2:57 Road to Le Mans - Meet the Team

Meet the Creation team who are out to dethrone Audi's domination of the Le Mans Grand Prix

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Paris to Istanbul and back, nonstop. It's equivalent to running an entire Formula One season in a single race. Ian Bickerton has taken on the challenge of getting a car into shape that can be Audi

5:10 The Secret Life of Formula One - Launch Control

Just like an Aircraft Carrier, the takeoff of an F1 car is managed by a computer rather than the pilot.

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Formula One race tracks are noisy, dangerous, and fast. To overcome this, racing has developed unique languages. Drivers, engineers, and even the car itself never stop communicating with one another. A secret electronics revolution has changed the face of Formula One . Aircraft carriers bristle with electronic communication. Down on the noisy flight deck, these are unreliable. Here, hand signals are the key. On

But burning rubber is wasted energy. Today, smooth electronic launch control is one example of how the role of the Formula One driver is being diminished. They are no longer alone in their cockpits.

5:08 The Secret Life of Formula One - Bernie Ecclestone

Bernie Ecclestone is largely responsible for the F1 competition setup today, but where is it headed?

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BMW is one of the biggest. The Bavarian giant joined forces with Williams in 1998. The company's 5-year commitment to Formula One won't leave it much change from a billion dollars. Having made that kind of investment, the chances are that BMW will want to follow its rival Mercedes and buy a permanent stake in a top Formula One team.

Formula One is a never-ending battle for supremacy. The teams compete to get the most sponsorship, the best technology, the most championship points, and

There are more millionaires per square yard in a Formula One paddock than anywhere else in the world.

Formula One is run by one of the world's greatest salesman Bernie Ecclestone, who started up selling secondhand motorbikes and motorcars and has become such a fabulously rich

bought the Brabham Team in 1971, Bernie Ecclestone became secretary of the Formula One Constructors' Association known as FOCA. The organization had been set up to represent the British garagistes. Ecclestone bound the teams together against

by becoming an FIA vice-president. He recently secured the commercial rights to Formula One for the next 100 years. He shares the spoils with the team bosses; exactly how the cake gets carved up is highly secret. Now, Bernie Ecclestone's entrepreneurial genius has enticed the world's most powerful companies onto his merry-go-round of money, publicity, and cutting edge technology. Having succeeded in turning Formula One into a truly global product, he might have endangered the British garagistes' culture that he set out to protect.

and I think that you can already see Britain's dominance, which at one stage was overwhelming, beginning to erode. What's happened now is that big manufacturers, car manufacturers have moved in to Formula One in a big way.

under threat at the moment, and nobody should sit comfortably thinking that Formula One exists in England and that we're the best at it.

6:17 The Secret Life of Formula One - Drivers

The driver may be important to the success in F1, but Frank Williams believes they are only 25% of the equation.

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Whoever you are in Formula One , there are lots of other people there, who are just as good as you are, whose sole object in life is to

a prerequisite [time=0:01:] to be socially maladjusted to be a success in Formula One , but it probably gives you the edge over the next man.

And it was, you know, it was very typical really of a Formula One person in a crisis. Very calm, very logical.

4:35 The Secret Life of Formula One - The Front Line

Whoever you are in Formula One , there is always someone out to get you. What does it take to be successful? Everything.

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Formula One is about hard work. It's about doing hard work `til they go in next year. You know, it's about Williams working harder than Ferrari. To get people that want to work in that environment, they find their way into the environment. It's very difficult to train people to want to do that. They come from race tracks all around the world in a lot of categories, and they worked their way into Formula One .

Whoever you are in Formula One , there are lots of other people there who are just as good as you are, whose sole object in life is to

not a prerequisite to be socially maladjusted to be a success in Formula One , but it probably gives you the edge over the next man.

A Formula One team will spend as much money as it can get. It can never get enough, but the sport is so technical these

the race weekend. A 4-poster rig costs nearly a million dollars. No Formula One team can seriously compete without one .

