Speed Reader

One of the most memorable elements of the 2007 F1 season was its steadfast refusal to follow the script. With each passing race, assumptions and preconceptions were dismantled, sometimes piece-by-piece, on other occasions with the subtlety of a kid trashing a sandcastle. And just when you thought that you finally had a handle on what was going on, something else would arrive out of left field.

It was kind of reassuring that most of the time, the people involved were equally surprised by each new development. Ferrari weren't expecting a pile of technical data to end up in Woking. Fernando Alonso wasn't expecting his rookie team-mate to interfere with his bid for a third title. Shanghai's circuit management wasn't expecting a driver to punch a door off its hinges after qualifying.

It was a particularly revelatory year for Ron Dennis, who at various times turned up to the track to discover that his prodigy was rebelling, his newly-recruited double world champion was blackmailing him and that the integrity that formed the very fabric of his team was being called into question.

And that's before we get to the biggest fine in sporting history - a sanction that still, after several months, remains difficult to reconcile with the crime.

Then, just when it seemed that all the ill-will, politics and courtroom activity was done with and the season was gearing up to finish in a rare three-way scrap at the final race - with McLaren holding all of the cards in terms of the various points permutations - Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen turned a seemingly insurmountable deficit into a one-point championship win.

Even then, the suits refused to die. Kimi had not boarded the plane home from Sao Paolo before his status as world champion faced a new threat through the possible exclusion of BMW and Williams over a technical matter; a situation that could potentially have promoted Lewis Hamilton far enough up the order to steal the crown. The 2007 season may have been a bad one for Dennis's stress levels, but it was a great time to be a lawyer.

The last time three drivers had gone into the final round of a season with a chance at taking the championship was in 1986, a season that, in its own way, was as marbled with drama and intrigue as last year. The parallels are not lost on Maurice Hamilton, who offers a typically well-presented account of both in his latest book Chequered Conflict.

In addition to his status as respected F1 observer, excellent writer and generally very nice bloke, Hamilton is in a prime position to comment on both the 1986 and 2007 championships, given that he is one of the handful of journalists in the media centre to have been around for both.

The tale of what unfolded during last year's spy saga has been sufficiently well-flogged to not need retelling here, but the fact that Hamilton has created something so readable out of a topic that was covered so exhaustively and so recently deserves to be recognised.

What made it work for me was that he captured the feeling of being at the centre of it all. I didn't attend every race last year, but by pure fluke I was at a lot of the ones that eventually proved central to the story - Australia, Monaco, Hungary, Monza, China - and thinking back, there were occasions where you seemed to spend the entire weekend feeling perpetually astonished as one twist gave way to the next.

But the fans following it from home probably didn't realise how deeply the scandal permeated the paddock. Even the media was affected, as Hamilton explains in his recollections of a McLaren briefing with Lewis Hamilton for the British press in Shanghai:

"Hamilton was obviously much in demand following the Fuji enquiry and the British media were looking for a more detailed and exclusive response than the one Lewis had given during the international briefing.

"It was to be a surprise, therefore, than an Italian journalist should enter the room towards the end of the British audience and pick up a tape recorder that, he claimed, had been accidentally left on the table. It was also an accident, presumably, that the tape was still running.

"Hamilton, not realising the gravity of the situation from a media point of view, looked on in amazement when Ian Gordon, a British journalist, sprang to his feet, shouting, 'That's bang out of order, that is, mate!' before berating the Italian in no uncertain terms and demanding that he wipe his recorder clean.

"Claims of feigned innocence cut no ice with the man from the News of the World as the temperature in the room rose dramatically. If the Italian had passed the interview on to an agency in Europe, the exclusive nature of the words from a British media point of view would have been made worthless. Hamilton did not utter a word while all hell broke loose around him."

As Hamilton himself points out, competition in F1 is not confined to the race track...

The book is mapped out with alternating chapters recounting 1986 and 2007. It illustrates the similarities between two seasons separated by 21 years, but it's equally effective at highlighting the differences - and sometimes in ways that you might not expect.

There is one passage in particular that brings this home, and it is Hamilton's reproduction of a press release from Ferrari - from Enzo Ferrari - addressing Nigel Mansell's decision to sign for another two years at Williams after apparently having already agreed terms for a switch to Maranello.

"(Mansell's) subsequent behaviour has amazed us and our lawyer will treat the matter in the appropriate manner. This does not alter our great admiration of Mansell as a driver but it does show us the kind of person with whom we could have been dealing.

"We had out discussions with Mansell because he assured us that he had no future plans with our friend Frank Williams, to whom we renew out good wishes."

Enzo's courteous greeting to his rival team owner in the midst of a dispute over a driver hearkens to another era no matter how you look at it, but it stands in particularly stark contrast to the relentless, borderline malevolent sentiments that were the hallmark of the Prancing Horse during the turmoil of last year.

Chequered Conflict is an intelligently-written reflection upon two complex F1 seasons that bore striking similarities in some ways, and glaring differences in others.

Even if you're still recovering from spy saga fatigue, Hamilton brings enough insight to the table to make this book worthy of investigation. It's not on the shelves yet, but it should be available in hardback from Simon & Schuster on March 3rd.