We should champion Jenson Button

Many now say Formula One cannot be a sport at all," writes Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail, "because Jenson Button is suddenly good at it." Button after all only took one victory from 113 races prior to the current Formula One season - and that when "wet weather conditions produced a freak result (Button No 1, Pedro de la Rosa on the podium for the first time in second, Nick Heidfeld giving BMW Sauber their first podium finish in third)" in Hungary in 2006.

"Button has already won more races than Lewis Hamilton did last year and is not even at the halfway stage. This has been taken as conclusive proof that drivers are no better than monkeys in space; dumb creatures operating aboard a machine that is controlled by greater minds, like that of Ross Brawn, the real brains of the operation."

So, Button with a bad car couldn't win a race while Hamilton in the best on the grid took second place in the championship in his first season and won it at the next attempt. Now with the positions reversed, the results are too. "QED: motor racing is not a sport. Except that is not the half of it.

"The knowing is the key. Not just knowing the consequences of defeat, issues of expectation and fear of failure that affect all sportsmen. Motor racing contains a bleaker knowledge, that of mortality, because no matter how many safety measures have been brought into play, no matter the extent to which tracks have been sanitised and drivers protected by technical innovations to limit speed, there is still something pretty damn stupid about driving a car at 200mph, and the consequences of error are random."

"Everybody has a different definition of what counts as sport. Some argue that it is not sport unless people sweat, and rule golf out on those grounds (although try playing a US Open venue like Southern Hills in the summer without wringing out a shirt at the end)."

Samuels concludes, having noted that many people's aversion to seeing F1 as a sport is the technical angle, that "in the end, in a country in which most people are still struggling to grasp the concept of mini-roundabouts, to pour scorn on the best driver in the world for not being in charge of his vehicle seems a little churlish."