4:40 The Secret Life of Formula One - The BRM Project

After WWII, English teams plundered the German formula for Grand Prix Racing - leading to the BRM project.

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a symbol of hope for a new country, West Germany. Within just one season, the team again dominated motor racing. At the British Grand Prix in 1955, Mercedes Benz took the first 4 places. Stirling Moss became the first Englishman to win his home race in the new era of Formula One . Neubauer's team again looked unstoppable. But once more, tragedy would end to the team's dominance. Mercedes Benz announced its withdrawal from all

manager Alfred Neubauer had set the standards of professionalism that defined today's Formula One teams. After the Second World War, with Germany in ruins, the British motor industry decided to assume the dominant position that Mercedes

were employing German rocket scientists, the British decided to steal the German Formula , the Grand Prix success. In 1948, His Majesty's Stationery Office published a secret report imaginatively entitled

5:28 The Secret Life of Formula One - Radio Communication

In the early days of F1 radio communication, not all drivers enjoyed the new technology.

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Formula One race tracks are noisy, dangerous, and fast. To overcome this, racing has developed unique languages. Drivers, engineers, and even the car itself never stop communicating with one another. A secret electronics revolution has changed the face of Formula One . By the late 70s, Lotus' Colin Chapman, who was a pilot, was experimenting with aircraft headsets plugged into a modified driver's helmet.

3:04 The Secret Life of Formula One - The Pits

The flight deck of a battle-ready aircraft carrier has been called the most dangerous place on earth, but it is far more ordered than an F1 pit lane, where no- one is in charge.

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Formula One race tracks are noisy, dangerous, and fast. To overcome this, racing has developed unique languages. Drivers, engineers, and even the car itself never stop communicating with one another. A secret electronics revolution has changed the face of Formula One . The pilot of this supersonic jet is lining up to land on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The entire deck is about twice the length of a Formula One pit lane. A 23-ton plane must land in half that length at 240 kilometers per hour. There is little room for error.

dangerous place on earth. Some reckon this is just as dangerous. A Formula One pit lane is lined with fuel, tires, equipment, and filled with people. It is dangerous because no one is in overall charge. Each team brings its car in when race strategy suits it. Sometimes several cars and several pit crews

4:20 Ultimate Cars - Racers - Auto Union C-Type

In 1937 the Auto Union hit 252 MPH on the Autobahn. Think about that - that's faster than the Mclaren F1!

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600 horsepower, that's the sort of thing that you wouldn't see in Formula 1 until the 1980s in a car where you cannot strap in at all. You don't have any nice carbon fiber cocoon

5:31 The Secret Life of Formula One - Sponsorship

After trading the racing colours of their home countries for the colours of their sponsors, Formula One came into big money. Mostly from cigarette companies.

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Each year, 11 Formula One teams contest 17 races across 5 continents. This sport is a 3-billion-dollar-a-year industry. The competition is ferocious. The world's best engineers fight for an advantage that can be measured in just thousands of a second. Formula One cars are designed and built to the limits of technology, technology that is as secret as the most advanced military projects. Formula One star drivers are global celebrities. The teams exploit their high profile to attract massive corporate

is the television audience because that's what powers the money and Formula One is about money--a big, big money.

in a way, is another kind of competition. Nobody is better in Formula One at selling space on the car to sponsors. The tops of the suspension arms on the Williams are sold to a sponsor

Sponsorship money has transformed Formula One . It started with Colin Chapman. He shot to the sport in 1968. The traditional green-and-yellow livery of his Lotus team was replaced

oil and tire companies who hereto had been the general funders of Formula One . The money is the common denominator in all success in this sport.

Tobacco's billions would power Formula One throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but now, the party is over. Today, scenes like these are history. The teams recently bowed to

government as the original major sponsor of Grand Prix racing and now, Formula One and it is now the big sponsors who are doing with money what Hitler did except that they are doing it for