As Grand as it gets

But the change in the World Championship is obvious when we consider that the first decade of the new century has also seen Spain produce its first World Champion, the superbly gifted Fernando Alonso, and a new British star rising in the shape of Lewis Hamilton.

This year alone has given us not one, but two new winners. Kovalainen, from a country with a proud motor sport tradition, was one. Before him, at the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, it was the exciting Robert Kubica’s turn, the first Polish driver to win a World Championship Grand Prix.

And so to World Championship race number 800. Its winner will add his name to a fabulous list of men who marked the previous F1 milestones. The 100th race in 1961 was won by Englishman Stirling Moss, “the greatest driver never to win the World Championship”; the 200th in 1971 went to Scotland’s Jackie Stewart – both men since knighted for their services to the sport.

The 300th event in 1978 was won by pugnacious Swede Ronnie Peterson, later killed at Monza; Niki Lauda claimed F1’s 400th race, appropriately at Austria’s fabled Oesterreichring in 1984; Nelson Piquet took number 500 in Australia in 1990; Jacques Villeneuve was the winner of the 600th in 1997; and Giancarlo Fisichella was the unlikely but no less worthy winner of the 700th in Brazil in 2003.

Seven previous milestones, all marked in different countries; seven races won by seven men of seven different nationalities - if we allow Moss and Stewart to be English and Scottish respectively.

So whose name, which nation shall it be when Singapore celebrates the magical 800th?

Credits: By M.H Sim