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Here's a question for the petrolheads, procurement experts and financial controllers amongst you: how many dummy cameras do you think a needs? That's dummy cameras - the pretend ones they attach during testing - not the real ones they are given by TV for the races.

Three (one for each car, including the spare)? Four (a spare one just in case)? Or perhaps six (a spare one for each car in case they all fall off during the same bumpy testing session)?

Well, one team made 49 last year. But then they spent £300m in total so they probably didn't notice they were doing it.

Much of that money went on squeezing a few more horsepower out of the internal combustion engine, an invention that is now comfortably a century old, a challenge that many of this country's finest engineers put their collective brains to in an effort that would have gone completely unnoticed by motorsport's many fans.

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The men and women who represent at will be the best equipped, funded and trained athletes this country has ever sent to an Olympics or Paralympics.

Having scaled the heights in on the back of lavish public funding, Britain's finest have an additional £39m to spend on their preparations and home advantage to exploit.

So why am I disappointed? Let me number the ways.

First, is very generous, particularly in the current climate, but it's not nearly as generous as the £354m that was promised by our in his final budget as Chancellor, when the economic going was considerably better.

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