Williams quietly unveiled their FW29 today and kept the hype very low key – the car must speak for itself on track, they advised. It is visibly a Williams with colors not much changed in spite of their new sponsor, Lenovo, but it appears to have grown a splendid mustache this year, the upper component of the front wing assembly curving up and away from the lower element. Messing around with the nose of the car is almost becoming a Williams tradition.

As I was looking through the photographs, I came upon the standard portraits of the drivers and was struck by the complexity of their helmet designs. Much of this is caused by the profusion of advertising, of course, but there does seem to be a trend towards increasingly confusing designs. These days it isn’t easy to identify the drivers as they whoosh past, hunkered down between their high cockpit sides and its shoulder bulges, and these modern helmets don’t help with their profusion of colors and strange shapes.

Even a driver as recently arrived as David Coulthard has a clear and simple design for his helmet, based on Scotland’s flag without embellishment and instantly recognizable as a result. Compare this with Kathikeyan’s, also inspired by his nation’s flag but managing to appear similar in its spiky Indian wheel to Wurz’s red and white zigzags. Considering how much of the helmet is obscured by adverts, it hardly seems worth going into such detail with the design.

Back in the good old days (said the old fart) things were much simpler. Nelson Piquet’s red and white teardrop and stripes were easily identified and Senna stuck with an even plainer theme of green and blue stripes on a yellow background.

Speaking of yellow, it does seem to be the in color of the moment – most new drivers use it somewhere on their helmets and Lewis Hamilton favors it almost to excess. I wonder if this is a subconscious hope that Senna’s magic might have come partially from his helmet colors. Don’t laugh – the F1 drivers are a pretty superstitious bunch.

Take green cars, for instance. There is a tradition going back over fifty years that green is an unlucky color in racing. That might have come from the fifties, when all the British cars were green and were routinely thrashed by the Italian red, and it should really have been exorcised by Lotus in the sixties and Benetton in the nineties. But I suspect that the myth lingers on, perhaps given new life by Jaguar’s brief return to F1.

To return to helmets, the fashion for complex designs certainly doesn’t help commentators and could make Murray Walkers of them all. Which is bad news for young drivers trying to make a name for themselves. If I were a driver just entering F1, I’d buck the trend and go for the simplest helmet design imaginable.

Oh, wait a minute – wasn’t Mark Webber wearing an unadorned white helmet in one of the recent test sessions…?

Anthony Davidson has been talking about his career and hopes for the future. His contract with Super Aguri is his first season-long chance in F1 competition and he wants to make the best of it. Five years as a test driver is a long apprenticeship.

As might be expected, Davidson thinks that customer cars will be good for the sport, especially as they will mean that new and smaller teams will not be sentenced to an extended period of being back markers, coming in two or three laps down on the rest of the field. Using chassis that have already been through extensive development, such teams could realistically expect to be competitive in a very short time and the spectacle for the fans would be better as a result.

This is all relevant to the looming row over Super Aguri’s intention to use a development of the Honda 2006 car this season, of course. Things are quiet for the fledgling Japanese team at the moment but are bound to heat up if Toro Rosso lose their battle to run a variation of the Red Bull RB3 in 2007. Gerhard Berger seems confident of winning that one so there may be a good chance that SA will get their way too.

Naturally, Davidson wants SA to succeed in their plan as it will give him a good car in which to make his mark in F1. He deserves such a chance in view of his long wait and previous brief debut in a Minardi. Customer cars are coming, like it or not, in 2008 so I think no harm will be done by allowing them this year. It wouldn’t be the first time that rule changes have been instituted ahead of their projected time – we already have a standardized tire formula even though it was not due to happen until next year.

I think the teams protesting about SA’s and TR’s cars are over-reacting anyway. Neither team will suddenly shoot to the front of the field as a result of using good chassis; it will take time for them to get used to the cars and tune them in for optimum running. And even Adrian Newey has been trying to deflate some of the hype surrounding his RB3, pointing out that it is unrealistic to expect it to be a world beater right from the start.

Let the second teams have a decent chance, say I, and then we’ll get some really competitive races. And we might even get to see how good Davidson is.

Another Brit whose stock is increasing is Gary Paffett. If Prodrive are to be a sort of B team for McLaren/Mercedes next year, they will need drivers. Gary’s position as a McLaren test driver puts him in pole position as one of Prodrive’s line-up. Ideally, they would want an experienced driver as number one (David Coulthard maybe?) and Gary could slot in as the young hotshoe. On his past record, he would be ideal for the task.

Former rally champion, Walter Rohrl, reckons that the end of Michael Schumacher’s career as a driver will be good for all forms of motor sport. He points out that, in the last few years, advertisers have lined up to have even a tiny decal on Michael’s car, rather than use the same money to sponsor an entire rally car.

