We are seeing an unusually high number of pay drivers in Formula One and Jean Todt has expressed concern. Sauber, an established and respected team which has been in Formula One since 1993, has admitted that it has not been paying some of its bills.

Some European countries are effectively bankrupt. The city which, after Paris, has the most French citizens is London with 750,000. The French economy is in a very bad way, but it shows that our food has improved.

The powerhouse economies of Japan and China are faltering.

My local car maker is Rolls-Royce, now owned by BMW. When it was established 12 years ago, target production was 1,000 units a year. Last year it made more than 3,500 cars, an astonishing number given their price. When people buy Royces (only the vulgar call them Rollers) it shows that the global economy is healthy,

This year, however, the workforce is on short time. The factory is closed on Fridays and has recently been closed for weeks at a time. It is one of those harbingers that we do well to notice. Meanwhile, Formula One continues in its own bubble, oblivious to the real world.

The 2014 engines are expected to cost an extra 7.5 million dollars per team per season. That is 1.5 billion dollars over the predicted life of the new formula, money which has to be found from somewhere, yet the indications are not promising.

In 2014 we will have only three engine suppliers, and we have no idea how much each of the major companies are subsidising them. Cosworth Engineering went from being a two-man tuning shop to being a prosperous company in under ten years on the back of selling racing engines at a profit.

Honda is joining with McLaren in 2015 and it is hoped by the FIA that F1 will attract other engine suppliers. We saw what happened to factory teams at the last economic crisis. Some teams are in F1 because it is their reason to exist, many factory teams are window dressing. They come, they go, like BMW and Toyota.

The new engines require a radical redesign of the car. Fuel consumption is expected to be down by 30 per-cent so there can be a smaller tank. The engines are shorter and turbo plumbing has to be contained. The whole package has to be rethought and much of current date will be redundant.

Apart from the increased cost of the engines, a ground-up new car design is expensive.

It is possible that one of the small teams will come up with a breakthrough design, as March did with the 881 in 1988. That car was designed by Adrian Newey and Nick Wirth, then relatively unknown. If a team does make a breakthrough, everyone else will copy it, as they did the March 881.

Teams with small budgets have to employ pay drivers. The grid divides into two types of driver, those who were in F1 before the restriction on testing and the newcomers who have had comparatively little track time.