Grapevine: Paddock Life - Barcelona edition

Dennis has said over the San Marino Grand Prix that the sport should do more to liven things up, and one of his suggestions was for drivers and journalists to hold water pistol fights.

The FIA followed through on Dennis's ideas, and left the pistols on the desks of the four stars of their press conference - Dennis, Honda boss Nick Fry, Jenson Button and Kimi Raikkonen.

Upon seeing the weapons, Dennis tried to explain that his comments about water pistols had not been meant to have been taken seriously, as Fry duly kept spraying his pistol up into the air.

Looking over at Dennis, Fry said: "This one's got premature ejaculation, Ron."

Dennis, who finally broke into a smile as he referred back to BAR's fuel-tank troubles from last year, hit back with: "You should know about it. There's a reserve water tank under here, actually!"

Renault director of engineering Pat Symonds has earned his money over the last few seasons with some brilliant strategy calls - so it was only right that Bernie Ecclestone made him the proud recipient of the first officially licensed Formula One watch.

At a special ceremony in Ecclestone's motorhome at Saturday lunchtime, Symonds was beckoned over by the sport's commercial boss for a presentation in front of the cameras.

"This man knows a lot about time, so it is only right he gets one of the watches," said Ecclestone, whose deal with watch manufacturer Jacques Lemans was put together with the help of former Grand Prix team boss Walter Wolf.

There are a total of 34 watches in the Formula One range, which marks the first of what will be a whole range of officially-sanctioned merchandise.

Renault press man Bradley Lord found himself to be more popular than normal on race morning at the Spanish Grand Prix when rival teams found out that the world champions had invited Hollywood star Owen Wilson to the race.

Wilson, who has appeared in Starsky and Hutch and the Wedding Crashers, was attending the race to help promote his latest venture - his voice-over in the new Pixar film, Cars.

Word of Wilson's appearance quickly spread around the paddock and teams duly sent representatives down to Lord to ask if some of their female staff would have the chance of getting an audience with their heartthrob...

If Alonsomania was not enough to get the Spaniards out of their beds early, the Spanish Grand Prix organisers made sure to try and entice the locals to arrive at the Circuit de Catalunya a little bit earlier on Sunday morning.

With Spaniard Dani Pedrosa on pole position for the Chinese MotoGP race, the race was beamed live at Barcelona on big screens - which duly delivered a large crowd to the circuit early on. It did not do much to stop the lengthy traffic jams, though, which proved how popular Formula One had become in Spain.

Or the mass appeal could have had something to do with the free breakfast that was on offer to any spectator who made it into the circuit before 9:00am.

Autosport.com experienced first hand on Friday night just how fine the line is between success and failure in motor racing.

At Bridgestone's annual Spanish Grand Prix karting night, our team had managed to beat off the rest of the press to a well earned pole position thanks to the effort of Motorsport News' Glenn Freeman - who famously recently beat Nigel Mansell in a kart race.

Starting from the front, everything looked fine and race starter Brad Spurgeon, from the International Herald Tribune, was duly given his pre-start briefing about keeping calm, staying out of trouble and not spinning.

So one and a half laps into the race, and after Spurgeon had been off the track at least twice and spun once, our team was last but one and facing a hard hour and a half of racing to try and pull back up again. In the end, fifth place was not bad.