a background in marketing detergents and toothpaste before coming across a drink called Krating Daeng, sold in South East Asia, which would make him one of the world's richest men.

Sport was the vehicle Mateschitz chose to drive the worldwide promotion of his energy drink. His first venture into F1 came in 2001 with Sauber, but at the end of 2004 he bought the ailing Jaguar outfit, renamed it after his product, and installed a new hierarchy.

On Bernie Ecclestone's advice, Mateschitz hired Horner, an ambitious 31-year-old Englishman who had set aside a career as a driver to start his own team, Arden International, and led it to multiple F3000 titles. When Mateschitz put him in charge, Horner went from a staff of 20 to an operation employing 500 people, of whom one new arrival would prove crucial.

As well as taking advantage of his driving experience to give the viewer a new level of technical insight, Brundle pioneered the pre-race grid walk, providing the illusion of intimate contact with F1's main protagonists

Newey and Horner had attended the same Warwickshire prep school, although they were 15 years apart in age. When Horner backed Newey's desire for Renault power, which meant dealing with Flavio Briatore, Mateschitz was willing to secure the deal by buying a box at Queens Park Rangers, then owned by the Italian.

The arrival of Red Bull, with its vast Energy Station hospitality unit, took F1 up a notch in terms of glitz. It coincided with F1's commercial rights being swallowed up by CVC Capital Partners, a venture capitalist organisation which would spend the following decade sweating F1's assets.

TV broadcast rights were key among those assets, and rising rates would render live F1 unaffordable to terrestrial broadcasters. In the UK F1 had moved in 1997 from the BBC, its longtime host, to ITV. Murray Walker was persuaded to move across, and was joined by Martin Brundle, recently retired from F1 and taking over as co-commentator. Brundle would hold the position as the live coverage moved from ITV back to the BBC and then on to Sky Sports.

The new ITV team was fronted by Jim Rosenthal, an all-round sports broadcaster who had no background in motor racing but, as a friendly face introducing the general viewer to a complex and highly technical world, set the tone for his successors, including the BBC's Jake Humphrey and Sky's Simon Lazenby.

In a sport long resistant to hiring women as anything other than grid girls, ITV also introduced Louise Goodman as its pitlane interviewer. Her professional approach established another template, one followed by Lee McKenzie, Natalie Pinkham and Rachel Brookes.

But it was Brundle whose expertise and energy enabled the real upshift in TV presentation. As well as taking advantage of his driving experience to give the viewer a new level of technical insight, Brundle pioneered the pre-race grid walk, providing the illusion of intimate contact with F1's main protagonists.

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F1 had breathed a temporary sigh of relief when Bernie Ecclestone negotiated the sale of a controlling stake in F1's commercial rights for £1.4bn to CVC. Ecclestone's long dictatorship, which had included the piecemeal disposal of stakes to various banks and media companies, appeared to be over.

But Donald Mackenzie, CVC's chairman and co-founder, had other ideas. Ecclestone was the man who knew how F1 worked, and so he stayed on as chief executive of the Formula One Group, still negotiating the lucrative broadcasting deals and generally running the show.

CVC's stewardship would be marked by two phenomena. The first was a lack of new marketing ideas, particularly in respect of F1's waning appeal to a young generation. The second was CVC's use of F1 as, in the words of the Guardian's Giles Richards, "a fruit machine that kept paying out."

Rather than following the normal private-equity practice of taking its profit and selling up after five years, CVC would keep tugging the handle and pocketing the payout for more than twice that span, while F1 fretted about its future.