To see how much Formula One has changed, you could go back 60 years, to the finale of the 1956 season, when a 24-year-old Englishman voluntarily gave up his chance of the world championship to an Argentinian rival old enough to be his father. It was a race in which the two early leaders fought each other so hard that they both had to come in for new tyres after only four laps, and in which the eventual winner, having run out of petrol with a handful of laps to go, was shunted a mile or so back to the pits for a quick fill-up by a fellow competitor who happened to be driving the same make of car.
Today’s F1 fans, watching Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg regularly treating each other with glacial disdain before mounting the podium, might find it hard to believe that such a universe ever existed – one in which drivers fought every bit as fiercely but behaved on and off the track as if they respected and even liked each other. Nowadays we have Sebastian Vettel, a four-time world champion, and Max Verstappen, a 19-year-old future champion, settling their petty on-track differences by exchanging text messages, as they did after the race at Interlagos a fortnight ago.
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