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This week’s report comes from the motorsports desk, with the Formula One season having just reached its halfway point allowing a well-deserved break for the drivers and their crews. Mercedes are the on-form team of the season so far, having won nine of the eleven races, and with their drivers Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton separated by only 11 points at the top of the table. Hamilton has suffered more reliability issues so far compared to Rosberg, leading many people to speculate about a so-called “German team” sabotaging an Englishman’s car to favour their German driver.

The team is branded “AMG Mercedes” but is still located in leafy Northamptonshire, England, and has English technical directors and a majority British staff, so I don’t think there is much basis for a conspiracy theory that paints Lewis as the lone plucky Brit in a team of traitorous, xenophobic Germans still bitter about the outcome of the war. Saying that Mercedes is a German team is like saying you are drinking a beer craft-brewed in accordance with Bavarian purity laws only to read the label and find that it is mass produced in Auckland’s beautiful Onehunga.

Formula One has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism over the past 15 years for its boring, predictable races and two spells of German dominance (Schumacher from 2000 - 04 and Vettel from 2010 - 13). This has led to several gimmicky rules and regulations around tyres, aerodynamics and engines being introduced over the last few years in an attempt to make the races more exciting to watch.

The unlikely sexual innuendo of Formula One tyres and aerodynamics ...

Grooved tyres replaced slicks in 1998, which caused a big reduction in mechanical grip available to the drivers. This led to the teams relying on increasingly complicated aerodynamics to generate sufficient down-force to keep the cars on the track. After 10 years of this madness the FIA relented and reintroduced those black, 13-inch, slick and sexy tyres in 2009. Part-time soft pornographers Pirelli are now the sole supplier of rubber that tears and falls apart after getting pounded by a few laps of hot, hard and heavy use, often resulting in premature pit stops. If you know what I mean ...

The revised aerodynamic regulations appear slightly at odds with the crash safety standards and has made for some very awkward-looking front ends of late with many of the 2014 cars now sporting what can only be described as a massive dildo protruding from the nose of the car. The Lotus team has taken the phallic look even further, fitting their E22 with an unevenly sized double-dong shocker option that has a definite “two in the pink ...” kind of look. If you know what I mean ...

Another recent aero innovation to increase the on-track spectacle has been the DRS “drag reduction system.” This is a driver-controlled moveable rear wing which spreads wide open when flat-out down the straights, making the car much more slippery. This allows the drivers to accelerate harder and faster from behind, fighting through the dirty air before hitting the sweet spot and going deep on the brakes, hopefully shooting between the walls and coming up the inside of the next curve. If you know what I mean ...

Decrease the revs and lose some cylinders and you can have your turbos back ...

In a vain attempt to cut costs and appease left wing eco-mentalist Green voters by increasing fuel economy, the FIA has slowly been neutering the potency of Formula One engines. Over the last decade we have seen the fire-breathing 20,000 rpm 1000 horsepower 3.0 litre V10 engines downsized first to a 2.4 litre V8 in 2006 until this season which saw a return to forced induction with a 3.5 bar turbocharged 1.6 litre V6, limited to 15,000 rpm. They are now fitted with a hybrid energy recovery system that captures energy generated by the rear wheels under braking and stores it using some flywheel and battery witchcraft so that the extra power boost can be deployed later in the lap to either defend against or aid overtaking.

The latest engine specifications have again drawn criticism from the forever fickle Formula One fans, first for lacking the iconic high pitched, ear piercing engine note which prompted Mercedes to test a ridiculous megaphone exhaust extension. The Mercedes engine has also enjoyed a noticeable horsepower advantage over the Renault and is a big factor in reigning champion Sebastian Vettel and his Red Bull team struggling in 2014 after dominating for the last four seasons.

Bond villain Bernie and his quasi-political global piggy bank ...

Bernie Ecclestone, the seemingly immortal, corrupt and grotesque Formula One boss who is hell-bent on world domination, has pushed for the construction of new multi-billion dollar circuits in a sparsely populated area of South Korea and in impoverished parts of India and Turkey that don’t exactly have much of a motorsport pedigree. He then moaned about the poor attendance and refused to stage any more races at the venues unless they paid more than double the previously agreed hosting fee. That old trick.

With a Russian Grand Prix set to take place in Sochi this October and a street race planned in Baku, Azerbaijan for 2016 it seems as though Ecclestone sees former Soviet Socialist Republics as the growth market for Formula One. The race in Baku is scheduled to be held under the prestigious banner of the “European Grand Prix” (typically held in Germany or Spain, you know ... in Europe), which seems to defy geographic logic as the Azeris’ lack of EU membership, a majority Muslim population and a rather long land border with Iran suggests that they are not really going to be racing in Europe. Understandably the “Transcaucasian Grand Prix” doesn’t have quite the same cachet ...

Finally, one of the most controversial decisions has been to award double points at this season’s finale in Abu Dhabi. With 50 points on offer for a single race win, this is more than many past drivers scored in an entire season to win the title. The intent is obviously to keep the championship alive until the very last race as the Emirati Sheiks don’t want to host another dead rubber, but I think it is a rather contrived scheme to artificially generate the action and excitement. Hopefully we don’t see a repeat of 2010 when Sebastian Vettel who, despite never leading the championship throughout the year, undeservedly won his first title owing to some fortuitous events at the final race. This double points rule has a distinctly high-octane whiff of deus ex machina about it. If you know what I mean ...