If this freedom of development were to end, what would you get? A dead spectacle on the track, plus some sort of officially approved electric Trabant to drive on the road – that’s what.

A sick idea is creeping into fashion, revealing a mistaken notion of what motor racing has been all about for the past century. Millions of new fans were attracted by Lewis Hamilton’s success. The reigning World Champion is a great driver and obviously a very decent sort of bloke. People took to him and the world was delighted when he won the title.

Suddenly, the catastrophic reversal in his fortunes has left these new fans very confused. What’s gone wrong? The immediate temptation is to complain that motor racing is not ‘a level playing field’. That’s the first mistake. The rules are the same for everybody and it’s part of a driver’s job to get his backside into the best car, then work on improving it.

Somehow that rather important point gets forgotten and people who should know better are falling for a dangerous line of thought. Racing cars, they say, should be equal in order to find the best driver. In
top-level motor sport, that’s absurd. Who cares about that?  That’s what the lower levels of the sport are for. That’s where you discover and develop the best beginners, competing against each other in near-equal machinery. Those with talent, determination and luck graduate to compete at the top. Those with too much money soon get found out.

Once the real aces reach F1 we can admire their skills and watch them cope with the pressures. At this level there is no excuse for imperfection in a driver but, for the vast majority of fans, the human interest is irresistible. Of course it is. That’s why the Drivers’ Championship gets more attention than the points chalked up in the Constructors’ Championship. But that’s where the heart of motor racing really lies, in the battle between constructors.

If that is ever forgotten, motor racing will be reduced to a carnival entertainment, an irrelevance, and it will soon die. When Formula Ford was introduced over 40 years ago, which is where I started out, it proved to be one of the greatest ideas of all time in our sport but to apply that thinking to the top end of motor racing would be very sick indeed.

This is what historic motor sport shows us. Over more than 40 years, I’ve been lucky enough to drive competition cars from almost every decade, even the Gordon Bennett Napier and the Mercedes and Benz GP cars of more than 100 years ago. I wasn’t actually born then, by the way, in case you hadn’t guessed, but I have competed in dozens of machines that were modern in their day and which are now historic machinery. I know what it feels like to do 221mph at Le Mans, to tackle an icy special stage on the Turini at night, to drive F3 at Monaco, to be part of a successful modern Touring car team (a long time ago) and to take the Nürburgring’s Foxhole at 185mph without lifting (even longer ago).

In the next few weeks I’ll be driving in the Le Mans Legend race and the Goodwood Festival of Speed, then hillclimbing a new car at Harewood. I was never going to get into F1 but the combined experience of driving such a huge variety of machinery, ancient and modern, has left a deep impression on me: motor racing has always made a crucial contribution to the development of road cars. Apart from the fun and the excitement of driving these old machines to their limits, that spirit and that fabulous history are part of what we celebrate when we take to the tracks, the forests and the mountains in historic competition.

The idea of turning modern F1 racing into a mere TV entertainment, a travelling showbiz promotion with the sterility of no technical development, is really rather offensive. If anyone suggests that motor racing has nothing more to contribute to automotive development, tell them they sound just like Charles Jarrott, who wrote exactly that – in 1906. It’s still rubbish. The evidence of new technology being tried and developed rapidly in motor sport, not just in F1, is in front of our eyes every weekend. For a vivid reminder of what this has achieved in every decade, look at any branch of historic motor sport.

If this freedom of development were to end, what would you get? A dead spectacle on the track, plus some sort of officially approved electric Trabant to drive on the road – that’s what.