fotoLibrarian

I used to enjoy Formula One enormously. Wolfgang von Trips, Masten Gregory, Archie Scott-Brown — these were my heroes. Then it got, how can I put it, somewhat dull.

Michael Schumacher, to my mind, is the greatest ever F1 driver. The trouble was that he was so much better than everyone else that the races became processional, and the excitement leached out.

I never thought I'd see the day when cricket would be more exciting than motor racing, but that came in 2005. There is more excitement in the average one day cricket match than in three Grands Prix, sad to say.

But now we have Lewis Hamilton, who has — rekindled is far too soft a word — conflagrated interest in F1 in Britain. He's young, he's very talented, he's well-mannered, he's nice, he's good looking, he's black, and he's driving the fastest car on the circuit. He is in his very first year in F1 and he has been leading the Championship for nearly the whole season. His team mate is the current World Champion (two years in succession) Fernando Alonso, who as a result is not a happy bunny.

Their team McLaren / Mercedes-Benz has just been fined $100 million and stripped of all its points this season (they were well in the lead of their rivals Ferrari) for falling foul of Ferrari — or Max Mosley, President of the FIA.

$100 million. That is an awful lot of money. That is nearly fifty million pounds.

The truly bizarre thing is that the verdict has been passed, the sentence has been imposed, and no one seems to know what the charge or the offence was that has resulted in such a draconian punishment.

A Ferrari executive sent a huge and secret but unsolicited Ferrari technical document to a mate of his at McLaren in March. The 2007 McLaren was unveiled in January. The Ferrari document can have had no bearing on the performance of the car. Yet McLaren have been delivered a knock-out blow. There are only two F1 teams rich enough to withstand that sort of penalty — Toyota and (you guessed it) Ferrari.

Funnily enough, when another Ferrari engineer passed full details of their top secret engine management system to Toyota, he got 9 months in jail and Toyota weren't touched.

Why then was McLaren doubly punished? And so severely?

It's well known that what's good for Ferrari is good for F1 and vice versa. It's also well known that Max Mosley of the FIA and Ron Dennis, the boss of McLaren, do not exchange Christmas cards.

But a hundred million dollar fine. That is outrageous.

Hamilton and Alonso will nonetheless be racing at Spa on Sunday. Let's hope for another McLaren one two. With Hamilton coming first, of course.

I wonder if we'll learn what really is behind all this. It does not reflect well on this "sport".

I can drive a car, but I’m no Schumacher or Alonso. I can take a photograph, but I’m no Snowdon or Cartier Bresson. I guess Schumacher makes something like $20 million a year. If I were one twentieth as good as him I’d be happy with $1 million a year. But thanks to fotoLibra, I can make a dollar or two out of my adequate photography, simply because nobody else will take a photograph exactly from my angle, or I was there at the right time, or the weather was amazing, or it was the only photo of that building before it was torn down, or any of a hundred reasons.

But before fotoLibra came along, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. None of the picture libraries would have taken me on, good as I was because I couldn’t ensure continuity of supply. I had other things to do, other turbot to poach. So the world was fated never to see my true genius. (Well probably the world did see it, once or twice, decided it wasn’t genius and there was an end to it).

I always wanted to level the playing field, to allow open access to all walks of life and fields of endeavour. OK, I might draw the line at amateur brain surgery, but otherwise why can’t we all have a crack at doing what we enjoy doing, and all the better if there’s a little cash to be made from it by and by?

We can’t all win seven world championships. But every sale made is a lap record for someone.