Kimi Raikkonen is rumored to have been in trouble with police in Hungary over a matter of alcohol and sitting behind the wheel of a car. This follows other stories of the flying Finn’s night club and partying exploits.

It has echoes of an F1 tradition that we all thought had died out with the advent of the super-professional driver epitomized by Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher: the “bad boy” syndrome. In the 1950s, many drivers were renowned for their wild behavior at parties, Mike Hawthorn especially gaining a reputation for being heavily into wine, women and song. It was as though the working class lads, who suddenly found the heights of motor sport available to them, intended to make the most of their brief moments of fame. They worked hard and they played hard.

This continued into the sixties, although there were already signs of a growing professionalism that had no time for drunken high jinks. Drivers like Jim Clark and John Surtees were serious about racing and saw it as a profession rather than a bit of fun. Some, such as Graham Hill, still knew how to relax and party between races, however.

By the 1970s, advertising had upped the stakes so high that it was clear that F1 was now more of a business than a sport; the sober attitude of most drivers reflected this too. So James Hunt stands out as the last of the playboy drivers, an isolated throwback to F1’s wilder days. With his retirement, we all thought that era was gone forever.

Through the eighties and nineties we became used to the dour professionals, Prost, Senna, Schumacher, pursuing their career objectives with unwavering intensity. Flashes of humor from such as Johnny Herbert gave relief but the overall atmosphere was that this was far too serious a business to have fun in (hmmm, I think I just identified the reason for Minardi’s huge popularity).

And now Kimi Raikkonen arrives to upset all our preconceived notions. It would have to be someone like him, of course – a driver so talented that all his off track adventures can be ignored by the team manager. Oh, there might be the occasional “talking-to” in the motorhome but, when you’re paying the guy millions to drive for you, it’s not easy to lay down the law about his private life.

What Kimi does for us all is demonstrate that it’s possible to be damn good at your job and still have a good time on your days off. For too long we have believed that only the dedicated monomaniac can get to the very top of any profession. Kimi shows that, with youth, talent and energy, that doesn’t have to be true. After all, what is the point in being paid so much if you can’t live a little as a result?

Predictably enough, Fernando Alonso won the Canadian Grand Prix in style, making it look easy in spite of the bunching of the field after a late pace car intervention. He seems unstoppable this season.

The win was also the 100th for Michelin in F1 and the Michelin men were out in force to celebrate as a result. Plus, the race was held on the centenary of the first ever Grand Prix, the French, held at Le Mans in 1906. It is a strange coincidence that Renault won that race too and the winning car was shod with Michelin tires.

But the similarities go even further. Second in Canada was Michael Schumacher in a Ferrari, while the same position in the French race was occupied by a FIAT, the company that now owns Ferrari. It would be easy to assume from this that nothing ever changes in F1, especially when you remember that the likely champion this year will be going from Renault to McLaren at the end of the season, just as did Alain Prost at the end of his most successful year with Renault.

Yet we know that, in between these strange coincidences, GP racing and F1 has been subject to incredible changes and upheavals. For many long years there were no French constructors involved and many other tire companies have come and gone. We have seen the races become the virtual preserve of German manufacturer teams and other times when the small private teams from Britain dominated. Circuits have become shorter with huge run off areas and the race through city streets is almost extinct. It has been a turbulent 100 years.

The one constant has been that the fastest drivers of the times have competed using cars at the leading edge of technology. The cars of earlier times may look primitive and dangerous to us now but, in their day, they were the most advanced machines on the road. And every driver has known that, to reach the top, he must compete in GP races. Other forms of motor sport may have more passing, excitement, thrills and spills, but F1 remains the pinnacle, the finest expression of both driving skills and engineering.

So Renault’s feat in winning the first Grand Prix and its centenary is almost miraculous. Countless manufacturers and constructors have come and gone in those intervening 100 years yet Renault are still here and winning races. They deserve every accolade they will have from their achievement.

Fernando Alonso is an enigma to me. He seems to have sprung from nowhere in a very short time, won the Championship almost before I’d learned his name, and seems set to win another with apparent ease this year. Can he really be as good as his results suggest?

Assessing any driver in F1 is a complex business. One has to take into account experience, race craft, speed in qualifying and the race, quality of the car, and performances against team mates. Alonso’s F1 career is so brief that it’s very hard to say whether his results come from outstanding talent or luck in being in the right car at the right time. It is inevitable that much of our assessment depends heavily on comparing him with his team mate at Renault, Giancarlo Fisichella.

Interestingly, both drivers got their start in F1 with Minardi, although Fisichella’s was five years before Alonso’s. In his early years, Fizzy was regarded much as we see Alonso today: a young lion about to set the world alight with his talent. Although he did not have Alonso’s luck in being with the right team, Fisichella managed to post some surprisingly good results, often in inferior machinery.

But it all seemed to lead to very little until last year, when Fizzy bagged a seat in what we knew to be one of the best cars. Surely his day had come at last.

Well, it might have, had he not been teamed with Alonso. The young Spaniard has been quicker in almost every race and has had all the luck going. If a Renault is going to fail to finish, you can bet that it will be Fisichella’s.

This happens so often in F1 that I think we have to recognize it as a major part of any driver’s array of talents; there are lucky drivers and there are drivers so unlucky that they make you want to scream in frustration. It is impossible to look at the two Renault drivers’ results over the last year and a half and not be impressed with how often Fizzy has had the bad luck while Alonso sails on to yet another victory.

To some extent, this is a self-perpetuating thing. Once one driver has a few good results under his belt, his team mate will feel the pressure begin to rise, the need to post some wins to re-assert at least his equality with the winning driver. So he tries harder, risks more. And, in doing so, he puts more strain on himself and his car; suddenly it looks as though it’s not just luck causing the string of retirements and errors. The very fact that one driver is winning more often makes it harder for the other driver to turn things around.

But that is not the whole story. There is such a thing as bad luck (just ask Chris Amon) and I have no doubt that Fizzy is one of the unlucky ones. He’s quick, as he demonstrated in getting the upper hand over Ralf Schumacher at Jordan, but probably not quite as fast as Alonso. Add in Alonso’s lucky streak and there’s just no contest.

All this means that I have to give Alonso his due: he’s one of the best drivers in F1. Not only is he fast but he has a level head and copes well under pressure. What remains to be seen is whether he has the stamina to go on for year after year, still winning races.

Next year, Alonso will be in a McLaren. We might think that this will be the real test of his ability but that would be omitting the luck factor. It’s very possible that McLaren will suddenly come good and, once again, Alonso will be in the best car.

After all, it’s happened before. Does anyone remember how Alain Prost left Renault at the end of a year in which they’d been the best and went to a McLaren team that was just about to become a world beater? Even the teams are the same…

Michael Schumacher’s relegation to the back of the grid for the Monaco GP highlights an interesting twist on the two-races per engine rule. Since Michael was already beyond reach of any ten grid spots penalty for changing the engine, it made sense to put a new engine in the car for the race. Effectively, he goes to Silverstone with an engine that has done a race but not the practice and qualifying laps before it.

This means that he can afford to put more practice miles on the car than usual before Sunday’s race. It’s a small advantage, but one that Schumacher and Ferrari are experts at maximizing. Over the years, we have become used to the effectiveness of the Italian team’s planning and race strategy; they are masters at the art.

This goes a long way to explaining Ferrari’s enormous success in recent years. Strategy and tactics are just as important to winning races as are good design and a quick driver. Indeed, it was Alain Prost’s expertise in race tactics that enabled him to post respectable results when teamed with a driver as massively talented as Ayrton Senna. There were good reasons for him being nicknamed “the Professor”.

So we should not despise strategy and tactics, nor bemoan the fate of those who are clearly fastest but lose through inferior thinking on race day. Bad luck does happen but, more often, it is the result of not seeing the race as a whole and being impatient to get to the front.

But I must admit that I prefer talent over careful planning. Give me a Senna over a Prost, a Raikkonen over a Schumacher, any day. There is drama in watching a truly talented driver overcome the dispassionate logic of a strategist.

Which brings me to my prediction for the winner of this year’s British Grand Prix. It just has to be Kimi Raikkonen. Surely it is time that his run of bad luck ended, that the McLaren came on song and lasted the race. And he deserves a decent result; after all, we all know that he’s the fastest driver out there, don’t we…?