Molotov Cocktail Not A Proper Bomb, Insists Ecclestone

As Team India staff begged Bernie Ecclestone to release them from indentured servitude and let them go home to their families after a petrol bomb narrowly missed them on a Bahrain motorway, the billionaire F1 microbe smoothly insisted that the Gulf state remains nothing less than a veritable oasis of love and harmony.

“A Molotov cocktail isn’t a real bomb at all,” he explained. “It’s more of a kid’s toy, actually.”

Mr Ecclestone decides to avoid the traffic jams

“What you have to understand is that Bahrain is sadly lacking in supervised play areas,” squeaked Mr Ecclestone from his luxury armoured personnel carrier. “The lovable local street urchins have to make their own entertainment with whatever they happen to find lying about. Since all the cash that used to float around on the breeze now belongs to me, that only leaves them with a giant underground lake of petrochemicals to amuse themselves with.”

“It’s just a bit of harmless fun,” he beamed indulgently as one of his APC’s eight wheels suddenly flew through the air with an entertaining bang, adding: “You cheeky little buggers! I know your dads!”

Lewis Hamilton To Take Up Media Career With Kazakh Ministry Of Information

"This suit is black not."

McLaren driver Lewis Hamilton today shocked the world of motorsport by declaring his immediate retirement from Formula One racing because he is black, and announced that he was moving to the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan to begin a career in journalism.

Media pundits pointed out that Hamilton has some experience in his new chosen field, having spent years hilariously trying to pretend in interviews that he is a streetwise black hipster even though the audience knows he is a typical middle-class white man from the stockbroker belt.

F1 Car Design To Return To A Simpler, Happier Time

The 2013 Ferrari prototype got to 390mph before exploding

From 2013, sweeping new rules will force Formula One car designers to abandon huge aerodynamic wings and seek other ways of generating downforce - taking the much-criticised race series back to an earlier era of mechanical simplicity in the vain hope that drivers might actually have a go at overtaking the car in front, instead of sitting comfortably on its tail for 64 sleep-inducing laps and hoping that its wheels fall off or something.

“I – whoops, slip of the tongue – the FIA committee asked Patrick Head and Rory Byrne to apply their years of experience to the problem of audiences all over the world falling into deep comas,” said Formula One owner Bernie Ecclestone. “And they have decided that it’s all the fault of these aerodynamic aids, whose ability to keep the cars going where they’re pointed falls off dramatically in the turbulent air of another car’s slipstream.”

“An F1 car really only needs two things: power and traction,” explained Williams engineer Patrick Head, “Although Bernie is adamant that a passenger of some kind is necessary for the TV ratings. So we’ve stripped the design back to basics. All cars will have to use a 56-litre turbocharged Allison V-3420 engine, which can bang out 2600hp on war emergency power - although teams will have to bear in mind that only 150 of these monsters were ever made, and at the end of the season the world’s aviation museums will want their exhibits back in reasonably good nick. This 24-cylinder dinosaur will also eliminate the advantages gained from clever pit stop strategy, as every car will have to come in on each lap to refuel.”

“With no fancy aero packages, we hope designers will use their imaginations to come up with exciting new ways to keep their cars on the tarmac,” suggested Ferrari’s Byrne. “For example, in a throwback to the reverse ground-effect techniques of yesteryear, the 2013 Ferrari will use the extraordinary suction of James Dyson’s revolutionary vacuum cleaner to cling to the road like glue.”

“I understand that McLaren and Renault are already fighting to get Hoover on board,” he added, “And there are indications that Force India have just put in quite a big order for Pritt Sticks.”

McLaren To Replace Button With Brazilian Policeman

Button has been promised Toy Story 3 if he behaves himself

After reigning F1 champion Jenson Button’s narrow escape from armed gunmen after qualifying a dismal 11th in the Brazilian Grand Prix, McLaren have surprised motor-racing aficionados by adding a passenger seat to his car and giving the wheel to the quick-thinking police driver who sped him to safety.

“Let’s face it, Jenson’s chances of retaining his title this year were wafer-thin even before we came to Interlagos this weekend,” admitted team principal Martin Whitmarsh, “And after his lame qualifying effort only managed to put the car on the sixth row of the grid, frankly there wasn’t a snowflake’s chance in hell of him hanging onto the championship.”

The team, however, was so impressed with the police driver - who reacted to the sudden appearance of gunmen, as Button and his entourage were stuck in a Sao Paulo traffic jam on the way back to the hotel, by gunning their bullet-proof Mercedes limo and recklessly barging other vehicles out of his path as he accelerated to safety – that they immediately offered him a contract to be Button’s race driver, starting immediately.

“It’s exactly the determination to get from A to B as swiftly as possible that Jenson so conspicuously lacks,” added Whitmarsh proudly.

While his anonymous driver is doggedly barging his way past title challengers Fernando Alonso, Sebastien Vettel, Mark Webber and team-mate Lewis Hamilton, Button will be sitting in the back seat with a stack of publicity photos and a biro.

“It’ll be nice to see Jenson doing something useful in a race for once,” admitted Whitmarsh, explaining that the pictures featured Lewis Hamilton, with Button under strict team orders to faithfully copy his team-mate’s signature onto them.

The biggest fear in the McLaren pit is that their new signing will lose valuable seconds by pulling Felipe Massa over and placing him under arrest, if he sees Massa blatantly allowing fellow Ferrari driver Alonso to overtake him.

World's Best Driver In World's Best Car Will Inject Much-Needed Element of Unpredicability Into F1, Say Incurable Optimists

Formula One legend Michael Schumacher has sensationally signed to the new Mercedes team - formerly champion constructors Braun F1 - three years after retiring because there were no more records left to break, in a move which desperate motor-racing publicists are frantically trying to portray as exciting in some way or other.

"Look, Michael Schumacher is really very, very old and decrepit," said a spokesman for Mercedes. "It's touch-and-go whether he'll be able to remember where the starter is, it's been so long since he drove a cutting-edge F1 car."

"Well, not in a proper Formula One race, as such, anyway," he admitted when it was pointed out that Schumacher has spent the intervening years as a consultant and test driver for Ferrari.

Many of the championship's current drivers are young enough to be Schumacher's children, leading the more delusional pundits to claim that the venerable old man of high-speed racing will probably crawl along at a resolute 30mph and not a mite faster, stop at every corner to examine a dog-eared AA map and eventually exit the pits from the entry lane and drive the wrong way around the track until the chase car pulls him over.

But it is the completely unpredictable pairing of Formula One's most successful driver with a world-beating chassis/engine combination which expert PR liars say will add tension and excitement to the flagging championship series.

"It would be a brave man indeed who rushed off down to the bookies and slapped a couple of grand on Schumacher running away with the 2010 title," said motorsport fan and owner Bernie Ecclestone. "Believe me, I've just tried and the odds are bloody atrocious. Even I'd soon bankrupt myself at 500-1 on."

Snickering Floppy-Eared Hound Buttley Hailed Winner of Wacky Races

Britain was one huge street party yesterday evening, as the nation united in joy to celebrate Jenson Buttley's historic achievement in attaining the coveted Wacky Races Passenger Championship.

Ecstatic crowds poured onto the streets after Buttley's Mean Machine GP001 trundled into fifth place at Brazil's Interlagos track, clinching his status as the fastest car passenger of 2009 and earning him a medal.

"This is the culmination of ten hard years of sitting in a Formula One car," snickered the floppy-eared hound after the race, as he clutched his long-awaited medal to his chest and floated in ecstatic glee. "I'd like to thank Ross Klunk for snapping up the old Hondastardly team for a fiver, and giving me my old job back because he was too tight to pay for a new seat to be made for somebody else."

Buttley's long road to success has been a difficult one, with long drought years in which the plucky British passenger struggled unsuccessfully to fight a natural urge to drive the car himself, despite fervent radio messages from his masters to "Please just sit there, Buttley - do nothing!"

F1 insiders say the key to Buttley's triumph was former Ferrari technical supremo Klunk's inspired decision to wire the steering wheel up to a Taser battery, putting 50,000 volts through the passenger if he touched any of the re-engined Hondastardly's controls while sitting in the cockpit.

Critics, however, say that while electrocuting the passenger may not technically breach the ever-shifting rules of the sport, it is typical of Klunk's style to win races off the track by relying mainly on legal experts instead of engineers to design his cars.

Industrial spies say that Klunk GP's first indigenous design for next season is still cloaked in secrecy. However, several Goldfinger DVDs arrived at the factory by courier last week, prompting rival teams to examine the rule book to see if it specifically outlaws tyre-slashing hubcaps, oil-slick nozzles and smokescreen generators.

F1 Fingers Hover Over The Self-Destruct Button

Motor racing fans are looking forward to the next thrilling instalment of the Formula One legal season, with another exciting courtroom battle between the teams and the FIA looming.

The battle for the championship hotted up as eight out of the ten teams mounted their strongest challenge yet to current leaders Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone.

Up to now, nothing has been able to touch Mosley and Ecclestone's winning partnership of money, arrogance and contempt. However, with determined opposition from such former enemies as McLaren and Ferrari working together on a package of deals with the world's TV companies to run their own breakaway championship, the leading partnership looks set to be overtaken by events and left stuck in the gravel.

"The FIA team is using its tried-and-tested legal threat, as usual," said commentator Martin Brundle, "But it's looking increasingly like old technology. There's just too much money floating round the law courts these days - both the teams and the FIA acknowledge that. But they just can't seem to agree on the answer, which is probably to tell Hitley to stick poison-dwarf Ecclestone up his arse and fuck off to his Nazi dungeon."