For those of us primarily interested in F1, it has been easy to overlook Michael’s influence beyond our favorite sport. If Rohrl is relieved to see him go, the ripples of Michael’s success must have reached way beyond our limited horizons. And I can believe that he is right; the Schumacher years changed F1 itself to such an extent that it is only logical that the effects should have spilled over into other areas.

Michael was both good and bad for F1. In becoming a household name, he attracted many more viewers, come to see what all the fuss was about, and this automatically brought the advertisers clamoring for a piece of the pie. But his domination of the sport also raised the most common criticism of the races: that they were predictable and boring as a result. For those of us who became fed up with the same guy winning all the time, the only enjoyment left to us was the hope that someone, somehow, would beat the blighter.

It is a danger that always threatens F1. In the past there have been flashes of domination by a driver or a team that have hinted at the boredom of such a situation. The total domination of Mercedes in the mid-1950s, Jim Clark’s succession of wins in the Lotus 25, Chapman’s Lotus 79 in 1978 and the swapping of dominant years between McLaren and Williams in the 1980s and 1990s were examples of how F1 races can become foregone conclusions.

What saved us in those years was that the boredom never lasted too long. Mercedes got out after a couple of years, Clark was always subject to the fragility of the Lotus, Chapman’s designs after the 79 were not as effective as others’ and neither Williams nor McLaren could achieve total dominance for long. Michael’s reign, however, just seems to have gone on and on.

So F1 breathes a sigh of relief to see Michael go. Suddenly there are new stars in the shape of Alonso and Raikkonen and a hoste of young bloods eager to make their names. This is what makes for great racing years: uncertainty as to who will win, real battles between several drivers and cars, the championship won by a point or two.

Already the advertisers spread out and begin to hedge their bets. McLaren and Renault find new sponsors and even lesser teams such as Spyker manage to attract good money. Perhaps Rohrl is correct in assuming that some of the money will go to rallying – and that has to be good for all motor sport.

Not that Michael is really to blame for all this; the object is to win and, if he proved the most complete racer for ten years, succeeding as a driver, politician, strategist and team builder, he was only doing his job. But F1 loves the real racer, the guy who fights through adversity, doesn’t always win but gives his all in the battle and cares nothing for the politics and strategy – hence the enormous popularity of Gilles Villeneuve and the fans’ preference for the skill and courage of Senna over the clinical approach and carefully planned races of Prost.

F1 might lose a bit of advertising revenue in the coming years – there are no obvious stars that will dominate in Schumacher style and the household will have to deal with several names rather than just one. But the health of the sport will improve immensely. Big names may attract new viewers but it’s competition that keeps them.

Colin Kolles has announced the signing of young German driver, Adrian Sutil, to be Spyker teammate to Christijan Albers in 2007. This is slightly surprising, since most had expected that Tiago Monteiro would continue as Spyker’s second driver.

But it does tie in with the sudden fashion for giving rookie drivers a chance. With Lewis Hamilton at McLaren, Robert Kubica at BMW, Heikki Kovalainen at Renault, Anthony Davidson at Super Aguri, and now Sutil at Spyker, F1 is filled with fresh new faces. I cannot recall a previous season in which so many first-time F1 racers entered the sport.

There are two reasons for this, I think. Clearly, the instant success of Robert Kubica at BMW made team managers realize that there were discoveries to be made within the ranks of hopefuls graduating from F3 and GP2. As the GP2 Champion of 2006, Hamilton was an obvious pick but there were others who seemed just as talented. Two who made it into test driver seats are Sebastian Vettel and Gary Paffett, both of whom look to be just as quick as any of the new drivers.

And then there came the retirement of Michael Schumacher. Somehow his disappearance has created a lot of space in F1 and allowed teams to be more adventurous in their choice of drivers. It may well be that memories of Michael’s debut at Spa in 1991 were stirred and the hunt for the next Schumacher has started. The weight of expectation falls heavily on the shoulders of Hamilton and Kubica but the others too will be watched closely for signs of greatness.

Every year we hope for a really good season to come but the changes and shake-ups of 2006 point to a fascinating 2007. So many imponderables have been thrown into the mix that there are bound to be surprises in the forthcoming races. Out with the old, in with the new!

So how good is Adrian Sutil? He finished second to Hamilton in Formula 3 Euroseries in 2005 but otherwise his reputation rests on the potential he showed in his few tests for MF1/Spyker this year. Colin Kolles has made it clear that he was impressed by Sutil’s performance and that is why he was given the nod over Monteiro.

Personally, I applaud Spyker’s decision. Monteiro is a known quantity and the team have nothing to lose and everything to gain by letting Sutil have a go. Albers is competent enough to ensure that the Spyker car will at least achieve its potential and Sutil offers the possibility that it might do even more.

It all adds up to a great season to come. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait.