Safety fast!

Bernd Mayländer is one of those people who makes you feel everything’s going to be okay. He’s calm but cheerful. He smiles a fair bit but not, you suspect, just because there are cameras nearby. On the contrary, he appears truly to enjoy life, and why wouldn’t you if your job involved driving the F1 safety car, something he’s done all-but unbroken for a quarter of a century.

When I ask the 56-year-old German ex-racer how many F1 races he’ll have driven for when the lights go green at Silverstone this Sunday, he says he honestly doesn’t know. The answer as far as I can calculate will be 656.

He started at Melbourne in 2000 and has missed just three races since due only to injury or illness (at Monaco and Canada in 2001 and at the US GP in 2002). This means he’s led the F1 pack around the world’s best race tracks for literally tens of thousands of laps over the years.