Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

Mount Fuji's peak made one half-hour appearance during the Japanese Grand Prix weekend. Only on Friday lunchtime did the clouds briefly part to reveal the goddess - as it was once considered to be - in her full 12,000ft majesty.

Nowadays, around 20,000 people climb to that peak every year. But it was only 140 years ago that the first woman was allowed to go up there. Prior to that it was believed the goddess would become jealous were a female to set foot on the territory and a terrible revenge would be wreaked.

Ancient warriors used to train here and the area, although eye-wateringly beautiful, does have an eerie feel. Lying in the foothills is Aokigahara Jukai (The Sea of Trees). It has the dubious distinction of being Japan's number one suicide area. Some 78 bodies were recovered from there in 2002, since when there have been signs erected attempting to convince would-be suiciders to go back and get advisory support. Locals say the spirits of those who kill themselves are cursed to forever haunt the area.

The mountain is actually formed from three overlaying cones, the first of them rising millions of years ago not long after Japan first broke off from what is now continental Asia. The most recent overlay came 10,000 years ago. Interspersed between these mountain-forming monster eruptions have been countless smaller ones, the last of them 300 years ago.

Go backwards for a tenth of that 300 years and you arrive at the point where Fuji Speedway last hosted the Japanese Grand Prix, when James Hunt gave a virtuoso performance in the McLaren M26 to lead all the way and Gilles Villeneuve, in his third grand prix, reduced his Ferrari to a steaming ball of scrap, killing two spectators. The race continued without even the interruption of a safety car as an ambulance crew attended to the dead and injured.

Earlier in the race Mario Andretti's Lotus speared off into the barriers after Mario broke a track rod banging wheels with another car. Carlos Reutemann saw it happen and feared the worst for his colleague. Although Mario climbed out unharmed, Reutemann's first question on alighting from his second place Ferrari at the end of the race was: "Mario. Is he alive?" From the vantage point of today, it all feels brutally archaic. Just like the primitive huts with their corrugated iron roofs that served as the pit garages.

Yet from the perspective of the watching mountain, 30 years is less than an eye blink. If we think of the 10,000 years since the mountain has existed in its present form as one lap, then the gap between the '77 race and this one represents 0.003sec of lap time.

From flimsily lethal aluminium cans to technological jewels in carbonfibre, from anything goes to intensely regulated, from pirates of chance to minutely analysed extractors of performance, from pit garages resembling the huts found on the mountain to the vast concrete and shiny flush glass edifice that sits in the pitlane now - all in that tiny run of time.

Talking to Williams technical director Sam Michael about his '07 season of chasing lap time was an illuminating experience. Williams didn't even take part in that '77 race, their budget not stretching to the flyaway rounds outside Europe. The team consisted of seven people back then. Today Williams employs around a hundred times that number.

Among them is a sub-department within the aerodynamics group that is dedicated just to correlation between the windtunnel, CFD and the track. As technologies have developed to give ever-deeper layers of data, so they provide answers but in the process reveal many times that number of further questions. Questions that you didn't even realise existed before. As the questions have expanded, so has the staff necessary to answer them.

"You're trying to correlate four different sets of data," he explained. "The track, a windtunnel model, a full size car in the tunnel and CFD. They're all giving you data - downforce, drag, aero balance, sensitivity - and you're trying to tie those four things up continuously.

"We've made massive progress in this area this year. These data sets were much further apart previously. You're never going to get it perfect - you're always going to have to work on correlation, especially as things change. For example when we changed to the current tyres this changed some things on correlation so we had to go back and work.

"There is a group of people working full-time trying to make the model more accurately represent what is on the track. So you're playing about with things in the tunnel like the size and shape of the tunnel walls, boundary layer control, whether you put a trip in the tunnel or not to create a turbulent flow. These guys are not looking at new wings or coming up with new parts; that's not their job. All they do is work on improving that correlation - and there will always be work to do on that. It is a never-ending task."

It's a task that probably will end one day - forcibly. Either the sport's money will run out or the planet's patience with us all will. But the mountain will still be there.