Robin Wilton's esoterica

Have you looked lately at what it says on the humble tin of boot-polish? It's enough to put you clean off... as it were.

"May cause sentitization by skin contact. Avoid contact with skin. Wear suitable gloves. If swallowed, seek medical advice immediately. Harmful to aquatic organisms. Keep out of the reach of children."

I didn't know the bit about it killing fish - presumably that's why you never see a fish with shiny shoes.

The advice about keeping out of reach of children is pretty sound, though. That's what I always try and do.

I was at Thruxton circuit yesterday to watch the final 3 races of the British Touring Car Championship season - and with the final points scores of 300 to Fabrizio Giovanardi and 297 to Jason Plato, it could hardly have been tighter.

I've missed several of the Formula 1 races this season, so it feels like a while since I've heard the Italian national anthem at the end of a motor race, but yesterday Giovanardi was on top form, winning the first two BTCC races and finishing second in the last. Plato, chasing points right to the end, was characteristically 'committed' in the last race, reminding me that Touring Car racing can often be very much a contact sport. As well as the Touring Cars, there were also races of Formula Renault, Porsche Carreras, Renault Clios and Ginettas, and air displays by the Army Air Corps (Lynx helicopter) and the Red Devils (parachutists). A great day's entertainment, with plenty of straight-forward, full-on racing.

Formula 1, on the other hand, seems still to be being dogged by the kind of thing which sours my appreciation of the amazing skill and commitment of the drivers. The FIA has appointed an 'internal scrutineer' specifically to monitor the McLaren team during the championship-deciding Brazilian Grand Prix next weekend. The scrutineer will be there to make sure McLaren treats both drivers even-handedly and doesn't make any attempt at using team orders to determine the outcome of the race.

If Ron Dennis were actually employed by Bernie Ecclestone, he'd surely be considering an employment tribunal claim for constructive unfair dismissal by now. McLaren have already had a technical scrutineer imposed on them by the FIA in the wake of the 'Ferrarigate' scandal over leaked technical documentation - to ensure that their 2008 car doesn't incorporate anything they might be considered to have learned from those leaks. The practicalities of enforcing such a ruling are so absurd - given the extent to which any leading team has to innovate to stay competitive - that it essentially represents a blank cheque to McLaren's competitors. Essentially, McLaren could simply find themselves spending the whole of next season fighting a series of vexatious claims that whatever innovation they have introduced has somehow been derived from the leaked documents.

OK - the 2007 championship is going down to the wire; OK - the tension between Alonso, Hamilton and Dennis has been palpable as the season progresses. But McLaren have a winning car and two extremely competitive and capable drivers. McLaren have a reputation for letting their drivers fight it out, and have no history of using team orders to rig the finishing order. When there were allegations of team orders at Monaco earlier this year, the resulting investigation completely exonerated the team of any inappropriate behaviour, finding instead that every tactical decision they took was 'entirely reasonable', 'entirely legitimate' and 'standard practice'.

As far as I'm aware, no team in F1 history has ever had such external scrutiny imposed on them in the past. So why this extraordinary move? It's hard to conclude that it's anything other than F1's opaque governance model at work again; 'follow the money': whose interests are advanced by this ruling? Bernie Ecclestone's... he gets a final in which an already-competitive sporting showdown is articifially inflated to soap-opera proportions; and Ferrari's. The ruling increase the chances that their primary competitor will win on the track but lose in the pit lane - because some bean-counter questions why one driver's tyres was brought out rather than the other's, or why someone was left out on the circuit for 3 laps with a visibly de-laminating tyre.

And why are there specific regulations forbidding team orders in the first place? Well, it goes back to Austria in the 2002 season, and the 6th race out of 17 for that year. As the teams went into that race, Michael Schumacher had achieved almost maximum points, winning 4 of the first 5 races and finished 3rd in Malaysia (45 points). His team-mate, Rubens Barichello, had retired from the first three races, failed to start in Spain and finished 2nd in San Marino (6 points).

Schumacher's closest rival at that stage, Juan-Pablo Montoya, had 3 second-place finishes, a 4th and a 5th (23 points).

At the A1 Ring in Austria, Barichello led the race until the end, when he was instructed to let Schumacher pass him for maximum points, to the jeers of the crowd. Then, in the penultimate race of the season, at Indianapolis, the Ferrari drivers again staged the finishing order... by this time, though, they had won all but two races of the season. Schumacher would ultimately finish the season with around twice the points of Barichello and three times the points of Montoya. Schumacher later suggested that his aim had been for the cars to finish exactly side by side... which, in this era of 0.001-second timings, did little to reduce his reputation for arrogance.

The FIA fined Ferrari $1m for the Austrian farce, and introduced specific rules forbidding the use of team orders to influence the finishing order of a team's drivers.