Autosport: There's something about Monaco

The palace high up on the hill looks down on the cars as they fly around the tight little track below, indulging Formula 1 and trading off it too, the bringing together of two fairytale lives. The image and profile of these two entities - Monte Carlo and F1 - mark them as heroic glamour survivors in a toned-down age, when men no longer walk the moon and Concorde no longer flies, an age when 'jet set' can otherwise only be used with an ironic post-modern raised eyebrow.

But Monaco and F1, they're full-fat jet set, aren't they? Their annual coupling, greased by money, recharges the batteries of each, adds lustre to the respective images.

When 'Mr Monaco' Graham Hill took his fifth and final victory around here, Neil Armstrong was just a couple of months from taking that historic first step. Look at any F1 picture of that time and it's clear that the sport was so in tune with those wondrous times when anything seemed possible - indeed seemed likely.

The cars had recently sprouted wings and were being painted in ever more lurid colours, going around the tracks at ever more outrageous speeds. The hair of the drivers was growing longer, emphasising their pirate credentials, followers of no rules other than their own in keeping with a generation in general that had begun to question things and reject previously accepted social mores. Everything was up for grabs in this rocket-powered, wild-coloured age where the doors of perception really did seem to be opening.

Peel back the gloss and things were still a little primitive, whether it be the construction of the cars or the computing power inside the Apollo spacecraft being less than you'd find in a modern mobile phone. But the essential thing was the reach and the striving, the trajectory the world seemed to be on. Mankind seemed on the verge of an entirely new epoch, maybe even the next stage of civilisation.

Back then before anything was known of global warming and when there was assumed to be an infinity of natural resources, the whole world seemed heading towards a jet set future, dragged along in the slipstream of the space race.

Instead, what we discovered wasn't the stars but the reality that we were mired in this world and that we needed - need - to take care of it much better than we are doing. Against this backdrop, utopia was suddenly postponed for a few millennia at the very least.

As the hard geopolitical facts emerged over the years, those '60s ideals were left looking impossibly naive. The idea of a jet-set, a bubble of unreality within a very stark world, lost any aspirational quality, became something to be either laughed at or despised.

Our scope had been capped, the dream was over. As we set about applying ever-more advanced technology to ever-more restricted and mundane - but vastly more important - challenges than space exploration and supersonic passenger travel, so F1 came to be artificially capped too. To make it safer in a changing world. So it lost some romance, gained some sanity.

Kimi Raikkonen (McLaren MP4-21 Mercedes) 2006 Grand Prix of Monaco © LAT

Regulations came to define the cars, the scope for the next technological quantum leap was squeezed dry. The pirate drivers became less so, became more corporately beholden. They were now employees rather than buccaneers, with telemetry meaning they had nowhere to hide. The air of mystery dissolved.

But Monaco and F1 somehow remain exempt. F1 can, and surely will, attune itself by being at the cutting edge of energy-saving fuel technology. Monaco will continue to be a haven for the conspicuous consumption of wealth, but will probably avoid ridicule by its close association with the sport, which at least gives something in return for its own conspicuous consumption.

In the meantime, despite the latest in technology, there's something nostalgic about Monaco. When you see the Prince take Max Mosley for a ceremonial ride around the track in a white open-topped 1960s Lincoln Continental, uncannily like the car in which JFK took his final fateful ride, and listen to its 7-litre V8 burble away its fuel, you can find reassurance - albeit false - that things aren't so different from when Jackie Stewart dined with Elizabeth Taylor and Ringo Starr at the Casino.